Before Olympic Glory Came Tougher Battle

Anyone can get a gold medal throwing a Yugoslavian or Greek wrestler, running a the fastest 100 meters or beating the field in the javelin or the hammer.

Those guys play by the rules, the field is level and the odds even.

But what if you have to win two out of three falls with cancer? An Olympic trial is grueling when you have to overcome the best your nation produces just to make the team. But no one ever had to get in the starting gate or the throwing ring with the foe known as Hodgkin’s disease. Until Jeff Blatnick.

When people talk of great comebacks in Olympic history, they usually mean the runner who survived a stumbling start, the thrower who fouled on his first five attempts, the marathoner who staggered to the finish line in a state of semi-unconsciousness.

Blatnick’s trials were against an undefeated foe; the best you could hope for was to get, you should pardon the expression, a dead heat.

You usually get ready for an Olympic Games by getting plenty of sleep, carbo-loading on pasta, working out, pumping iron, perfecting your techniques, building your strength.

Jeff Blatnick had to get ready on radiation, chemotherapy. He spent his preparation period trying to stay alive.

It all began when he went to the doctor with an attack of conjunctivitis, an inflammation of the eyelid. As the doctor treated him successfully, Blatnick was buoyed. “Will this mean those other bumps will go away now?” he wanted to know. “What other bumps?” the doctor wanted to know.

And that was when Blatnick first came in contact with one of the most dreaded words in the English language-- biopsy . He had lymphatic cancer.

The insidious part of Hodgkin’s disease is, it’s painless. That’s unfair. An enemy that relentless and ruthless should, at least, give warning. Even the German Army dropped leaflets.

Hodgkin’s disease invades like a fifth column of saboteurs, spies and guerrillas. It often does its dirty work undetected till it’s too late. Undiscovered, it can invade the liver, spleen, intestines, spinal cord or brain. Its worst symptom in early stages is itchiness. It is killing you, but all you think you have to do is scratch.

In Blatnick’s case, it was diagnosed as a “1-A” stage. That means, it is infiltrating but it hasn’t called up the reserves yet.

The doctors removed the spleen and prescribed radiation. There was some hair loss, but the side effects were body sores and such a burning sensation that Blatnick couldn’t take a shower for five weeks.

Blatnick’s sport was Greco-Roman wrestling, a refinement of the ancient art in which no holds were permitted below the waist. It is a far cry from Wrestlemania, and it was a sport in which the USA had not only never won a gold medal, but had never won a medal of any kind up to 1984.

When Blatnick, in 1982, asked his doctor if he could expect to resume his training to get ready for the ’84 Games in Los Angeles, the doctor wanted to know what he had to do. When Blatnick cheerfully answered, “Oh, throw 260-pound Bulgarians around the ring,” the doctor wondered if, in spite of his best efforts, the disease hadn’t reached the brain.

Probably no one in the long history of the Olympics ever overcame the handicap Jeff Blatnick did to win his gold medal. The late, great Glenn Cunningham had overcome childhood polio to become a world-class miler, but his Olympic best was a silver medal in 1936. Jeff Blatnick had to un-lap himself in radiation laps before he could even get on a start line.

It says in the record books that Blatnick’s Olympic victories were over the massive Yugoslavian, Refik Memisevic, and the giant Swede, Tomas Johansson, but these were just the undercard. Blatnick’s main event was against a far more malignant opponent.

Hodgkin’s disease is a tag team. It comes at you in relays. Blatnick thought he had achieved remission at the time of his Olympic competition.

But when he went back home, he was setting out to get ready for the ’88 Olympics and he got lucky again. He tried a recreational sport, skiing, with predictable results: He had an accident. In the course of treatment for that, the doctors found another telltale lump. This time in the abdomen. Another biopsy and, as he says now, “Mr. Hodgkin was back.” He adds: “This time it was labeled 3-B because of the location of the cancer.”

That was five years ago. Once more, the cancer was pinned. But it sent glimmering his hopes for the Seoul Olympics. “I wanted to get in one non-boycott Olympics,” he laments. But this time, the comeback was stalled. “I got pummeled. I got cut for the first time in my career. I decided to retire.”

Jeff Blatnick was through here this week. He was one of six athletes honored as recipients of the Crown Royal Achievement Award, given to athletes who have overcome extreme physical hardship to excel in their sport. The fund-raising dinner was for the benefit of the Jimmie Heuga Center, a Colorado-based research facility named in honor of the Olympic ski racer who contracted multiple sclerosis after his 1964 and ’68 Olympic appearances.

Baseball’s Tommy John, Olympic sprinter Wilma Rudolph, ex-Notre Dame and Pittsburgh Steeler running back Rocky Bleier, figure skater Scott Hamilton and golfer Calvin Peete were the others honored.

“The tendency, when you hear an awful word like cancer or sclerosis is to say, ‘Well, that’s it. I’ve had it,’ ” Blatnick explains. “But sports is about competition, and so is life.”

And sometimes the biggest victories don’t show up in the record books.