From where Chris Klug’s family and friends stood behind a metal barricade at the finish line, part of the alpine snowboard course was slightly obscured.
They could see the racers push out of the start two by two, navigating the first few gates on a steep incline. The course plateaued a bit in the middle and the men seemed to vanish for a split second, then reappear as they slid over a lip and headed full-tilt into the final stretch.
Klug always has been able to build speed in the flats, so his parents held their breath and thought positively during that instant when they couldn’t see him. It was a leap of faith infinitesimally smaller than the one they, and he, took 19 months ago when he disappeared from their view on a hospital gurney, bound for the operating room.
“There’s nothing a parent can do once your kid gets here,” said Klug’s mother, Kathy, who watched her son, stricken by the same rare liver disease that felled Bears great Walter Payton, wither during the final months of a three-year wait for a donor organ. “You just have to trust the athlete to do their best.”
And Friday the 29-year-old Klug, who survived a liver transplant in July 2000 to return to world-class competition, won an Olympic bronze medal in the parallel giant slalom. The achievement was the completion of a trip back on a crater-filled road from an unlit backside of the moon few people see.
Klug, the first recipient of a major organ transplant to medal in Olympic history, is a happy warrior who has embraced the role of spokesman for his life-saving cause. But he doesn’t want people to forget that it is fierce competitiveness, not warm fuzzies, that led him to the podium after he was diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis nine years ago.
“There’s more than 80,000 people on transplant lists across the U.S. right now, and I think 16 a day die,” Klug said. “Being on the waiting list was one of the scariest things I’ve ever gone through. I thought I was going to be one of those 16. So I think it’s important for me now, in the position I’m in, to hopefully encourage a few families to talk about organ transplantation and get the word out there.
“But my riding and my efforts in helping to promote that are two different things. All I can do really when I go out and ride is relax, have fun, enjoy each turn and do the best I can. If I start thinking too much about results and sponsors and getting the media message out there, it would give me a heart attack. I don’t need that.”
The field of 16 men raced in pairs, doing two head-to-head runs, with the faster combined time advancing. Klug edged Canadian Jerome Sylvester by 0.05 of a second in the first round, then benefited from Italian Walter Feichter’s fall in the quarterfinals.
Klug, however, was not able to overcome a 1.49-second deficit to eventual winner Philipp Schoch of Switzerland in the semifinals, sliding off the course on his second run. Schoch bested Richard Richardsson of Sweden for the gold medal.
On the first run of the bronze-medal race, Klug took a 0.15-second lead over Nicolas Huet of France, but he rode the ski lift back to the top of the hill wondering if he could make it down safely a second time. A buckle had broken on one of his 6-year-old boots.
“I had to jury-rig it with metal and duct tape,” he said. “It wasn’t ideal, but I thought, if this buckle’s going to determine third or fourth place, the heck with it … if this is going to work out, it’s going to work out.”
After he arrived at the finish 1.21 seconds ahead of Huet to clinch the bronze, Klug fell into the arms of his teammates, then swung his long legs over a fence and kissed his girlfriend, Missy April, an incandescent smile splitting his blond stubble.
Klug’s brother, Jim, handed him a U.S. flag mounted on one of their father’s old ski poles, and Klug held it aloft.
“We are one grateful family,” said his father, Warren, a Highland Park native who runs a hotel in Aspen, Colo.
Klug wrote his thanks last year to the family of the donor, a 13-year-old victim of an accidental gunshot from Denver. In recent weeks the boy’s name, Billy Flood, has surfaced and his family has expressed an interest in meeting the Klugs. Those potentially emotional encounters often are arranged by the National Donor Alliance, which strives to preserve confidentiality for families who want it.
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“[The Floods] are the real heroes in all this in my mind, but it’s still something I’m figuring out, and I’m not 100 percent comfortable with it yet,” Klug said several days before his event. “It’s a little awkward for me. This tear-jerking soap opera at the finish line is not quite what I had in mind.
“Nonetheless I am forever grateful and I do look forward to meeting them when the time is right. Hopefully we can do it after the Olympics or in the spring, so it doesn’t get exploited. That’s something I very much look forward to, and I think it’s going to be very special and moving for me, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to do it in front of the cameras.”