A Kind of Grace

by Jackie Joyner-Kersee

  I'm hardly the lone victim of such cynicism. At every summer Olympics since Seoul, the same old questions have come up, with reporters, coaches and athletes alike pointing fingers and whispering about athletes who were successful, unfairly casting clouds over their performances.

  I don't know how to solve the problem because I'm not an expert in drug testing. But I wish the people running our sport would find a way to inspire more confidence in their testing policies and procedures. While I know it's easy to make the media the scapegoats in controversies like this, I think they do bear some responsibility, too. I wish journalists would demand concrete proof of wrongdoing when accusations are made, rather than just repeating unsubstantiated and slanderous allegations and envy-inspired gossip.

  Despite my misgivings, I dutifully reported to the testing lab each and every time I was notified, no matter how burdensome it became. The last thing I wanted was for someone to say I wasn't complying with the rules or that I was trying to hide. But I dreaded the process because it disrupted my whole day. Often I had to cancel appointments or reschedule appearances. Also I hated having to tell the organizers that I had to take a drug test because I didn't know how they would react. They didn't know how random testing worked. It probably made some of them think I had a drug problem or had previously failed a test.

  When I received the notices at home in Canoga Park, I immediately called the doctor who was certified by TAC to administer the test and made an appointment to meet him either at a hospital in Long Beach or his office. He was very accommodating, often agreeing to meet me at 6:00 A.M. so that Bobby and I could avoid the heavy freeway traffic and not disrupt our daily schedules.

  So I woke up really early and drank a lot of water. Then, Bobby and I began the hour-and-a-half drive from our home in the San Fernando Valley, past Westwood, Beverly Hills and the airport, to Long Beach. My bladder was so full and the drive so long the first time we did it, that I had to stop to use the bathroom four times and drink more water before reaching the hospital. The next time I had to prepare for the test, Bobby told me not to drink anything until fifteen minutes before we left home.

  At the hospital, I worried that my urine would be too diluted and the testers wouldn't be able to get a reading because I'd flushed out my bladder and refilled it so many times. During track meets in very humid conditions where the risk of dehydration was high, after drinking water and relieving myself all day, I would sometimes have problems producing a usable sample for the drug test after the meet. Or if the testers threw out the first 70 ccs and asked for a second sample, as they sometimes did, if I was empty, I had to drink more water and sit around the waiting room until I could produce another sample. Sometimes I only spent twenty minutes at the lab. Sometimes I was there for several hours.

  After going through that drill so many times in January, Bobby blew his top when I received that fifth letter in February. “It's a witch hunt and I don't think you should go,” he huffed. “Track and field expects you to forget you have rights.”

  I tried to calm him down. “It's better to just do it and avoid any controversy later on,” I said. “If I do what they ask, they can't come back and say I have something to hide.”

  But I was ticked off, too. During an appearance in Dallas, I raised questions about the system by making light of my situation. “Is it really random or a conspiracy?” I asked the journalists rhetorically. “I really don't know how the process works. But if my number is going to keep coming up that many times, I ought to start playing the lottery.”

  My comments sent the reporters running to TAC with a notebookful of questions about the testing policies and procedures. The responses were vague and unresponsive. But after I publicly complained, the notices became less frequent. That only made me more suspicious of the process.

  After living in California for a while, I greeted spring with trepidation. The season wreaked havoc on my asthma and my allergies, the list of which seemed to grow daily. From Dr. Katz, an allergist at UCLA Medical Center, I'd discovered that I was allergic to nuts, shellfish, fruit, dust, grass, pollen, ragweed, feathers and animal hair. Digesting or encountering any of them could prompt a seizure and bring on a severe asthma attack. The words “seizure” and “severe,” however, didn't faze me. I still regarded my condition the way I did an East German heptathlete or any other foe—it could be defeated if I stayed relaxed and didn't panic.

  The threats were becoming increasingly serious however. Bobby knew it. He'd accompanied Jeanette Bolden to a seminar in Colorado on asthma and learned to detect the warning signs of an attack and the proper preventive measures and care in emergency situations.

  When he returned from the meeting, he habitually called me off the track during practice to study my eyes, my breathing and my complexion. If I looked drowsy, or my eyelids seemed to be constricting or my breathing was labored or my face was flushed, he lightened the workouts and took me to the hospital for an examination. And he badgered me about taking my medicine.

  In March 1991, we were preparing for the World Championships to be held in Tokyo. It was nearly dusk on the track. As I said good-bye to Bobby before walking off the track to Al's waiting car, he looked into my eyes and told me to stop by the hospital for a check-up. He walked with me to the car and gave Al the same instructions. I felt fatigued, but once we drove away, I told Al to take me home to Canoga Park, saying I preferred to rest there. He obeyed his sister.

  When Bobby came home I was lying on the bed. Al had gone to the store for me. Bobby asked if I'd been to the hospital, and when I told him I'd decided to come home and rest instead, he stomped upstairs.

  Less than fifteen minutes later, I saw stars in front of my eyes. I started wheezing and a surge of intense heat ran through my body. I took off my jog bra, which seemed like a vise grip around my chest. Fighting for air, I put on an oversized T-shirt. I was starting to get really nervous now, because I was taking in less and less air with each breath. I realized I had to get to Bobby. He was upstairs talking on the phone with Greg Foster.

  I was trying not to panic, but I knew it was a bad attack. I needed to get to the hospital. I didn't have the energy to get up and walk. So I slid off the edge of the bed and crawled to the staircase in the hallway.

  I raised my head and called out.

  “Bobby. Help.”

  He didn't hear me. I could still hear him talking on the phone. I didn't have much strength left to yell, but I gave it all I had.

  “Bobby! Help!”

  He appeared at the top of the stairs holding the cellular phone. When he saw me at the bottom on the floor, he dropped the phone and ran down. Al walked in the house at that moment and ran to us. They carried me to the car and the three of us drove to the hospital. My breathing was still labored, but my lungs had relaxed a bit when we pulled into the parking lot at the emergency entrance. Bobby and Al tried to rush me inside but I couldn't walk that fast. “Relax, Jackie,” I said out loud. I bent over, trying to calm down and catch another breath. They were moving me too fast.

  Bobby said, “Let's carry her in!”

  They picked me up and ran toward the door. As soon as the glass doors parted, Bobby darted inside and yelled to the nurse, “Her name is Jackie Joyner-Kersee and she's as—”

  “Oh, yes, I remember,” the nurse said, motioning for Bobby to put me in a wheelchair she rolled over. “Asthma, right?”

  After sitting with the IV and the breathing machine in a room inside the emergency ward, my system calmed down. I begged the doctors not to admit me. I begged Bobby, too. It was no use. I spent the night in the hospital and was released with another warning about taking my medicine.

  I was diligently taking my medicine when I accompanied Bobby to Eugene, Oregon, for the NCAAs a month after the episode. But nevertheless I had another attack. The problem was the thick pollen in Eugene. I'd been out at the track all day, watching Bobby's team compete for the collegiate championship. The pollen was so thick, we could see it floating in the air,
like dust pellets. My anxiety about the UCLA team's performance heightened my stress level, which exacerbated everything. I was talking to Bobby when the wheezing started. I grabbed the inhaler and started breathing into it and pumping it. The attack subsided, but he took me to the hospital anyway, where I stayed overnight for observation.

  When an attack hits, my chest tightens and my body overheats in a matter of seconds. I feel as if I'm on fire and everything inside my body is closing up. My first impulse is to take off anything I'm wearing that's tight. I want to free myself of all confines and constrictions to get air, and let my body breathe and cool off. After an attack is over, my chest and back muscles are sore for several days, as if I've been lifting heavy weights. That's how hard I have to work to breathe.

  Shortly before the Worlds, I accompanied Bobby to Houston, where he spent a week working with tennis player Zina Garrison while I trained for the World Championships. We were all out at the Rice University track, when an attack hit me. I started wheezing and my body got hot. I yanked my T-shirt over my head in the middle of the track, in front of everyone. Then I started pulling down my jogging pants, which fit like leggings. Zina's eyes widened as she watched me. She bolted down to the other end of the track and alerted Bobby that I was breathing hard and taking my clothes off.

  She and Bobby came sprinting over to me. They grabbed two big towels and stood in front and behind me while I stripped off my pants and bra and put my T-shirt on over my panties. I grabbed my inhaler and pumped it several times before I could get enough air to relax. It was a tense moment and poor Zina was freaked out. She kept asking me and Bobby if I was okay. She'd never seen anyone have an asthma attack. Later that year, Zina and her husband, Willard Jackson, spent New Year's Eve with us in St. Louis. The four of us laughed long and hard about the day I did a striptease at the track.

  Despite it all, I stopped taking my medicine and carrying my inhaler around as soon as I felt better. I didn't want to be a prisoner to medication or some inhaling device. Amazingly, I was still in denial about my condition. In a desperate attempt to convince the emergency room staffs that it wasn't serious enough to warrant an overnight stay after an attack, I often said things like: “You don't understand. I'm not your typical asthmatic. I'm an athlete.”

  One doctor just laughed at me. He told Bobby, “I think we'll have to put your wife on the psychiatric ward.”

  Once I left the hospital, my thoughts immediately turned to the next competition. In 1991 it was the World Championships in Tokyo. Performing well on the track reinforced the notion in my head that there was nothing seriously wrong with me. But in the back of my mind, I knew how serious my asthma was getting. Each time I had an attack, it was more violent and scarier than the last.

  27

  Heike

  For the first time since I began entering the heptathlon and long jump in international competition, the long jump was scheduled before the heptathlon at the World Championships in Tokyo. Learning about the unusual scheduling jolted Bobby and me. Competing in that order meant four consecutive days of pounding my legs on the track with little time to rest. We hadn't prepared for that in training. Ordinarily, I did the two-day heptathlon and then had two, three or four days of rest before the long jump.

  In Tokyo, I would have nine rounds of jumps, three to qualify and six in the finals, in two days. All that jumping would be followed the very next day by sprint hurdling, high jumping and the 200-meter sprint. The fourth day involved more long jumping and finished with the 800. Not the ideal situation. But there was nothing to do but give it my best shot.

  As it turned out, I hit 24′ ¼″ on my first jump in the long-jump finals, good for first place. My second attempt was a foul but no one eclipsed my mark, not even Heike Drechsler of East Germany, my archrival and good friend. With no one threatening, I decided to rest my hamstrings and pass on the third attempt. On my fourth jump, I missed the board and my foot touched down on the plasticine just beyond it. Plasticine is a gushy, claylike substance. It grabbed the spikes on my right shoe and yanked my right ankle around as I tried to launch in the air. I felt something twist. I shrieked as I went down, head first into the sand. I was crying as Heike ran over to me and knelt down in the sand beside me.

  “My leg! It's my leg!” I cried.

  She picked up my head and held it in her lap and dusted the tear-soaked sand from my face. Tears welled up in her eyes.

  I couldn't move my leg. I thought it was broken. I was terrified. Bobby and Bob Forster, my physical therapist, ran over and kneeled on either side of us.

  “It's my leg! It's my leg!” I cried to them. Bob started to examine my knee.

  Heike asked if I was okay, and I calmed down.

  “Yeah. I'm okay,” I said, nodding. She blinked her eyes at me, her signal that she wished me well. She got up and walked back to the athlete waiting area, as Bobby and Bob continued to poke around my leg.

  “No, it's my ankle,” I told them. Bob examined and touched it. A doctor had arrived and he also examined it. It was a slight twist. He asked me to try to get up and stand on it. With Bobby and Bob's help I gingerly stood up in the sand. I put my weight on the ankle and felt okay, just a slight twinge of pain. I walked to the infield.

  I sat on the grass with my legs stretched out in front of me. The doctor examined it some more, while Bobby and Bob crouched beside him at my feet. He said it wasn't serious. No broken bones. That's when Bobby told Bob to tape it up if it wasn't broken because he wanted me to take the last jump. I tried running gingerly at first. No pain. I put more pressure on the leg. Still no problem. I ran back and told them it felt okay.

  Bob scrambled furiously to wrap the leg, but discovered he didn't have an Ace bandage with him. Ever resourceful, Bobby pulled a 5,000-yen bill out of his pocket and handed it to him. “Here, use this,” he said.

  Bob wrapped my ankle with the yen bill, then, as an added prevention against swelling, put a bag of ice on it and secured it with tape, which I kept on until my next jump.

  At the line, my ankle was still wrapped with the yen bill. I didn't improve on the last jump and neither did Heike. She needed only 1¼ inches to beat me, but she couldn't pull it off. She didn't use it as an excuse, but I knew she had a knee injury. She came over and congratulated me with tears in her eyes. “You're the best,” she said. I started crying and we embraced.

  I prevailed that day at the Worlds. But Heike took home the gold medal a year later at the Barcelona Games and I received the bronze. After my last attempt came up short at the Olympics, I got up, dusted myself off, shook my head once and walked to Heike with a big smile on my face. “Congratulations. Today was your day,” I told her. “You're the best.”

  As the episode in the sand pit showed, I was closer to Heike than I was to any member of the American long-jump team. We first met in 1985 at a meet in Zurich. Bobby pointed her out to me on the warmup track. I knew she was the young East German long jumper who'd set the world record at the age of eighteen in 1983. Bobby told me she was the best he'd seen and the one to beat. He marveled at her sprinting and jumping ability.

  “You're going to have to work hard to beat her,” he said as we stood on the edge of the track, watching her run around, her blond curls and long legs flapping in the breeze as she trotted past us.

  Heike was one of the few friendly athletes in the East German track delegation. I knew how careful the athletes from the Eastern Bloc had to be because their coaches and chaperones were watching every move they made and expected them to keep their game faces on at all times. I wouldn't have blamed her if she kept her distance. The only other member of that team who ever behaved civilly to athletes from the West was heptathlete Anke Behmer.

  In 1986 at Gotzis, Anke and I had struck up a friendship and she wanted to exchange uniforms with me. She talked to me about it away from the prying ears and eyes of her coach. We made a secret plan to do it at the athletes' banquet that night. Back at my hotel room, I stuffed my uniform in my purse and hea
ded to the dining room. Before dinner, Anke snuck over to me and whispered, “We can't let the boss man see us. I'll go to the bathroom first. Then you come. We'll do it there.”

  I kept one eye on her and one on my meal all night. We were sitting across the room from each other. She got up and went to the exit. I waited until she'd disappeared. Then I followed her. In the bathroom, we greeted each other with mischievous smiles and giggles. We quickly pulled the bunched-up uniforms out of our purses, made the switch and shoved them back inside. Anke left first. I waited a minute or two and then walked out. We were never seen together and no one ever knew what we did.

  At the Zurich meet, Heike came over and said hello on the warmup track. She had a nice smile. She asked whether Carol Lewis was competing in the long jump. I guess my ego got the best of me, because I thought to myself: “You should be concerned about whether I'm competing!”

  Heike was three years younger than me, but she was a world champion before I was. I admired her versatility, her incredible athletic ability and her staying power. She'd dabbled in the sprints and made her Olympic team as a sprinter, posting some of the best times in the world. In fact, she was the one competitor Florence worried about while preparing for the 1988 Olympics.

  Our friendship grew through the years and we chatted whenever we could steal a few minutes out of the view of her coaches. On the track, she used eye signals—blinks and winks—whenever she passed me. I'd acknowledge her by smiling or winking back. It added fun to the competition and kept me relaxed. I always knew what her eye signals meant. “Hi! How are you?” or “Nice to see you,” or “Good jump.” In the sand pit that night in Tokyo, the blinks told me she was concerned about me and was relieved I was okay.