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CHAPTER 1
Blinding Fear
Fear is the most intense, stimulating high a human can experience. Nothing else comes close. From the "startle reflex" — that dilating and widening of the eyes and tightening of the muscles that comes about when your car hits a slick spot or someone sneaks up behind you and yells "Boo!" — to the off-the-charts heartbeats — the quick breathing, the adrenal gland in overdrive, and the sharpened senses as blood flees certain organs and rushes to major muscle groups — no drug can replicate the feeling of dozens of hormones flooding the body and billions of cells firing in response to fear. It is a reflex triggered deep inside the amygdala, a section of the brain near the cerebral cortex, one that causes you to tighten your face and duck your head when firecrackers go off close to you or when the scary monster jumps out in a movie. It is why women are able to lift cars off trapped children and arthritic old men are able to beat off young muggers.
This adrenaline rush is the reason some people jump off cliffs wearing wing suits or somersault off the Eiffel Tower holding their parachutes in their hands. It is why people line up for roller coasters, or strap bungee cords to their legs, or go off-trail to create their own ski runs. Despite your logical brain screaming for you to flee from such dangers, fear packs an intoxicating lure. The successful television show Fear Factor was created around the idea that people will do incredible things once immersed in the emotion of fear. The rush makes you forget the mundane problems of life. You become totally immersed in now.
Great athletes know the sensation better than most. That instant before the football is snapped, amid the yelling and shifting and watching as the man in front of you prepares to hurl his body at you with all the force he can muster, those precious seconds create a feeling that is unmatched — and irreplaceable. Many professional football players struggle and flounder in their personal lives after leaving the game. Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers star Kevin Carter told me, "Every NFL player has trouble coming down off the high after leaving the league. Some handle it better than others, but every player feels it."
It's why Herschel Walker, a successful businessman in the food industry, became a mixed martial arts fighter, and why Chad Ochocinco chose to ride a bull and wrestle an alligator during the brief NFL lockout. It's also why boxers seem to always stay in the ring one fight too long and why race car drivers continue to compete well into their forties. The high is incredibly addictive.
Some people call it "butterflies" or "jitters," but whatever the name, the same physiology defines it. Epinephrine and norepinephrine cause the skin to constrict and the glucose levels in the blood to increase. Arteries and veins expand to increase blood flow, nostrils flare, and lung capacity increases. That chemical reaction is why a champion skier can be sweating like crazy in the starting gate even though it's freezing outside and why a sprinter can get chills on a ninety-degree afternoon as he puts his feet on the starting block. No matter how many times an athlete has been called on to make the crucial final play, that hair-on-the-arms feeling and churn in the pit of the stomach never goes away. Athletes call it something else — "nerves" perhaps, because no champion will use the "F" word — but the autonomic responses don't lie: their bodies are responding to fear.
For as long as I can remember, I've had a healthy working relationship with fear. My father had me on skis before I was fully potty trained, and I raced the slopes of Park City, Utah, long before I could read or write. When I was four years old, I was going off-trail, weaving through the trees and finding my own way, much to the horror of my mother, who was an intermediate skier and always rushing to catch up. The faster I got, the more challenging the runs became. Rarely did I glide leisurely down the mountain. Every run was about going a little faster. Crashing only served as a reminder that this wasn't badminton. Snow, ice, and steep slopes are the most inhospitable environments humans encounter this side of outer space. Preparation with a pinch of fear keeps you sharp, especially when sliding down a run.
Throughout my brief competitive skiing career, I was always trying to push the limits. Could I take a straighter downhill line? Could I get closer to the gates? Could I get lower, streamline my body to make myself more aerodynamic? Could I squeeze a tenth of a second off an already breakneck run? But all those questions were really asking the same thing: could I stare fear in the face without flinching?
I haven't discussed any of this with my teammates because it's not necessary, and talking about such things is not what athletes do. If you go into a team locker room before a championship game, you don't hear guys talking about fear or what they are feeling. Most athletes say nothing, preferring to prepare in the serenity of silence. But a few, like Jason Kidd of the 2011 World Champion Dallas Mavericks, will say things like "Stay focused." Prior to the Mavericks' final game against the Miami Heat in the 2011 NBA Finals, Kidd and Jason Terry were the only players who spoke — Kidd preached "focus" and Terry built up his teammates — but other than that the Mavericks' locker room, like those of most championship teams, was as quiet as a Sunday school class.
The fear athletes have is natural, and it can be used to advantage: fear keeps you on your toes and helps you focus your control. But sometimes there are situations beyond your control, and that is a different kind of fear. Experts call this "conditioned fear," which is different from the response to a lion attack or a mugger jumping out from behind a tree. Conditioned fear is learned and nurtured. It's the growing alarm parents feel when their daughter is late getting home from a high school dance, or the feeling you get when the doctor says you need "additional tests." It's the anxiety of waiting on mammogram results, or the back-of-your-mind dread that you'll suffer a heart attack, be diagnosed with cancer, or become paralyzed in a car crash. Some of these fears are rational (like poisonous snakes and high-crime neighborhoods), while others metastasize into phobias.
At the height of my career, I faced a frightening situation over which I had no control and I learned firsthand what conditioned fear feels like. My eyesight was deteriorating, and I had just been told that I would eventually go blind. First, I was scared. Then I became depressed, not gee-I'm-sad-my-team-lost depressed, but seriously, clinically, can't- get-out-of-bed depressed. No amount of training or experience can prepare you for the full range of emotions that you go through and the physical and psychological changes that manifest when you know that your world will grow darker by the day.
There were also a couple of other problems. First, I was a bobsled driver, the person responsible for piloting a projectile down the world's most treacherous runs — yet I had eyesight so bad I would have been kept from getting a driver's license in any state. That in and of itself should have caused a great deal of concern, and probably would have were it not for one very important detail, a detail that was perhaps even more problematic than the fact that I was going blind: I kept my condition a secret.
Nobody knew — not my teammates, my coach, or even my closest friends. Anyone with 20/200 vision is considered legally blind. My vision was 20/600 and getting worse by the day. Without the strongest contacts made, I couldn't see to get from the locker room to the starting line, and yet I kept it from everyone, even the three teammates who were putting their lives in my hands every time they jumped into the sled behind me.
It sounds crazy now. How could I have kept secret the fact that I was going blind? If I had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, or some other terrible disease, keeping it from those around me would have been tough but manageable, at least for a while. But when someone you work with on a regular basis cannot see, you usually notice, especially after he bumps into a few things. Somehow I was able to keep everyone around me fooled, in part by insulating myself when I was away from the track and by remaining all business when I was on it.
Driving a bobsled requires explosive speed and strength, as well as quick fast-twitch reflexes. What it does not require is 20/20 vision. To understand how I was able to drive the world's fastest bobsled when I couldn't read a street sign on the highway, you have to imagine yourself sliding down a track with walls of ice on both sides and white turns straight ahead. Unlike race car drivers, bobsled drivers can't see much with all the curves, just the occasional visual cue like a flagpole or the passing edge of a grandstand. Daytona 500 winner Geoff Bodine learned this after he crashed and bent the frame during his first and only run driving a bobsled. We're actually a lot closer to air-show pilots, who see nothing but sky and ground when making their turns. Even before keratoconus started affecting my vision, I could see only a few feet in front of the sled during a run. I relied on my other senses, primarily feel, as gravity and speed pulled us into and out of turns. As my vision grew worse, that sense of feel more than compensated for my visual impairment.
This was not an excuse, or even a valid reason for keeping my condition a secret. Just as I didn't lose my sight in a day and didn't fall into the depths of depression in a week, my decision to keep my impending blindness from everyone came as gradually as a changing tide. Then my sight got worse. I kept telling myself that the answer was out there somewhere; I just had to find it. But with each new opinion, the prognosis grew worse. Still I didn't tell anyone. I hadn't said anything before, so it was easy not to say anything now. The longer I held my secret, the harder it became to confess, even as my condition worsened by the day.
The second problem was that I had finally started winning. After years of work, I was finally experiencing the kind of success that I'd been killing myself trying to achieve. So somewhere inside me, I hoped things would work out and I would never have to tell anyone that I had a problem.
Unfortunately, as the spotlight grew brighter, my ability to see it got worse, my depression deepened, and the pressure of keeping my secret intensified. By all rights my career was over, and I knew it. Everything I had worked for, everything I had wrapped my identity around, was fading like a movie screen going to black. Not only would I not reach my goals, but I would live my life either as a blind man or a transplant recipient, or so I thought. I had become a lot quieter as my eyesight worsened, which was not my natural personality. As a teenager I was the most outgoing person in my circle of friends — the life of the party, according to those who knew me best. But as my eyesight deteriorated, I found myself spending more time alone. When it came to the point that I had to take my contacts out and put on glasses, the guys on my team joked with me, calling me Mr. Magoo and saying, "Jeez, Holcomb, are you blind?" I didn't respond because the honest answer was, "As a matter of fact, yes, I am."
Finally, I had no choice — I had to tell my coach. Not only was it unfair for my team to continue working as hard as they were with the expectation of winning a World Championship or an Olympic gold medal, but I could no longer live with the knowledge that I might crash and injure — or kill — someone because I couldn't see.
Three months after the most successful American bobsledding season to date in 2007, my team gathered in Calgary for the first of three one-week training sessions. Our coach, Brian Shimer, was, at that time, the most successful driver in U.S. bobsledding history. Now he was getting us ready to go further and accomplish more than he ever had. Calgary has one of the best push tracks in North America, an area where teams can simulate pushing and loading into the sled. A tenth of a second difference in start times — faster than most people can clap their hands — can translate into a three-tenths difference at the end of the run, which is an eternity in a sport like bobsledding. Brian wanted to make sure we stayed sharp and fast throughout the summer. The World Championship was coming up, and then the Olympic Games. Given the season we'd just had, this could be a historic time for USA bobsledding.
It was an extraordinary time, but my mind was elsewhere. I had just gotten the final prescription lenses, the strongest contacts made, and they weren't working. Every specialist I had seen had said the same thing: "You have to have a cornea transplant." None of them said, "You're out of the sport." But that was only because it was obvious. The procedure would involve having the front of my eyes lopped off and replaced with corneal tissue from a recently deceased organ donor. The recovery from that procedure is two years for each eye, which would take me out of the World Championship and Olympic Games and effectively end my career, even if there were no complications. Like organ transplant patients, cornea recipients are on anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives. I would also have to take a lot of precautions, and bobsledding wasn't one of them. One good thud during a run and my corneas could fly right out of my head.
It was over. Now I had to tell my team. First, my coach.
Before I even spoke, Brian knew something was wrong. I was rooming alone in the basement of the house we had rented, and I hadn't come out for two days. He had no idea how far I had fallen in my mind, or how the onslaught of the depression had become a familiar old friend that I simultaneously dreaded and welcomed. While my teammates were warming up for their workouts, I was in the basement. When I did come out, I was lethargic and unresponsive, a man with a thousand-pound weight on my chest and nowhere left to turn. Finally, Brian pulled me aside and said, "Holcomb, what's going on? Do you not want to be here? These guys are here to work and you're mailing it in. They're here for you. You need to show them that you care."
I wasn't in the mood for a lecture, so I turned away from him and said, "I've got bigger fish to fry right now."
"Bigger fish to fry!" he shouted. "What could be bigger than being an Olympic champion?"
There was no better time to tell him. The question had been asked. All I had to do was answer.
"Shimer, I have to retire."
"Retire! What are you talking about? You're twenty-seven years old. You just had the best year of your career. You can't retire. We're on the cusp of history here."
My lip quivered and my voice caught in my throat. I had to take some deep breaths. After a couple of seconds, I steadied myself. And then I said it.
"I'm blind."
CHAPTER 2
The Right Place
For the last fifty years, most top skeleton, luge, and bobsled athletes have come out of Germany and Switzerland, not because of some Germanic sliding predilection, but because those are the sports that kids watch and admire growing up. Place matters.
You have a better chance of being a world-class marathon runner if you were born in Nairobi than if you are a native of Copenhagen or Zurich. If you're a good athlete growing up in Puerto Rico, you're probably going to gravitate toward baseball as opposed to, say, figure skating, and a big kid from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is much more likely to play football than hockey, just as a young person from inner-city Detroit is more likely to play basketball than cricket or golf.
A middle-class kid growing up in Sydney, Australia, is a lot more likely to swim than become a ski jumper, not because of his personal desires or innate athleticism but because of his environment. And you're a lot more likely to be a great golfer or surfer if you grew up in Florida or Southern California than in Manitoba, Canada. That is not to say that Californians are genetically predisposed to golf or surfing, just as it's wrong to assume that Kenyans are born with a long-distance- running gene. But if you assume that a certain percentage of any population will gravitate toward sports, it makes sense that the region in which a person lives will have some bearing on what sports they play. Those from the southeastern United States see football as the quickest path to praise and fame, while Minnesota kids learn to lace up ice skates and slap a hockey puck around before they can write their names. I come from the American West, where we have a lot of options: skiing, biking, and skating, along with the traditional American sports like football, baseball, and, to a lesser extent, lacrosse. You can also find a fair number of rodeo cowboys — ropers and rough-stock riders — athletes who might as well be Martians to people in New York but who actually attend colleges like Utah Valley University, Odessa College, and College of Southern Idaho on bull-riding scholarships.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "But Now I See"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Steven Holcomb.
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
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