The heartwarming gift this wheelchair user gave away

When Aussie paratriathlete Nic Beveridge first started competing it was on a borrowed handcycle.

And we’re not talking the professional racing kind his rivals were using, but a leisure cycle, like the ones you’ve probably seen cruising along the footpath on a Sunday.

With an upright rather than a horizontal seat, it certainly stood out - not to mention made it harder to compete - when he took it all the way to the starting line at the World Championships back in 2013.

That was Nic’s first international race, eight years after he had woken up one morning suddenly unable to move anything from the waist down, unable to even scream.

He was 17, and it’s been a long journey from that hospital bed to the lineup at the World Championships, and later the Rio Paralympic Games - and now Nic wants to give back.

“It’s an expensive sport to start out in because the equipment costs so much and it’s difficult to find pieces to use or afford [a handcycle] on your own before you’ve even trialled the sport,” he tells Be.

Nic placed ninth in the Rio Paralympics triathalon last September, and given his sponsors are now providing him with a new, upgraded cycle, he decided to open up a competition to donate his current elite level one to someone interested in starting out. A new one retails at around $10K.

“Because my sponsors are enabling me to get a new one, I didn’t feel right selling my current one,” he explains.

“Lots of people have done things for me here and there, and you know how you feel like you haven’t really repaid everyone?”

RELATED: Dear Belle Gibson, this is what real cancer looks like

Nic was hoping to receive just one quality application to make his decision easy. Instead he got 15 - and each with merit.

After whittling it down to the final two, he left the ultimate decision down to a couple of his mentors with the hope that they would see something in one of the candidates that they had initially seen in him.

The result was 25-year-old Damon, a wheelchair basketballer with spina bifida who’s just been told his cancer is remission for the second time.

“I was really looking forward to telling him that if he was still interested, I had a handcycle for him that he could use to get into the sport,” Nic says.

“I said to him, it’s not just a handcycle, I’m happy to give you as much advice or guidance as you’re after.”

RELATED: Incredible photo captures messy reality of motherhood

Damon is the same age now as Nic was when he first became involved in paratriathalons, but he’s already an experienced wheelchair basketballer.

Nic’s background in sport meanwhile, hails back to his teenage years in the North Queensland city of Mackay.

“I was like most people in high school, I dabbled in a bit of everything, I was into drama and debating, but my biggest passion was sport,” he says.

He tried his hand at a few different codes, but it all came to a dramatic halt before the end of year 12.

“I remember when I was 17, I got this pain in my chest one night. I was on the phone to a mate - we had a water polo final the next night and that’s what we were talking about,” he says.

“I ended up saying to him I had to go, and by the time I got downstairs to my parents I was struggling to breathe.

“I actually don’t remember too much, I just remember that it was excruciatingly painful, my whole body had started spasming.”

Nic’s parents rushed him to hospital and he remembers being wheeled out the back of the emergency ward before passing out from the pain.

“When I woke up the next morning I was lying a little bit skewish in the bed and I went to straighten myself and I just couldn’t,” he recounts.

“I went to reach out and pull the hospital bed rails and moving myself was so hard.”

It soon came to light that Nic had developed rare neurological disorder transverse myelitis, which causes your immune system to confuse your spinal chord for a foreign body and attack it. As a result, Nic woke up a T4 paraplegic.

“I had no movement in my trunk, abdomen or legs,” he explains, “And because of the height of it as well, I couldn’t really yell.”

“So I remember trying to call out for help to the nurse but I couldn’t really get much power behind it, so I just had to wait for them to do their really early morning rounds, yeah I was just lying in the dark.”

While Nic, who is now an incomplete paraplegic, continued to stay active and swam for rehabilitation, he never tapped back into the athleticism of his teenage years until major surgery seven years later left him bedridden for three months.

It just so happened that the London 2012 Paralympic Games were on at that time, and Nic was inspired – a word he doesn’t use lightly – to “make the most of what I still have full use of”.

He contacted Triathlon Queensland, borrowed a leisure handcycle and started on his road to Rio.

Want more celebrity, entertainment and lifestyle news? Follow Be on Facebook,Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram