Sports heroes go beyond win and lose

Opinion

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This article was published 12/09/2015 (3454 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was a stunning interview, one Clara Hughes said on Twitter was the “most difficult” of the hundreds, likely thousands, she has ever done.

For those 10 minutes that aired on CBC last weekend, the Olympic legend looked vulnerable, but at peace with that fact. She talked about living with an eating disorder. She recounted the abuse a former coach hurled at her, and his words tumbling from her lips were like a punch to the gut. She deserved better. Everyone does.

She talked about what it was like to hold her breath on live TV and hope, 19 years ago, that her father wouldn’t be drunk and angry in front of an entire nation. CBC had brought him and her mother in as a surprise, while interviewing Hughes during the Atlanta Games.

Late in the interview Hughes, who is set to speak at McNally Robinson Booksellers on Tuesday to launch her new memoir, Open Heart, Open Mind, volunteered her surprising admission. Yes, she acknowledged in the book, she once had a doping infraction. It came after the 1994 World Championships in Sicily, when she tested positive for ephedrine.

Hughes swears she never took the stimulant, or any over-the-counter medicines that can contain it. Her punishment was light, a three-month off-season suspension.

“I do know that I didn’t cheat,” she told CBC. “I can look anyone in the eye, and I can look myself in the eye, and know that is my truth.”

The Canadian Cycling Association told her to keep it quiet, and for 21 years she did. Nobody knew. The Free Press archives from August 1994 mention her worlds performance briefly. Her name doesn’t pop up in the paper again until seven months later, when she earned a silver medal at the 1995 Pan Am Games.

Maybe if it hadn’t been silenced, the rest of Hughes’ career wouldn’t have happened. Maybe the public would been disgusted, maybe commentators would have torn her apart. Because nobody ever believes it was an accident or a mystery, not really. We imagine elite athletes transact with their bodily fluids the way we do our bank accounts: if there was something strange in there, you’d know. You’d have to know.

As for what really happened in 1994, Clara, our Clara, first-name-basis Canadian and the pride of Manitoba, seemed to just hope that a nation and a sport would believe her. “People are going to judge me over this,” she said. “There are people that are gonna say everything I did, that I cheated in it. And I can’t control that. That is something that, it’s the decision of the reader, and people that are going to come to know me in this book, that they can make.”

It would take a hard heart not to believe her. She’s earned that. Not only through her athletic achievements, which in the end are only as meaningful as the weight we place on them, but in what she did between them and after.

When there was something to give, Clara gave it. She rode across Canada for 110 days to get people talking about mental health. She donated one $10,000 Olympic-medal bonus to support outdoor adventures for children. She travelled the world with Right to Play, and when she challenged Canadian businesses to contribute to kids’ sport in developing nations, they ponied up nearly half a million dollars.

Through it all, Hughes was willing to peel back parts of her own hero’s veil, to show us what she had achieved could be reached by us, too. She has long talked about her own struggle with depression, and fractured teenage years that were saved by sport. In her new memoir, she reveals even more.

Maybe it’s telling that out of all these hard truths, the doping infraction is the one CBC used as a preview for its interview, and that this is the one that drew the most immediate attention. Doping allegations are easy to navigate, a fallback to the monochrome morality we learned as children: don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal.

That’s convenient for sports, which tends to make archetypes out of people. The narratives around sports tend to flatten, to narrow, to sort life’s blows into two categories: that which was overcome and that which defeated us. Fragility is for the rest of us; in sports, too often there are only the heroes and the fallen.

So it goes that the world made an example of Lance Armstrong, when he could no longer duck his scandal. But Armstrong’s most unforgivable transgression wasn’t the doping, it was his willingness to destroy anyone who might have exposed him. The public could stomach those rumours, so long as they could cling to the fading belief he was clean-winning. Doping is black and white, easy. It’s the rest of a life that gets complicated.

In 2013, Hughes sat with CBC host George Stroumboulopoulos to talk about Armstrong. Near the end of the segment, she deftly turned the topic to the question of what happens to lives that churn through these pitfalls of sport. She cycled back to the question of what happens when sport is all you have, and it is taken away.

“I also saw the aftermath of that,” she said. “I saw girls go into mental illness, like depression. A former Lithuanian cyclist ended up jumping in front of a train. There’s major repercussions that haven’t even been talked about when it comes to mental health.”

And maybe that’s the gift Clara Hughes has: the ability to turn our eyes to what matters. Not so much the winning or the losing, but how one gets there. In owning her own vulnerability, Hughes showed us an Olympic podium is not set so high above a normal life that normal people can’t reach it.

They do, she did, and the absolute least we can do to show thanks for this gift is believe her. After all, she’s believed in us all the way.

 

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca