Hall’s Olympic Dream Gets the Boost It Needs

He is one man in a dinghy, a sailor who for years has dreamed of riding the wind to Olympic glory. One man tacking into the teeth of one of life’s gales, which has threatened to turn his world upside down and, at times, made his dream seem more like a nightmare.

Today, however, Kevin Hall finds himself back in calmer waters. A cancer survivor who must take regular injections of testosterone, a substance banned by the International Olympic Committee, he was cleared Tuesday to compete in next month’s Summer Games in Athens.

Rich Wanninger, spokesman for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, said that paperwork involving the U.S. and international agencies “has gone through” and Hall “has been approved” and will receive a Therapeutic Use Exemption waiver to compete as the United States’ lone representative in sailing’s Finn class.

Efforts to reach U.S. Sailing, the sport’s national governing body, were unsuccessful. Hall, reached Tuesday night in Athens, said he had not heard from the agency but was not surprised.

“Why am I always the last to know?” he asked.

The news came a day after Hall’s wife, Amanda, issued an e-mail to various members of the media assailing the slow handling of his case.

“Kevin has endured logistically challenging mandated blood tests, tedious and repetitive paperwork demands, inconsistent and contradictory stipulations on his time, his energy and his patience,” she wrote, “all the while keeping a smile for the press, keeping his optimism alive, and with little moral support and advocacy from the very organizations established for those purposes.”

The process, at a time when several high-profile athletes are fighting to clear their names amid charges of performance-enhancing drug abuse, has dragged on much longer than expected.

Hall’s weekly injections are not to boost testosterone levels; merely to maintain normal levels of the hormone.

Ultimately, the matter was put before review by an independent panel, which gave its approval Tuesday morning, Wanninger said.

Hall, 34, navigated a similar but even more frustrating experience during the 1996 Olympic trials, “probably the only permanent scar I really have from the process,” he said.

Indeed, his ride to the Olympics has been a turbulent one. A standout sailor who grew up in Ventura and now resides in Bowie, Md., he earned his first world title in a single-handed youth competition at age 16.

While attending Brown University he was an All-American three times. It was then that an Olympic dream he said began when he was a clumsy 5-year-old first seemed realistic. It was also then, during his senior year in 1990, that he noticed something wrong in his groin area and learned that he had testicular cancer.

Surgery went well and, after graduating with honors with degrees in mathematics and French Literature, he sailed a Finn -- a single-handed vessel that requires strength and endurance to handle properly -- to an eighth-place finish in the 1992 Olympic trials. Within months after that, though, the cancer reappeared and required a more extensive series of surgeries that resulted in the removal of both testicles and his abdominal lymph nodes. Hall’s body was no longer able to produce testosterone, required to maintain healthy bones, ligaments and muscles.

“There were simply no answers,” he recalled Tuesday. “Just the trips to the blood bank for the operation, and explanations of the procedure, and the world crashing down on me.”

He said he persevered with the support of family and friends, and then-girlfriend Amanda.

Hall’s comeback began in 1995, and he excelled in the Laser class, involving even smaller single-handed vessels. The testosterone issue, which had not been a concern during international sailing regattas, surfaced for the first time when Hall made his failed run at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

The International Olympic Committee considers testosterone a performance-enhancing drug and, while it is allowed to grant waivers to those using banned substances as a treatment for diseases, it was up to Hall and U.S. Sailing to prove, “I’m performance-replacing, not performance-enhancing,” Hall said at the time.

The bureaucratic process “left me drained, disillusioned and anything but focused on sailboat racing,” he said. “It took me a very, very long time to forgive myself for not having the mental strength to sail my best at the [1996 Olympic trials]” where he finished fifth.

Hall’s next Olympic charge was sailing as crew for best friend Morgan Larson in the double-handed 49er class, making its debut at the 2000 Games at Sydney.

Larson and Hall teamed to win the bronze medal three times, from 1997 to ‘99, at the 49er World Championships, and won the North American Championship title in 1999. They were denied a spot in the Olympics, however, after finishing second in the 2000 Olympic team trials.

“We learned from the experience of 1996 and basically operated under the cross-that-bridge-when-we-come-to-it plan,” Hall said of the doping issue.

This year, Hall won his first four races and claimed five more victories, including a triumph in the 16th and final race -- after he had already secured his place on the team.

“For the past 12 years [this] has been because of the little boy who dreamed about it every night while staring at the pictures of boats on his walls at bedtime,” he said, “and because giving up was simply the opposite of what I had to do.”