Well, good evening.
I'm a sportsman: I practiced swimming, athletics, high jump,
I played basketball, I play soccer with my friends --
used to play soccer with my friends --
And today I play rugby.
I've played rugby for a long time now.
You've noticed the crutch, surely.
And you've seen I walk with a kind of limp.
But don't be mistaken.
I'm not injured.
It is a prosthetic limb that has helped me walk since quite a while already.
I was born with a congenital malformation.
Congenital means it has nothing to do with genetics,
that neither my dad is to blame,
nor did my mom smoke, drink alcohol while she was pregnant.
Congenital is a medical term for what is fortuitous.
It's nobody's fault.
My congenital malformation is expressed
in the size of my left femur
and the position on which my foot came out of the factory.
I have a normal femur,
and a left femur the size of a chicken's.
And my foot came out pointing backwards.
Well, I was born – obviously different – and doctors turned up
telling my mom I wouldn't be able to walk,
that I would be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of my life.
And well, an endless bunch of other Greek tragedies
that, of course, as first-time parents they were, scared them quite a lot.
Luckily there came a doctor that told them something pretty simple:
"The only one who will show you what this boy can
or cannot do is Nicolas" - me.
Luckily they followed this piece of advice and decided to have their perfect family,
in some way, with their firstborn,
and carry on with it like anyone would.
Then, I learned, like we all learned,
like all of you also learned, how to stand up when --
How do you say? - my senses, my instinct, asked me to stand up.
I wanted to take my first step when my instincts told me
I should take my first step.
In my case it was a hop.
Well, and rugby, why rugby?
My dad is a coach.
Then, since I was young I used to go watch his practices.
I had contact with the players, even since I was a child.
And I carried a normal life.
By normal, I mean, I walked with a prosthesis from an early stage.
Since I was two, or one and a half, when you start walking.
I rode a bike, like anyone does -- with a prosthesis.
And then came the moment to move on,
of undertaking common activities with my friends, whom I know from school.
And at age six my life ceased to be normal.
Because instead of celebrating a birthday,
going to a soccer game and stuff, with the birthday bag,
I had to be in the operating room because they wanted to see the chances
of stretching my leg.
They had decided that, even though they couldn't practice surgery on me
when I was born
as the bones were still not properly formed,
they could do it at that age.
They opened, they looked, and they were wrong.
My bones weren't developed enough to be able to do it.
We had to wait another year.
So, with recovery and stuff, we waited until the following year.
The following year they decided it was possible, and they placed
an intramedullary rod on me as the first phase of these operations:
joining the femur to the hip.
Obviously, the magic didn't happen.
The leg didn't miraculously grow.
And after eleven months of recovery
and a couple more years, I was operated again.
¿What for?
To start turning my foot.
Then, they thought, turning the foot that -- remember it was grown this way --
would later get to be in this way, and then grow the leg longer.
They could only reach here; bones can't be that much stretched on a single operation.
And well, it's obviously very frustrating to be 9
and not doing the normal things the way I used to.
Things like athletics, things like swimming,
things like playing a soccer match with my friends.
For that time, my friends were already playing rugby.
Rugby, which you already know how much it means to me,
or you probably understand somehow...
And I wasn't being able to go into the field with them.
One further frustration.
Well, not much time passed before I got out of bed,
I left the wheelchair, stopped using crutches
and could start wearing the prosthesis again,
and I started trying to train with my friends.
"No, no way" - kept telling me the doctors and my parents.
"Why? For what reason?"
"You've just been operated. What if what was done to you breaks down the operation,
which was so expensive, the time that cost you to recover and all, and, moreover,
if you break your good leg, then we are screwed!"
Which is true.
But it was a risk I was willing to run.
But my parents weren't.
And my doctors, even less.
So I had to opt for the less decorous way out
which is "sneaking" out from home, to say it some way, to go training.
"What a diligent boy!
With just one leg he has to sneak out from home to go training."
Well, the excuse was: "I'm going to study to one of my friend's,"
"I've got a birthday," "I'm going to study to some other of my friend's home,"
"I'm going studying," "I'm going studying,"
"I'm going studying."
You see, it's 30 classmates.
They repeated in many opportunities.
And I wasn't doing that well at school.
So there was something I was doing wrong.
Either I was studying like crap, or I wasn't learning anything.
So, of course, my dad, neither slow nor lazy, realized
if I go away Tuesday and Thursday and the guys train Tuesday and Thursday...
"This one's going training!"
Then came the issue of the matches.
Sure, every weekend I was at one of my friend's place.
That's normal in a kid that is 13, 12, 15 years old.
Even older too, that we stayed
for the weekend at our friend's.
So the matches weren't the problem.
The problem was training.
Until, finally, there came a trainer that said to my old man:
"I will help Nicolas"
or "I want Nicolas to go into the field because he really enjoys it."
And my old man, quite reluctantly, ended up giving his thumbs up.
And then came my first official match.
The goal, let's say.
My summit.
And I went in.
Of course, with their words in my head,
with ankle support, shin pads, knee pads, back brace, gloves, shoulder pads, helmet
and of course gum shield.
I was the Michelin dummy entering like that and hopping.
Let's say I was crucified entering a field.
As time went on, that fear --
which, of course, wasn't mine but everybody else's --
was gradually left aside and I could, or I can say, today I go in without anything.
Not even bandaging myself.
Because it's also better for me.
I can run, or hop, faster.
I had the chance to play rugby in the snow, for example.
I was invited to play a match, not a charity match,
but an exhibition, where we could play rugby in the snow.
I enjoyed it a lot.
I went to Europe for a while and played in a club in England.
Getting to the club with school partners was something.
Arriving to a club where I wasn't known was something completely different.
I come into the locker room.
"This is an Argentinean friend," says my English friend
who I had met in a rugby trip I had already done to South Africa,
I had gone to England, we went to Uruguay, Chile, and so on...
all to play rugby.
"He is a friend from Argentina who comes to play with us."
One at the back says: "Oh, he's playing with crutches, ha, ha, ha."
"Yeah, I'm playing with crutches," I say.
Because there are situations in which you can explain
all this I'm saying now,
and situations where you can't.
If I get into a taxi, for example, and the driver says, "Oh, soccer, right?"
Well..."Yeah," what else could I say?
"Nah, thing is I was born with a congenital malformation, the femur, the chicken..."
No! So I said, "Yeah, yeah, I will go in with a crutch."
Well. I go into the field, I start training
and the guys realized I was just another guy.
Just that, instead of running, I hopped.
That was the only difference.
Because my hands, I got them both.
And rugby is played with the hands.
So I had the chance to do that.
I had the chance to play in the snow.
I had the chance to play in the Netherlands,
a place where rugby is, like here, an international championship
with backgammon world cup.
And the truth is, I really enjoyed those kind of situations.
I went to the world cup in France, where I had the possibility to work.
In the next world cup in New Zealand I will be participating.
And I was awarded with a prize.
The Spirit of Rugby, they called it.
Rugby's FIFA, which is the IRB, gives me this award.
The Spirit of Rugby, and of course, it produced quite a commotion
in our small world of rugby.
And when I came back to Argentina a few years later,
the Buenos Aires Rugby Union
bestows me with a honorary cap.
A "cap" is a small hat given to certain players for representing something.
I was representing Buenos Aires' rugby spirit.
Same rugby they didn't let me take part a few years before.
Not them, right?
But the truth is the path I walked with this, I couldn't have imagined.
My only goal was to go into a rugby field.
It was going in with 14 other friends to defend my club's shirt,
my school's too, and a lot of things came along.
All just for a stubborn cripple who wanted to play rugby.
So well, then what I can say to you --
and I wouldn't want to be a fortune cookie or a candy with phrases,
is that life is just 10 percent what happens to you,
and 90 percent what you do with it.
So, don't let anybody tell you that you can't do
something you want to do.
If you really want to do it,
and are willing to give everything to achieve it, you will make it.
You will be able to make it.
That's it.
(Applause)
Matias Martin: Anyway, he summed it up because this is 12 minutes
and some of the atrocities he told me once he came to the radio
weren't told, like, for example, soccer is not the only thing you tell taxi drivers.
Nicolas Pueta: Well, no, sometimes you have to make up more elaborated excuses --
MM: For example?
NP: Not only to taxi drivers. In a nightclub, e.g., you are dancing.
You dance a little different.
"Oh, what happened to you?"
So there you pull out your guitar...
Of course...
"Well, what happens is I'm a surfer, so we were in South Africa,
in Durban, a gorgeous city but with a very dangerous sea,
and a shark came by and ate my leg."
"Come on!"
"I swear to god, a shark ate my leg!"
"Come on!"
"Alright, don't believe me, I 'll keep dancing. Anyway, it's the same for me
whether this happened or something else, it's the same."
"Did a shark really eat your leg?," and they start asking around.
And by now my friends say yes to anything because they know that can happen,
or that I got run over by a train or a car,
or that I had a motor biking accident and other laughable situations.
MM: Alright Nico, thank you very much. Nico Pueta.
NP: Thank all of you.
MM: Thank you.
(Applause)