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Liver donor made snowboarder's bronze possible
By Lee Benson
Deseret News columnist
PARK CITY — On yet another great day to be alive, the snowboard racer thrust his arms in the air and let out an Olympic medalist shout. There may have been someone just as happy on the planet Friday afternoon, but none any happier.
Chris Klug wouldn't have missed this for the world.
Strong, fit, fast, the picture of health, Klug stood in the finish area in front of 17,000 fans and proudly displayed the gear that helped him win.
He did it with a Burton board, with Burton boots, with piston legs, with a champion's heart — and with somebody else's liver.
It was an unofficial Olympic first: first organ transplant recipient to medal.
There are plenty of stories of Olympic medalists borrowing equipment — Toni Sailer needed a friend's safety strap to win in downhill skiing in 1956; Italian bobsledder Eugonio Monti once loaned a bolt to a British team that went on to win gold in 1964. People use someone else's goggles and hats and wax all the time.
But until Chris Klug, no livers.
The Olympic bronze medalist doesn't know much about the teenager who gave him his liver. Only that he was 13 years old when he died, apparently from a gunshot wound, and that his family, in all its grief, was still clearheaded enough to donate all of the young's man's usable organs to waiting recipients.
It's Chris' understanding that 13 people received living organs from that teenager. A lucky 13 people got a new lease on life from one life that ended.
And now, a mere 18 months later, one of them got an Olympic medal.
Chris had lived with his liver disease — a rare condition called primary sclerosing cholangitis, or PSC — for more than seven years prior to the transplant. He'd managed to hold it at bay with good eating, plenty of exercise and a lot of luck. He'd also managed to become America's best snowboard racer. At the Nagano Olympics in 1998 he'd packed his PSC along for a sixth-place finish in the first-ever Olympic snowboarding giant slalom competition. At 25 and with the next Olympics scheduled on American snow not far from Klug's Aspen, Colo., home, his athletic future looked bright.
But in May of 2000 the disease turned nasty and that's when he took his place in back of a long line called "top priority." English translation: ready to die.
For 72 days he was on the waiting list with some 75,000 other Americans constantly waiting for critical organ transplants; 72 days that seemed, almost too literally, like a lifetime.
He'd lost 25 pounds and his health was fading fast when the phone finally rang at the end of July. It was the hospital in Denver. A liver was ready, they told him. Get there on the double.
Once the transplant surgery was completed he could feel what he'd been missing. "As soon as I woke up I knew it was different," he said. "When you're sick, you get used to it. You don't know. You think that's how everybody feels."
Heading to the starting gate yesterday, his weight back to its normal 220, he pronounced himself "healthier than ever."
"I'm lucky to be here," he said, and then he was off.
Appropriately enough, Klug's route to the podium in the nerve-wracking side-by-side racing format was anything but smooth. He barely got past the opening round, edging Canada's Jerome Sylvestre by 5/100ths of a second over their two races. In the round of eight he was behind going into the second run and in the bronze medal final against France's Nicolas Huet he was barely 15/100ths ahead going into their second race, when he put together his finest run of the day.
The survivor was terrific at surviving.
At the end, Klug paid tribute to an organ donor system that for him made all the difference, a system that he said is desperate for many more people who will make sure their usable organs are cleared for re-use.
"Transplants save lives, cause miracles and allow dreams to be fulfilled," is how Chris Klug summed it up.
As the bronze medalist stood at the finish line, his Olympic dream fulfilled, no one was arguing.
Lee Benson's column runs daily during the Olympics. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.
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February 16, 2002
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