A Medal Is His Lesser Triumph

Glad simply to be alive, let alone at the pinnacle of his sport, liver transplant recipient Chris Klug put a whole new twist on the notion of an Olympic miracle.

Using duct tape to bind together a broken boot buckle for his final race, Klug persevered and won the bronze medal Friday in parallel giant slalom snowboarding.

Philipp Schoch of Switzerland, the second-slowest rider in qualifying Thursday, won the gold, and Sweden’s Richard Richardsson took silver.

Klug gave the United States its record 14th medal of the Winter Games and pushed the story of his unbelievable comeback to a stunning crescendo.

“I thought I was going to die waiting,” Klug said of the days before his liver donor was found 19 months ago.

“I was pretty scared,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about snowboarding, or coming back and winning a bronze medal. I was just thinking about hoping to live, hanging out with my family and continuing with life as I know it.”

In that sense, Klug’s Olympic triumph was about more than sports. It was about the miracle of modern medicine, one family’s generosity and the will to overcome adversity.

Leisa Flood, the mother who made the choice to donate her 13-year-old son’s organs in July 2000, was overwhelmed when she heard of Klug’s victory.

“I’m so grateful we were given the opportunity to help him,” Flood said from her Idaho home. “It makes me feel good. They both won.”

Of course, such an improbable comeback story deserves an improbable ending, and Klug served that up too.

During his first of two bronze-medal races against Nicolas Huet of France, the buckle on Klug’s back boot snapped. He didn’t have time to replace it between races, so he used some loose metal and duct tape from his repair kit to “jerry-rig the thing up.”

At the starting gate, he felt the looseness in the boot and briefly wondered if he could make it down the hill.

Klug had been in tougher jams than this.

“I just said, ‘To heck with it,’ ” Klug said. “. . . I just made the best of it.”

He won the race, won the bronze and celebrated by bouncing his fist against his heart, then pointing to his father, his girlfriend and the dozens of other overwhelmed friends and family who came to see him.

Klug wants his story to send a message to the world “to get families talking about organ donation,” but said he never felt pressure to win to make his ordeal worthwhile.

“All I can do is relax, have fun, enjoy each turn and do the best I can,” he said.