Their Medals Still Glisten : Nearly 30 Years After Breakthrough, Kidd and Heuga Maintain Bond

Jimmie Heuga was about to stop the rental car and beat the tar out of Billy Kidd. It was December of 1962, on an icy road outside Zermatt, Switzerland.

Reason?

“I didn’t like him,” Heuga remembers.

The two U.S. ski team stars were in the throes of a high-speed romp across Europe. After dropping U.S. Coach Bob Beattie off at the Geneva train station, they thought it would be fun to beat the locomotive to Austria by car if only to see the look on Beattie’s face when he stepped off the platform.

Kidd was at the wheel as they zoomed into Zermatt at rush hour and turned a town into a ski course, Kidd substituting humans for slalom gates.

“It incensed me that he wouldn’t slow down,” Heuga recalls.

Heuga demanded the wheel, and the two men exchanged obscenities as Austria beckoned.

“Call me that again and I’ll stop the car and beat your brains out,” Heuga said at one point.

Unmoved, Kidd was repeating the epithet as the car hit an ice patch, spun 360 degrees and slammed into a snowbank.

They looked at each other and began laughing.

Then they sped off. They had a train to beat.

Heuga and Kidd shared an affinity for the fast lane, but not much else.

They grew up on opposite parts of the United States--Kidd in Stowe, Vt., Heuga near Lake Tahoe in California--and forced into cohabitation as the two best members of the U.S. Ski Team.

They would be inexorably linked during the 1964 Olympic Winter Games at Innsbruck, Austria, when Kidd and Heuga became the first U.S. men to win medals in Alpine skiing, Kidd taking the silver, Heuga the bronze in slalom.

It would forever change their relationship, in ways only they understand.

“I can’t imagine what we would have had in common if we hadn’t done that,” Heuga says now. “That was the beginning of the bond.”

Today, the bond continues as Kidd starts each morning with a cold shower, a daily reminder of Heuga, who has shocked his muscles into action in such a manner since learning in 1970 that he had multiple sclerosis, an incurable degenerative disease of the central nervous system.

Heuga had never heard of MS until a doctor in Denver, after what seemed a routine battery of tests, unraveled the mystery of his inexplicable fatigue and lack of coordination.

Next May, Heuga’s wife, Deborah, is due to give birth to a baby boy, to be named Winston in honor of an old sparring partner: William Winston Kidd.

They’ve come a long way since Zermatt.

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Heuga was always the doer of the two, Kidd the thinker. Heuga had to be first down the mountain, first in training--first in everything. At 15, he was the youngest skier ever on the U.S. Ski Team.

Kidd was more cerebral about skiing as he tried to protect an ankle he severely sprained at 17.

Heuga mistook this for slacking off.

“Jimmie and some teammates probably thought I was lazy,” Kidd says. “But I had a different approach.”

Heuga: “We were different beasts.”

Kidd and Heuga would grow together in time.

In 1975, Heuga was left to stare out the window of a one-room cottage in Rowayton, Conn., overlooking Long Island Sound.

Eleven years after Innsbruck, Kidd remained the most famous name in U.S. skiing.

Heuga, however, was a bust. Marriage and business had failed him, not to mention a body that was wasting away from a disease with no known cause or cure.

The cruelest prescription for MS was a daily dose of nothing.

Conventional medical wisdom held that rigorous exercise leading to a rise in body temperature would exacerbate the symptoms of MS, which tended to come and go as it pleased.

Only each time MS returned, it came harder than before, taking with it a little more coordination, a little more freedom.

By 1975, Heuga, the former gung-ho squad leader during training, could walk faster than he could run. So, he gave up.

“It’s an insidious condition,” Heuga says. “One morning, you get up and you don’t feel like running. And the doctor says you shouldn’t.”

Heuga withdrew to the cottage, to his loneliness, accepting a job as a product manager for a ski company to pay the bills.

He watched from his window the able bodies that sailed and water-skied on the sound; others that enjoyed games of racquetball and tennis.

Heuga, the doer, had become a thinker, like that damn Billy Kidd.

“I was in the state Thoreau called ‘quiet desperation,’ ” Heuga says.

One day, thumbing through a magazine, he was stopped in his tracks by the name Blaise Pascal, a 17th-Century French mathematician and philosopher. Pascal is Heuga’s father’s name. Jimmie read further and came across a passage.

“One of man’s greatest obstacles is to learn to sit quietly in his room,” Pascal wrote.

The quote nearly jumped off the page.

It said to him: “Heuga, this is the rest of your life. Are you going to feel sorry for yourself or are you going to get out the door and do something with your life?”

The next day, he walked out the door, borrowed a bicycle from his landlord and went for a ride.

“I fell, and fell, and fell, and fell again. Forty-five minutes later, I stumbled back to the cabin,”

It was a painful lesson, but “I realized that while I was riding I hadn’t felt sorry for myself.”

Heuga increased his bicycle workouts incrementally until he reached his goal of 1,000 miles a year. He began swimming, working up from one lap to 50, four times weekly.

He was back on skis in 1977. “I could ski better than I could walk,” he recalls.

He was unable to retard the progress of MS, and through the years would need to upgrade his support systems: bike to stationary bike, regular skis to fatter slats, walking cane to walker.

But in terms of cardiovascular and emotional condition, Heuga was fit.

In the late 1970s, Heuga took his one-man case study to the medical community.

“I was written off as an anomaly,” Heuga recalls. “I was an Olympic athlete. It was thought that one day I would settle down. That the disease would take course. Well, the disease has taken course. Despite that, I continue to be healthy.”

Heuga believes others with MS could benefit from his brand of diet and exercise.

In the early 1980s, he and Kidd shared a condo at a ski event in Colorado. Kidd witnessed first hand Heuga’s daily regimen. They sometimes went years without seeing each other, but the friendship had long ago been galvanized on a slalom slope at Innsbruck.

“The fact we won those medals brought us together,” Heuga says. “As years went by, we realized we were in the pioneering phase of U.S. skiing. To this day, people come up to me and say, ‘Boy, I remember that day.’ In the ski world, it was like the day Kennedy was shot.”

Says Kidd: “I’m not that good at staying in touch with people. But we were still linked by that. Deep down, that connection is what kept us together.”

Heuga had dreams of opening his own rehabilitation center for MS sufferers, but was overcome with self-doubt.

It didn’t help that the medical world was against him.

Heuga needed a push onto a slippery slope. Kidd provided the shove.

“It was really courageous on Jimmie’s part,” Kidd says. “If what he was doing was going to be detrimental to his body, and actually bring on the effects of MS, he would have been crazy to start the Jimmie Heuga Center.”

Kidd told him to go for it: “I had seen that his approach of exercise and diet had helped him with his MS.”

In 1983, Heuga pitched the idea at a dinner with Vail community leaders that included former President Gerald Ford.

The Vail Valley Foundation pledged $10,000 toward the cause, and in March of 1984, the Jimmie Heuga Center opened in Avon, Colo.

Celebrating its 10th anniversary next year, more than 1,000 with MS have participated in specifically designed, five-day medical programs that focus on nutrition, exercise and self-management.

Almost alone, Heuga changed the thinking on MS management. Heuga’s program now has the support of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, an association Heuga once referred to as “City Hall,” because he got tired of fighting it.

“We have a very high opinion of Jimmie Heuga,” says Judith Baines, director of communications at the Southern California chapter of the society. “We have some clients who have gone there (to his center) and had positive experiences. We think exercise is important. The feeling is if it’s good for a person who doesn’t have MS, it’s good for a person who does, within adaptations.”

So what of the prevailing wisdom that exercise worsened MS?

“The prevailing wisdom was not based on any research, per se,” says Dr. Richard Hicks, executive director of the Jimmie Heuga Center. “It was an indirect association, that well, exercise would increase the core temperature, and we know that’s bad, therefore exercise must not be a good thing.”

While heat adversely affects many MS sufferers, Hicks says exercise in controlled environments has not proven to worsen the symptoms.

And in most cases, MS is not life-threatening.

“People with MS don’t generally die of MS,” Hicks says. “They die of the same things the rest of us do, with heart disease leading the list.”

To control his body temperature, Heuga performs his exercises in the cool of a swimming pool. He skis on chilly mountain slopes and conducts stationary bike workouts in a temperature-controlled climate.

Thirty years ago, some doctors used a “hot-bath test” to diagnosis MS. In retrospect, Hicks calls the procedure “barbaric.”

It was, in fact, after taking a hot bath that Heuga discovered something was wrong with him.

Heuga was 24 as 1967 ended. He was still a world-class skier, but the previous spring he had experienced blurred vision in one eye and general fatigue. In December, while training in Austria, Heuga came in from the cold and took a hot bath.

His body went numb from the waist down.

The numbness lasted five months. He felt emotionally and physically flat entering the 1968 Winter Olympics at Grenoble, France. Heuga found himself stumbling for no apparent reason.

“I was 24, but I thought I was over the hill,” he recalls.

Heuga quit ski racing after the Olympics.

His vision problems came and went. He saw a series of ophthalmologists, some of whom recommended he see a neurologist.

Another doctor prescribed Valium, and that seemed to help.

It wasn’t until 1970 that a neurologist diagnosed his ailment correctly. The day before, Heuga had run five miles in 25 minutes. What could be wrong?

“Who the hell knew what MS was?” he told himself.

Heuga knows more now than he ever wanted.

“The Jimmie Heuga Center is there because of Jimmie Heuga,” Kidd says of his friend, “not because someone said, ‘Let’s put your name on it.’ ”

The center is there, too, because of the efforts of Kidd, who remains on the board of directors.

In 1985, Kidd and other top racers skied 18 hours nonstop at Mt. Alyeska, Alaska, to raise $252,000 for the center.

It produced the Jimmie Heuga Ski Express, an annual series of ski events across the country that underwrites the Jimmie Heuga Center. The series has raised $5.5 million and has set target of $1 million in 1994.

Heuga says Kidd has added credibility to his cause.

“Billy is one of the most noted names in skiing,” he says. “You think of skiing, you think of Billy. He lends a great deal of identity and exposure, and people become aware of what we’re doing.”

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Heuga and Kidd are nearing 50. They live 75 miles apart, Heuga near Beaver Creek and Kidd in Steamboat, Colo., where he is director of skiing.

They drop in on each other often, and vacation in the summer on Kidd’s lake. Heuga remarried in 1987 and has two boys, Wilder, 4, and Blaze, 2, the younger one named after the French philosopher whose quote changed Jimmie’s life.

Kidd is godfather to Heuga’s younger son, and Heuga is godfather to Kidd’s daughter.

While Heuga exercises regularly, his condition deteriorates.

“Three years ago, I was walking with a cane, now I walk with a walker,” he says. “Obviously, my balance is a lot worse.”

Heuga’s ailments have not kept him off the slopes. He keeps his boots and skis in a storage room at Beaver Creek. Ski patrol interns help him into his gear and assist him on and off the chair lift.

Heuga is aided by a product called CADS, a special cable pulley device that attaches to the boot and decreases muscle fatigue in his legs and lower back.

Heuga is restricted to cruising the bunny slopes--son Wilder has already advanced to the high-speed quad lift--but he doesn’t seem to mind.

Whenever Heuga has a good day on the mountain, he usually picks up the phone and tells a friend.

“It’s like someone who just found the sport of skiing,” Kidd says of the calls. “He’ll say, ‘Boy, it was a great day, the skiing was incredible,’ and you get caught up in his enthusiasm.

“I think Jimmie Heuga’s contribution to the world goes far beyond the Jimmie Heuga Center. He has the attitude: Don’t feel sorry for me, do the best with what you have.”

Heuga is more pragmatic.

“I can assure you I’m not getting out of here alive, but neither are you,” he says. “I wouldn’t trade places with anyone.”

In February, on the 30th anniversary of their medal-winning performances at Innsbruck, Heuga and Kidd plan to attend the Winter Olympics at Lillehammer, Norway, and relive memories of 1964.

“It’s a rare experience to share with somebody,” Kidd says. “To be on the same team, to grow up racing, to race together five years, to win a medal together, that’s got to be some kind of connective force more powerful than different personalities and background.”

Yet to be determined is who gets to drive the rental car in Lillehammer.