’Have you lost your flipping mind?’ A busted leg, an impossible choice then a state title.

Miles Buchart was never supposed to dive again. The fact that he can even walk is a wonder.

Intense trauma to his left leg. Multiple surgeries. Years of physical therapy. For the Lexington Catholic junior, all of it made him stronger. And it all led to history in this year’s KHSAA Swimming and Diving State Championships when Buchart scored 519.50, breaking both Region 8 and Lexington Catholic school records. With that score, he also became the first Lexington boys’ diver to win the KHSAA state diving title since Kevin Teague won four in a row from 2000-03. (Buchart was born in 2005.)

But, what’s perhaps most impressive about his achievement is that he did it just three months after his long-awaited return to the sport — when most said he never would.

“I’m so grateful that I’m able to even compete at state,” Buchart said. “I wasn’t expecting first at all.”

Buchart first found his way to diving as a 9-year-old, and he took to it immediately.

“He was just one of those kids growing up, you know?” Miles’ father, Michael Buchart, said. “We had a trampoline. He taught himself how to flip and I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ He wasn’t one of the ball sport kids. He could flip. Body movement, everything. He was always jumping around, cartwheels, flipping, doing stuff, teaching this stuff, jumping off the wall and doing flips. And I was like, ‘Who’s teaching you how to do this?’ And he was just teaching himself how to do it. He’s like, ‘I want to start diving.’ I was like, ‘Good. Go for it, man. Do you.’”

He was in the eighth grade when he broke his leg the first time. Back then, in 2019, Miles Buchart traveled a couple of hours each day to practice at a facility near Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

“As I’m jumping on the board,” Buchart recalled, “I mess up my rhythm, and the impact of my leg hitting the board snapped it. It snapped my tibia, my fibula and my heel bone.”

With the adrenaline still kicking, he didn’t notice anything was wrong right away. In fact, his coach at the time didn’t even believe him at first, simply because he’d never seen something like that happen.

But as the young diver pulled himself out of the pool, he noticed that something was seriously wrong; his leg, he said, “was all mangled up.”

Buchart had to be rushed to the hospital to undergo emergency surgery. But, unfortunately, he had to wait until the following day.

“Diving was really late then,” he said. “So the surgeon had to come in the morning. But, because of that, my leg developed compartmental syndrome. And it was tons and tons of swelling. So they tried to give me some morphine. And I ended up almost basically overdosing on morphine.”

As a result, he stopped breathing and the crash team came in.

“The only thing I really remember that night,” Buchart said, “was just my dad’s hands on my chest, just making sure that he’s still feeling going up and down. Making sure I’m still breathing.”

Following a successful surgery, Buchart needed months of physical therapy. It was a recovery plan he most certainly did not enjoy.

“It’s the slowest, most aggravating process I’ve ever been through,” Buchart said. “Because I still wanted to dive, I still had that passion that I wanted to do. So every time I would go to PT, I would do as much as I could as much as I’m allowed to. And it would almost scare my parents, because I just wanted to get back. I wanted to get back to the sport.”

‘No reason not to go back’

By summer 2020, nearly a full year after that dreadful night in Cincinnati, Buchart could put full weight on the leg. Things had been going well enough that he’d been cleared by his physical therapists and doctors, and he even participated in cross country.

But his leg had lingering pains. And everybody around him told him that was normal.

“There was no reason not to go back to diving,” Buchart said. “I feel pain in my bones. But I have two titanium rods in the tibia. And every time I would tell someone about that pain, they would say, ‘You have titanium rods in there. It’s OK.’ The doctor said the same thing right after surgery, that ‘this leg ain’t gonna break again.’ Every time I would feel that pain, I would get nervous, but everyone else around me would say that it’s OK.”

And in July, on a family vacation to Florida, tragedy struck once more. Just one week before he was supposed to get the rods removed from his tibia.

Buchart was enjoying time by the pool, taking advantage of the diving board. His mother, Whitney Ward, told him to be careful, that she didn’t want to have to make a phone call.

He asked the lifeguard if he could remove the rope from the diving board’s fulcrum, as the board was bouncier without it.

“I’m running the board,” Buchart explained. “I’m doing it well, but I feel the pain. And without me fully understanding how bad it was getting, as I’m going up to do my hurdle, I snap it. I snapped my bone and my entire weight suddenly just crumbled under me because there’s no pressure.”

Buchart fell onto his back as the entire country club heard the snap of his leg.

“I put my head out of the water,” Buchart said. “I’m like, ‘You have to make a phone call, Mom.’ … The stitches were absolutely gory. It was like a zombie apocalypse-looking thing.”

This time, it was a compound fracture. Buchart described the bone as a 90-degree angle, with both the top and bottom parts of the bone sticking out of his leg.

“I have to do a surgery in Florida just to get it moved back in place,” Buchart said. “And another surgery to take out the titanium rods. And then a surgery to put a stainless steel rod in my leg. Because how bad it was right before the surgery, they come to me and they’re like, ‘You have a chance of losing your leg.’ And that, like I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t fully grasp what it would be like without a leg.”

He was 14 when this happened. The stainless steel rod pinned to his ankle and knee went through a growth plate, but the doctors said that it was necessary.

“We don’t know if the leg will grow properly,” Buchart said. “But it was one of the risks we had to take because we didn’t want to have titanium rods in the bone again. We just wanted to make sure it was sturdy for good.”

‘I lost a part of me’

Then began another long road to recovery. And, for Buchart, a struggle to process all that he had endured.

“He just kind of lost his spark,” Buchart’s father said, “I don’t know, lost something. … He was trying to reinvent himself. He loves being on a team, loves sports. Tried tennis, and God love him, he just wasn’t really good at it. Yeah. And swimming. Just, you know, swimming was not great.”

The young diver worked tirelessly to strengthen the muscles in his leg and get back into the community. Find a new path. Tennis, swimming, cross country. None of it gave Buchart the same joy that diving provided.

“It was a moment,” Buchart said, “when everyone was telling me, ‘You can’t. You’re gonna find something else.’ That maybe this isn’t it, this wasn’t it. ‘Maybe this wasn’t for you.’ And that was it, it was just like, it was me. And it felt like I lost a part of me.”

But, in the fall of 2022, a chance. A possibility that, due to the strength he had built up in his leg, he could dive again.

“I was so excited,” Buchart said. “The fear, even though I was gone for like three years, the fear wasn’t there. Only the passion that I had. I was nervous, but I wasn’t thinking about how nervous I was. I was thinking about how excited I am that I’m able to dive again.”

But that opportunity didn’t come without risk. If something were to happen to that left leg again, he would lose it. And, though the diver wasn’t nervous, his loved ones certainly were.

When Buchart told his parents he wanted to return to the sport, they didn’t take it very well.

“I got sick to my stomach,” Buchart’s father said. “I knew he wanted it so bad. I remember saying, ‘Have you lost your flipping mind? Like, what do you love more? Diving, or you want to walk the rest of your life? You’ve gotta make a decision here.’”

But Buchart was adamant that he would return to the sport he loves.

“His mom and I talked, and it took a while to sink in,” Buchart’s father said. “And, you know, he’s 17 years old. He’s almost 18. This is something he wants to pursue. He knows the risks. We explained it to him. He knows what’s at stake here. You know, something like this happens again and he loses his leg. And it’s done. And he was like, ‘I want to do this.’ And so, we had to let him do it.”

‘This kid’s got some stuff’

Miles’ diving coach, Jamie Palumbo, was clear in his expectations.

“Before we even started, I said not to set the expectations for where he was before he had broken the leg,” Palumbo said. “That, ‘Let’s set a goal for making top-16 at state.’”

To place in the top 16 at the state championships is quite an accomplishment. But the high school junior knew what he was capable of, and top 16 was far too low a bar.

“I never wanted top 16 at state,” Buchart said. “I wanted more. I just was like, ‘I need. I need it.”

And so the training commenced, both with Palumbo as well as at the Kentucky Diving Club, Lexington’s amateur diving club.

Julia Vincent, the KDC coach and a South African Olympic diver, noticed Buchart’s talent and determination immediately.

“I was like, ‘Oh, this kid’s got some stuff,’” Vincent said. “His first day coming back to practice, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness,’ there’s some fundamentals that never left, even when he wasn’t training. He was taught well, and he’s just a very talented kid. He came back, and I really wouldn’t have noticed that he hadn’t been training. He’s incredibly talented. Not everyone can do that.”

Three months. Three months of training. Three months of fighting. Three months of visualizing not only the return to where he was, but also the future of what he could someday become.

“The mental game that I’ve developed because of the trauma,” Buchart said. ”I can hold my head in a tough situation.”

On Feb. 16, that mental game served him well when he placed first by a 1.75 margin. When the state champion realized he had won, he found himself at a loss for words.

“I immediately looked at my parents,” Buchart said. “I didn’t want to react because I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t believe it, so I was just slowly nodding to them up and down. Because it was just this moment that me and my parents had, where we like, suddenly we experienced everything that happened the last, like five-ish years all at once, just being first at state. And it just, this rush of feelings was a lot. Was a lot.”

This story was originally published April 3, 2023 at 11:10 AM with the headline "’Have you lost your flipping mind?’ A busted leg, an impossible choice then a state title.."