Now I Know (9 page)

In the book
The Harder They Fall: Celebrities Tell Their Real Life Stories of Addiction and Recovery
, Ellis recounted his LSD-addled view of the historic game:

Ellis retired from Major League Baseball after the 1979 season and turned over a new leaf: He became a drug addiction counselor. He passed away in December of 2008 at age sixty-three.

In recent years, competitive sports have been marked with athletes using performance-enhancing drugs (PED) to gain advantages, Lance Armstrong, perhaps most famously. But drugs aren’t the only way to get ahead. For some—paralympians, specifically—there’s something called “boosting,” no drugs required.

Only a broken toe here or there. On purpose.

The body handles a bunch of functions seemingly by itself, such as breathing, digesting, sweating, and regulating blood pressure and heart rate. All these things happen in a way that we can’t truly control—try and get your brain to convince your body to stop sweating or speed up your heart rate and you’ll almost certainly fail. This is true whether you’re a paralympian or a paralegal.

But people who have suffered spinal cord injuries often find their bodies no longer appropriately regulate their blood pressure or heart rate. Because of this, when they exercise or compete in athletic competitions, their bodies do not adapt properly to increase the flow of oxygen available to the lungs and other organs. Without an increased oxygen supply, their bodies tire more quickly than a typical athlete’s would. But because this affects most of them, the playing field is level.

Until they bring the pain. Literally.

People with certain spinal cord injuries may be susceptible to something called autonomic dysreflexia. Autonomic dysreflexia occurs when something below the point of the spinal injury becomes irritated, and, because of the spinal injury, the brain isn’t notified about the irritation and therefore cannot act. Instead, reflex takes over, and the person’s pulse increases and blood pressure rises. Usually, this is very dangerous and at times life threatening. But for these athletes, it gives a boost in the areas where they need it most.

Autonomic dysreflexia can be self-induced in various ways, such as breaking a bone (commonly a toe, as mentioned above) below the point of the spinal injury, or overfilling one’s bladder via a clamped catheter. And for these athletes, the increased endurance they get from this is real—a study in the journal
Nature
stated that “the efficacy of boosting was a resulting significant decrease in race time with a mean improvement of 9.7% in race performance.”

In 1994, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) banned boosting—but because it’s hard to catch, it still happens widely. In 2012, the BBC reported that the IPC conducted a survey during the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing, and 17 percent of athletes (anonymously) admitted to boosting at least once in their careers.

The third modern Summer Olympics took place in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904. In total, these Olympic Games lasted months, coinciding with the World’s Fair which St. Louis hosted that same year. The now-familiar men’s gymnastics competition occurred primarily on October 28 of that year, well past the end of the summer. It lasted one day, with eight events plus an awards ceremony for combined excellence in the parallel bars, horizontal bar, vault, and pommel horse.

The number and nationalities of most of the competitors is unknown, lost to antiquity. All we know are the names of the medalists—all of them American—and where they placed. Two men, Anton Heida (five golds, one silver) and George Eyser (three golds, two silvers, and a bronze) took home medals in six events—not a bad day. Heida fared better than Eyser; he also had a distinct advantage over the second-best man that day. Unlike Eyser, Heida had two legs.

In 1848, a spate of revolutions spread through Europe, mostly fueled by the middle class. In Germany, one such revolution was led by a group called the Turnverein—literally, the “gymnastic unions.” These groups were comprised of mostly working-class males who, beyond gathering to learn the art of gymnastics, also found a common bond in politics. But when the revolution of 1848 failed, the gymnasiums closed and many Turnverein left Germany. Most ended up in the United States, where they became a group called the Turners.

George Eyser was born in Germany in 1870 and emigrated to the St. Louis area at age fourteen. Sometime during his adolescence, likely before his family left Germany (although much of Eyser’s biography is unknown), he lost his left leg after being hit by a train. He was outfitted with a wooden prosthesis, allowing him to run, jump, and otherwise participate in many athletics. The Turners were the prevailing German-American social circle in St. Louis at the time. If you were German, gymnastics was part and parcel of the St. Louis community experience, and Eyser’s lack of a left leg did not change this at all.

Eyser’s experience as a gymnast paid off. Even though the competitors in the 1904 Olympics were, compared to today’s athletes, rank amateurs—the Games simply did not have the draw or importance that they’d later develop—Eyser dominated. He took gold metals on the parallel bars, vault (tying with Heida), and in the long-discontinued twenty-five-foot rope climb. He also took a bronze on the horizontal bar and pommel horse, and, due to his combined success, took the “combined four events” silver.

Eyser’s medals in the 1904 Games would be the last won by a person with an artificial leg until the 2012 games in London. His mere participation in the Games was also a century-long feat—not until 2008, when South African swimmer Natalie de Toit participated in the Beijing Games, did another person with an artificial leg compete in the Olympics.

In the 2001 World Aquatics Championship in Fukuoka, Japan, a fifteen-year-old Chinese diver, Wu Minxia, and her partner, Guo Jingjing, took gold in the women’s synchronized springboard competition. For Wu, this would be the start of well over a decade of dominance. She’d earn gold in the event at the 2003, 2007, 2009, and 2011 World Aquatics Championships. Even more impressively, she took gold at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, the 2008 Games in Beijing, and the 2012 London Games—becoming the first woman diver to win gold medals at three different Olympics.

Reaching such heights requires some sacrifice, and for many Olympic-class athletes, their partners, coaches, trainers, and the like are akin to family. But in Wu’s case, that’s an understatement. Those people were, undoubtedly, closer to the diver than she was to her own parents. We know this because of what happened soon after Wu won her record-setting Olympic gold medal in Athens.

According to the AFP, Wu’s parents had decided to hide some family news from their daughter until after her final Olympic dive. After she took the medal stand (although thankfully, not immediately after), they informed her that two of her grandparents had died—more than a year prior. Perhaps worse, they told her that her mother had breast cancer and had been battling it for eight years. (By the time of the Olympics, it was fortunately in remission.) Wu had, effectively, lived a separate life from her family.

Other reports flew in. According to
TheWeek.com
, Wu spent the ten years prior to the London Games separated from her parents. At age sixteen—just a few months after her gold in Fukuoka—she left home to attend a government-run swimming and diving school. Her parents told the media that they’ve “known for years that [their] daughter doesn’t belong to [them] any more,” and admitted that they “never talk about family matters” with her.

Even that may be an understatement. As the AFP reported, when Wu’s parents arrived in London for the 2012 games, they barely communicated with her before the diving event—they sent her a text message, telling her they had arrived safely, but otherwise had no contact with their daughter.

They did not even go see her before her final dive.

The Chinese rank and file did not take kindly to these admissions. Many took to the microblogging service Sina Weibo (similar to Twitter, but censored and controlled by the Chinese government), bemoaning the parents’ actions. But their ire wasn’t focused only on the Wu family. Many blamed the national sports program—which, as Yahoo! reported, took a very hardline view toward earning victory: That year, the government sent official congratulations to gold medalists, but not to those earning silver or bronze.

Unfortunately, that is unlikely to change. The London Games were the third consecutive Olympics in which China finished in the top two on the medal count table (in this case, behind the United States), and the government likely sees the disintegration of the athletes’ families’ lives as an acceptable cost.

Mao Zedong controlled China with an iron fist for more than three decades and is widely believed to have caused the death of roughly 50 million people during his reign. His two main political campaigns—the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution—are considered terrible failures in large part because of the death toll and suppression of human rights. One of the reasons for the massive death toll? A fickle, half-baked idea of Mao’s called the Four Pests Campaign.

In 1958, Mao decided that the health and hygiene of the average Chinese citizen were of vital importance. As one his first acts as part of the Great Leap Forward, he took aim at four creatures—the “Four Pests”—that the supreme ruler believed were putting his people at risk of disease. Mao figured that if he could eliminate these creatures, he would thereby create massive health gains throughout his nation.

Of the four pests, three of them—mosquitoes, flies, and rats—may have made sense to single out among the animal kingdom. But rendering them extinct, even locally, is a fool’s errand. Mao was willing to play the fool, as evidenced by the fourth creature on his list—the sparrow. Chairman Mao observed that sparrows ate the grains planted by Chinese workers, at times ransacking fields, and, therefore, the birds were responsible for reducing the value of the people’s labor. Sparrows were added to the hit list and given priority—they were more effectively targeted than the other three “pests.” Mao’s government began a large-scale propaganda campaign to get peasants to shoo or kill sparrows on sight. People of all ages were encouraged to engage in this War Against Sparrows. Posters from the campaign still exist, with one particular one showing a child armed with a slingshot with the message “Everyone come and fight sparrows.”

The propaganda worked. The Four Pests Campaign was incredibly successful, as the sparrow was nearly rendered extinct in China.