Cancer Fails to Dampen Wrestler’s Spirit : ’84 Gold Medalist Jeff Blatnick Beats Disease, Sets Sights on ’88

There is nothing--not even cancer--that can extinguish the spirit of the Olympic flame in Jeff Blatnick. And Blatnick didn’t beat cancer once. He had to beat it twice.

Cancer couldn’t stop Blatnick in 1982. Fully recovered two years later, he won an Olympic gold medal at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles.

Cancer couldn’t stop Blatnick in 1986. Pronounced fully recovered again only three weeks ago, Blatnick is about to begin his bid for another gold medal at the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul.

“You can educate the mind, and you can train your body, but you have to have spirit,” Blatnick said this week in Groton, where he was helping the Connecticut Olympic Committee raise $150,000 in funds for the South Korean Games.

“Cancer was a part of my life, a part of my life I had to deal with,” he said. “But I learned that I could overcome adversity. Faith and attitude go hand in hand.”

Few people knew of Jeff Blatnick before the ’84 Summer Games, but those who saw him win a gold medal as a super heavyweight in Greco-Roman wrestling will never forget what they saw. Two years after he had contracted Hodgkin’s disease and had his spleen removed, Blatnick scored two takedowns in the last 90 seconds to win his final match.

When the bout ended, Blatnick dropped to his knees, kissed the mat and crossed himself. Unable to maintain his composure through much of a television interview, he walked off camera, saw his parents and broke down and wept in his mother’s arms.

“I’d like to divide the medal into lots of pieces and give a piece to my parents and friends,” Blatnick said at the time, when he dedicated the match to his brother, Dave, who had been killed in a motorcycle accident seven years before.

And then he broke down and wept again.

Five years earlier, before he first had cancer and before he won the gold medal, he had never tried the Greco-Roman sport. But he made the U.S. team in 1980, only to have the American boycott postpone his dream four years. His first bout with cancer then delayed, but didn’t deter, his courageous route to the gold.

“I almost felt embarrassed on that medal stand,” said Blatnick, 29. “Without the help of my friends and family, I would not have made it. I might not be alive.”

But Blatnick’s fight with cancer wasn’t over. After his heartwarming triumph in Los Angeles, he was told that he had the dreaded disease of the lymph nodes again. He took two more years away from his training program to undergo chemotherapy treatments and, now that doctors have given him a clean bill of health, Blatnick is ready to begin his Olympic training again.

Even now, however, the trip to the top of the medal stand two years ago doesn’t sit foremost in his mind. At the closing ceremonies in Los Angeles, the U.S. sports captains elected Blatnick to walk at the front of the line and carry the American flag.

“Winning the gold medal was an accomplishment over my adversity,” Blatnick said, “but an individual honor can never overtake that feeling, to be elected for something like that by your teammates.

“It was my biggest moment. The chill still goes up and down my spine.”