‘94 WINTER OLYMPICS / LILLEHAMMER : He’s Well : Heckman Has Healthy Outlook After Surgery for Lung Tumor

At 19, Ryan Heckman is a changed young Olympian. No more winning-is-the-only-thing for him.

“I think I have a much more lighthearted respect for the Olympic Games now,” he said the other day. “I think it’s easy as a young adult to get caught up in the performance syndrome. You know, people are really nice to you when you do well and sometimes they’re not nice when you do poorly. Having gone through some setbacks and almost hit rock bottom a couple times, I’m just here to have fun. I think that’s the most important part of athletics.”

A big scare can do that to you. And Heckman had a big scare, a lung tumor “the size of a sweet potato.”

It was discovered late in August, just as Heckman, of Steamboat Springs, Colo., was about to start the most intensive part of his training regimen for Nordic combined, which includes both ski jumping and cross-country skiing.

“It was between my lung and my spine,” Heckman said of the tumor. “That’s why we had to move so swiftly on it.”

The tumor turned out to be benign, but nobody knew that until several days after he’d had a painful biopsy. And in the meantime, Heckman, who as a 17-year-old wunderkind was known at the 1992 Albertville Games as “the Speck,” thought his life as an athlete might be over. In fact, he thought his life might be over.

“I thought the worst,” he said. “I thought I had cancer. I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve had such a good life until now and this is why it’s been so good, ‘cause it’s going to end right now.’ ”

Heckman was stunned to learn that there was something seriously wrong.

“I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning,” he said. “I was having a hard time just doing anything. Since (the tumor) was so close to my spine, I was putting it out of place and I couldn’t move my back and it hurt to put pressure on my right side.

“I still trained and just took a lot of (painkiller). With rigorous training you’re always in some pain, so I didn’t really think anything of it. I went to a chiropractor and he adjusted me and it was way better, but then an hour later it was bad again.”

Then one morning he couldn’t get out of bed at all and finally agreed to see a doctor, who recommended a CAT scan.

“The doctors, when they saw it on the CAT scan, kind of took my parents aside and told them they thought it was malignant,” he said. “I had a biopsy done that afternoon.”

And after that, surgery to remove the mass. The biopsy was worse than the surgery, Heckman said.

“Normally you’d be (anesthetized), but I had specific breathing instructions so we wouldn’t puncture the lung. So, I had to be in a CAT-scan machine and I had to breathe in when they had to go in with this thing. It was terrible.”

The removal surgery was no picnic, either.

“They did thorascopic surgery,” he said. “They go in like they would (for) a knee surgery with arthroscopic instruments and they cut it out and get it so it’s free moving. Then they open you up, four to six inches, and actually just pull it out. But in order to get inside your pleural cavity, they have to break ribs and it’s not very comfortable.”

So, suddenly, Heckman was trying to come back from a serious operation, as well as an off year.

“After ’92 (in Albertville), we switched to the V-style (of jumping) and I had problems with that,” he said. “I always jumped with my skis out in front of me. Making the change was tough because my skis under me were my security blanket.”

In his eagerness not to fall behind, Heckman said, he ran four days after the surgery.

“It was a mistake,” he added. “It was a big setback. I wasn’t able to train for a month after that.”

And during that month, Heckman took a look at his life.

“People were constantly badgering me about when my return was going to be, ‘When is the old Speck going to be back?’ and it all kind of caught up to me,” he said.

“It’s hard to grow up in athletics, I think. You’ll notice that in ‘92, Toni Nieminen (then a 16-year-old from Finland) was absolutely the (ski-jumping) star, without question, and he’s not here. Martin Hoellwarth, the Austrian ski jumper, another star at 17 in ‘92, he’s not here.

“For a young adult to grow up in the Olympics is a real fun way of growing up. On the other hand, it’s a warped sense of reality. I think that begins to catch up to you. I think I let it catch up with me. But the important thing is that I didn’t just let it happen. I took some time away from it to get back to normal.”

All of which doesn’t mean Heckman isn’t going to do his best here. He is, after all, having his best World Cup season. He’s just planning to enjoy the Olympics a little more this time around.