New York Times
October 1, 2009
As Doctor, Eric Heiden Continues Complicated Relationship With Speedskating
By JERÉ LONGMAN
MURRAY, Utah — The surgeon rubbed his thumb over the speedskater’s thigh, just above the knee and below a seven-inch wound sutured into an angry smile.
The speedskater’s white blood cell count was normal. No sign of infection. His red blood cell count was still low.
“As we expected with the blood loss,” the surgeon said.
On Sept. 12, J. R. Celski crashed in a 500-meter race at the national short-track championships in Marquette, Mich., his right skate slicing open his left thigh to the femur, blood pooling on the ice.
On Monday morning, Celski, 19, went through two hours of range of motion exercises at a clinic here south of Salt Lake City, continuing his recovery toward the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in February.
The orthopedic surgeon monitoring his rehab is Eric Heiden.
“He’s a five-time gold medalist in the Olympics,” Celski said. “Who would you want taking care of you more than a former speedskater? He knows what he’s doing. He’s making sure I stay positive. Just the idea that he’s my doctor — his opinion matters more than an ordinary doctor.”
In February, 30 years will have passed since Heiden won gold medals in all five speedskating events at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, N.Y. He whirred around an outdoor track at the high school along Main Street there, wearing skates two sizes too small, hoping the lighter weight would increase his speed, powering himself with thighs so massive that he needed Size 38 pants even though his waist measured only 32 inches.
“Now I can buy regular pants,” he said with a laugh.
Thirty years?
Heiden blushed and smiled. He is 51 now, the son of an orthopedic surgeon who became an orthopedic surgeon himself. His hair, once dark and wavy, is clipped and going gray. He wears glasses to read his charts.
Has it already been 30 years?
“Sobering,” he said. “Wow.”
His wife, Karen, is also an orthopedic surgeon. They have two children, Zoe, who is 8 and a soccer player, and Connor, who is 6 and hurtles from eight-foot ledges on his skateboard.
“My next patient,” Heiden said, laughing.
Now, as then, his relationship with skating remains complicated. He thrived on competition. He is immensely proud of his achievements, perhaps more now than even then. But he remains uncomfortable as always with celebrity.
He was a reluctant star in Lake Placid, turning down most endorsement opportunities, remaining nostalgic for the days when he was a nobody, grateful that skating was not so popular in the United States so he could retain some degree of anonymity.
“It’s hard when every moment people are paying attention to what you are doing,” Heiden said. “I did not enjoy that. I still do not enjoy that.”
And yet, he quickly added, skating opened plenty of doors that might have remained closed: undergraduate school and medical school at Stanford. Training with renowned orthopedists like James Andrews. Becoming medical director for the United States speedskating and cycling teams.
“Having five gold medals, they’re going to look at your résumé twice before they say no,” Heiden said.
There are other perks, too. He still cannot pay for dinner in skating-mad countries like Norway and the Netherlands. Otherwise, much has changed about the Olympics since he competed. Amateurism is gone, along with the Soviet Union. Skating is now a profession.
“In a sense, I’m a little jealous,” Heiden said. “When I think of the financial potential I would have had, it was probably pretty vast. But I feel very lucky I never had to make that decision of sticking with the sport to make money. That option wasn’t there. I had to pursue an education.
“I’m very proud of what I did as a speedskater. As time goes by, I appreciate more of what I’ve done. But what I do now, taking care of guys like J. R., helping athletes attain their dreams and goals, that’s pretty rewarding.”
Reminded that he had said his greatest accomplishment was becoming a doctor, not an Olympic champion, Heiden paused for a moment and said, “But to win five gold medals, that’s pretty impressive.”
He also became an accomplished cyclist and competed in the 1986 Tour de France before crashing on a descent and sustaining a concussion.
During his skating days, Heiden once said that he would rather win something utilitarian, like a warm-up suit, than a gold medal, and that he might sell the medals if he ever needed the money. For years the medals remained scattered at his home and his parents’ home in Madison, Wis. Now all five sit on a book shelf at his house outside Park City, Utah, where Heiden is chairman of surgery at a recently opened medical center.
Just how much the medals mean to him became evident at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. He declined a chance to participate in the opening ceremony, believing he embodied the Olympic ideal and should have been chosen to light the Olympic caldron. The celebrated 1980 hockey team was chosen instead.
“I was probably just too stubborn,” Heiden said of shunning the ceremony. “I figured if they don’t appreciate what I did as a skater, if they don’t appreciate now what I am doing as a human being, I’d just as soon hang out with my buddies and watch it.
“I did not mean to slight the Olympic hockey team in any way. I grew up with a lot of those guys in Wisconsin.”
Though he has not worn speedskates in 10 years, Heiden gets out on a pond in hockey skates with his children. He helps to coach soccer. Once a week he goes for a run “trying to keep up with my 15-year-old dog.” He lifts weights in the garage and still rides his bike. His knees hurt, and so does his back, but he is only 15 pounds above his playing weight of 185.
His children are old enough to know about his accomplishments, Heiden said, but “they’re not old enough to appreciate that everybody’s dad does not have Olympic gold medals.”
He will travel to Vancouver in February as team doctor for the United States speedskating team. And he hopes that Celski, the short tracker, will be ready to compete in the 1,000 meters, 1,500 meters and the relay.
“The next six weeks, I think, we’ll have a very good idea how close we can be to meeting our objectives,” Heiden said.
The original wound to Celski’s left thigh was gaping. He keeps a picture on his iPhone. “It looked like a shark attack,” said Nicole Detling Miller, a sports psychologist who works with Celski.
A fellow skater, Walter Rusk, rushed onto the ice and applied a tourniquet with his sweatshirt. A surgeon, Larry Lewis, closed the wound that night in Michigan. Heiden has monitored the rehab. J. R. was lucky, his father, Bob Celski, said. No major arteries or nerves were severed.
For now, Celski is restricted to range of motion exercises while on his stomach, flexing his knee while using his hamstring not his quadriceps, which is held together by dozens of stitches.
Celski will continue his rehabilitation at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs until mid-November. By December, Heiden hopes to have Celski back on skates for six weeks of hard training. Still, he admonished the skater about the risk of trying to do too much before the soft tissue is healed.
“The skaters completely trust him,” Detling Miller, the sports psychologist, said of Heiden. “He doesn’t blow smoke.”