GRANT ROBERTSON - Globe and Mail
Two years after a drug test destroyed his reputation, champion sprinter Earle Connor is on the brink of recapturing his former glory as the world's fastest man on one leg. But this time, GRANT ROBERTSON reports, he's chasing more than fame and fortune
CALGARY
-- On a summer day in 2004, a young man steered his black Ford Explorer down the narrow alley behind his home in downtown Calgary. As he coasted to a stop, a truck suddenly pulled up alongside.
"Are you Earle Connor?" the driver asked. "Who are you?" "I'm here to do a test." Mr. Connor felt sick.
Perhaps you have never heard of him, but at that moment, Earle Connor was the world's fastest man on one leg. His victories weren't just impressive. Some were downright cruel, with his opponents only halfway down the track when he crossed the finish line.
He was so good that some people thought that he might become a household name -- and make disabled sport famous in the process. The Athens Olympics had just started, with the Paralympics about to follow, and Mr. Connor, who is missing his left leg from the knee down, was favoured to win two gold medals and carry the Maple Leaf.
"Earle was a bit of a golden boy for us," recalls Patrick Jarvis, then head of the Canadian Paralympic Committee. "He made people look differently at the sport."
The first disabled athlete to join national track coach Les Gramantik's training program in Calgary, he travelled in an elite circle, golfing with Tiger Woods, hanging out with Sean Connery and playing tennis with Boris Becker. Nike had come calling with a sponsorship deal.
In fact, he so dominated disabled sport that he had begun to outgrow it. In recent years, he had managed to sprint into the realm of able-bodied athletes, nearing a mark few thought possible: 100 metres in less than 12 seconds, on one leg and a titanium prosthetic engineered for speed. At that pace, he could have competed in the 2000 Olympics and not finished last; in 1896, the first year the modern Games were held, he could have won gold.
Clearly, he was on the brink of perhaps the biggest achievement of his life. But as the man in the truck followed him inside, everything began to fall apart.
The next morning, he called Mr. Gramantik, who was already in Athens. "I think I just failed a drug test," he said. In truth, he knew perfectly well he had failed. His career was ruined. But one question loomed: Why would someone who could win so handily be caught cheating?
Two years later, with the good life just a memory, Earle Connor is sitting in a Starbucks in Calgary, ignoring patrons who can't help but stare at the robotic-looking prosthetic that pokes out from his knee-length shorts.
It is August, 2006, and he is attempting a comeback. Despite having spent two years in exile and giving up most of his training -- instead of the gym, he went to work at 7 a.m. -- he believes that he can recapture his past glory, that he hasn't ruined his life. "I have to do this," he says. "I have to know if I can do this."
He is looking ahead. In a few days, his two-year suspension from Canadian athletics will officially end. Then he will board a plane for Germany and compete for the first time. And he has vowed that, if he doesn't cross the line first, he will never race again.
But while he was banned from competition, he was also banned from having a coach, and so has been training on his own. "I don't feel fast," he says over the coffee-shop din. "Not like I was."
On a rainy afternoon one week later, he lowers himself into the starting blocks at a sparsely populated stadium in Leverkusen, on the Rhine just north of Cologne. He knows the track well. It was here, in 2003, that he set three world records in one day -- the last after he'd broken his prosthetic leg.
When the limb suddenly buckled near the end of a 400-metre sprint, he was so far in front that he was still able to get back on his feet and limp across the finish line first. But as he begins to warm up, his eyes fill with tears. His return is more emotional than he had expected. He tries to stay focused. He needs to win, which means he needs to beat Wojtek Czyz.
In the two years he has been away, Mr. Czyz -- the pride of Germany -- has assumed the throne as the world's top amputee sprinter. He took gold in Athens, and now holds one of Mr. Connor's former records. He also has the Nike contract. Kneeling in Lane 3, Mr. Connor listens intently for the sound of the starter's pistol. But something is wrong. Lane 5 is empty. Where is Wojtek Czyz?
To understand Earle Connor's story, it helps to go back to the beginning, when he had two legs, if only for a little while. He was born on July 30, 1976, in Castlegar, B.C., to first-time parents Dave and Diane Connor.
She was a teacher, and he was a disc jockey, spinning vinyl for a local AM radio station. However, when the baby arrived, there were complications: His left leg had somehow developed without a fibula, the smaller of the two lower bones used for bearing weight.
It was a rare condition with no known cause. Only two other babies were born without fibulas in North America that year, one in Mexico, one in the United States. Curiously, they were also on the West Coast.
All three families had the same choice to make: Insert a steel rod into the leg, which might not work and would require surgery every six to eight months as the children grew, as well as confine them to a wheelchair for much of their youth. Or the leg could be amputated.
"Like any parent, you have to look at all the options. And of course you always think in the back of your mind that something could be done," Dave Connor now says. "We went down to see doctors in the U.S. and the answer was no, there was no reconstructive surgery they could do."
After three months of agony and consultation, the Connors made their choice. In the fall of 1976, Earle was bundled up and taken to B.C. Children's Hospital in Vancouver, where the left leg was severed through the knee.
"The doctors said the easiest way to get us to adjust as parents was to change the bandages ourselves," Mrs. Connor says. "But changing the bandages was the most traumatic. Here is a little baby, and all of a sudden there's no limb where there was one before."
When Earle was still quite young, the Connors moved to Saskatchewan, where his mother had been hired to teach on a native reserve. The money was good and the family had relatives near Saskatoon, so the relocation made sense.
Small-town life on the Prairies had a profound impact on young Earle. He was the only kid with a rubber limb, and the only one on the reserve with blond hair -- which, even more than the leg, made him feel like an outsider. His mother remembers the Halloween that he took her mascara and tried to colour his hair black. "He was worried he wouldn't get any candy."
Even then, he could run, and he soon realized that sports was currency he could use to buy acceptance and respect. But in rural Saskatchewan, there were few disabled sports. So Earle learned to play with the rest of the kids, or sit on the sidelines. It made him more focused than your average nine-year-old.
"I've never, ever said this to Earle," Diane Connor says on the phone from Moose Jaw. "But I don't necessarily know if Earle would have concentrated as much on sports if he had been able-bodied. Who knows if he would have had the same determination?"
He tried minor hockey, and when skating proved cumbersome, he strapped on the goalie pads. His cousin Chuck Tersky played against him in a neighbouring town and remembers the dressing-room chatter when the two teams met.
"It was a lot of 'Guess who we're playing? The team with the goalie that has one leg. We're gonna kill him,' " Mr. Tersky says. "Then, maybe after the game, they'd be talking about how he stopped them on a breakaway. He faced a lot of prejudices."
Mr. Connor's desire to compete against able-bodied kids drove him away from disabled sports. When the family moved near Saskatoon and the opportunity to join Paralympics came up, he wanted nothing to do with it.
Stan Holcomb, a prosthetist in Saskatoon and himself a disabled athlete, remembers trying to persuade the boy to take part, but he always refused. Mr. Holcomb had competed in the 1976 Paralympics for Canada and raced against the legendary Terry Fox at meets in which the best they could hope for in the 100-metre sprint was a 20-second performance, because the prosthetics made back then were so clunky.
Recognizing that young Earle showed promise, Mr. Holcomb handed him a brochure whenever he came to have his limb adjusted. Finally, at 14, he agreed to give it a try, and the family drove to Calgary for a national disabled meet. But when the boy beat the adults to win gold in the long jump, he was told he was too young to compete at the real Paralympics.
"I was like, 'Okay, that's it, then. I'm done,' " Mr. Connor now recalls. " 'I'm not doing it.' " It wasn't until years later, after he had graduated from high school, that he finally changed his mind.
One afternoon in 1996, he was lounging on the couch watching TV and happened upon the 100-metre final at the Atlanta Paralympics. He watched unimpressed as Swiss sprinter Lukas Christen took gold with a world-record time of 13.54 seconds.
"I'm faster than those guys," he remembers thinking. "And they're on TV." It was no idle boast. Fast-forward a few years, and Earle Connor is tearing the sport apart.
When Lukas Christen set that record, skeptics figured that no amputee sprinter would ever break the 13-second barrier. Technology had taken the sport a long way -- prosthetics were now marvels of modern engineering -- but there were certain physical limitations that simply could not be overcome.
For example, losing a leg, even if just from the knee down, means that key muscles don't function as they should. "There's a lot of things, biomechanically, that are different," says Mr. Gramantik, the track coach who had to rewrite his training program when he agreed to work with Mr. Connor. Whenever an amputee runner strides, "it's a huge challenge to bring that one leg forward," he says.
In 1998, two years after strapping on a real running leg for the first time, Mr. Connor broke the Christen record, clocking a time of 13.18 as a relative unknown. After seeing him race, veteran amputee sprinter Rob Snoek pulled some strings to help him enter a race for cash in San Diego. "I called them up and said, 'You've got to let this guy in.' "
Mr. Connor walked away with $25,000 (U.S.) -- most of the money that was up for grabs. Over the next few years, his times fell like a thermometer on a cold day: 13.38, 12.81, 12.61 and 12.36. "The stories were apocryphal," Mr. Jarvis says of the Paralympic Committee. "Here's this guy who just shows up one day and says, 'I want to be a sprinter.' "
Soon, just running fast wasn't enough. Winning became paramount. At the 2000 Paralympics in Sydney, he took gold in the 100-metre final, but finished second in the 200 metres when a misstep on the first corner cost him a few seconds.
He was livid, and the next day had "Silver Hurts" tattooed on his right foot. A day after that, he took the medal to a beach outside Sydney and hurled it into the ocean.
At the coffee shop in Calgary, as he tells this story for the first time to someone outside his immediate circle, Mr. Connor speaks softly but insists he has no misgivings. "I said, 'This isn't going to happen again. I'm not taking the silver home with me.' "
The frustration also made him decide to drop the 200 event and focus on 100 metres. Winning became so automatic that it soon was clear he needed a new challenge. "Nobody was even close to him," Mr. Gramantik says. "He could toy with the opposition, he was just that much better. So we needed to set our own objectives."
They decided upon a new barrier: under 12 seconds. It was a delicious number -- faster than Jean Randriamamitiana, an Olympian from Madagascar who clocked a leisurely 12.5 seconds, on two legs, at the Sydney Games, and within reach of elite women sprinters. If he could break 12 seconds and move beyond disabled sprinting, "the controversy alone would raise the sport to another level," Mr. Jarvis says.
Looking back, Mr. Connor acknowledges that he became obsessed with the target. "That's all I wanted. I knew I was going to win gold medals. I knew I was going to set world records in Athens, but I wanted 11.99."
It began to look possible. In 2003, he broke his own world record with a time of 12.14. Then, in early 2004, Mr. Gramantik took his squad to Texas to train against U.S. college sprinters. On a desert night at the University of Texas at El Paso, Mr. Connor lined up against seven young women. He beat six of them, feeling that he could have gone faster, and then his time flickered across the digital scoreboard: 12.01. The numbers were seared into his memory -- his best time ever.
Having come so close to his goal, he says, "I was mad. It pushed me even more. I'd train constantly. I'd have to be in bed at 9 o'clock. I'd have to get 12 hours of sleep. I'd have to do this, I'd have to do that."
But something was troubling him. In early 2001, he complained to his doctor about swelling in one of his testicles. Fearing cancer down the road, the doctor ordered it removed. The surgery went fine, but Mr. Connor's testosterone level plummeted.
Most men don't notice a minor fluctuation, but when testosterone drops sharply, the impact is felt throughout the body. Lethargy, loss of strength, a depleted immune system and an inability to perform in bed are all possible consequences.
"If you read through that list, you're reading the story of an 80-year-old man," says Mike Nolan, a Canadian decathlete who battled low testosterone throughout his career. "Not only is it embarrassing, but if you're trying to be an elite athlete, you pretty much feel like shooting yourself in the head."
He sought medical clearance to take testosterone supplements, and was ridiculed in athletic circles. Some accused him of lacking machismo. Others noted that testosterone is a favourite of cheaters. It helps the body build muscle and can allow athletes to recover more rapidly after training.
Having seen what Mr. Nolan went through physically, Mr. Connor began wearing a prescription testosterone patch to boost his hormone levels. And knowing what he had gone through emotionally, he told few people about his surgery and no one about the patch. Women and athletes had no business knowing, he figured.
At that point, he also made a cataclysmic error in judgment: Obsessed with his training and fixated on breaking through 12 seconds, he neglected to seek permission from Canadian athletic authorities that would allow him to use the patch legally.
When Mr. Gramantik asked about his testosterone levels after the surgery, he said the papers were at home and he planned to fill them out. "He would never go too deep," the coach recalls. "But he was under medical supervision, so I didn't get too much into it. He wasn't totally willing to explain all the details of his health life."
Mr. Connor had figured out that, once he took off the patch, the synthetic testosterone could be flushed from his body in a matter of days. For three years, he used this system, halting the treatment several weeks before a meet. He never failed a drug test.
But in June, 2004, the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES), which administers Canada's anti-doping policies, brought in a new system for testing athletes. It didn't want any embarrassments at the Olympics. Random exams were being stepped up. A list of 3,000 amateur athletes was compiled, and officials were sent out to collect urine samples from hundreds of them.
One of those agents showed up at Mr. Connor's home and waited. As soon as the man identified himself, he knew his life as a sprinter was over. Athens was still weeks way and stuck to his backside, with two days left on the prescription, was a testosterone patch he shouldn't be wearing. "Testing outside of competition is important for us," says Paul Melia, president of the CCES. "We often say that it's only the stupid athlete that gets caught in competition."
The testosterone patch is known to be a favourite of athletes searching for an edge because the hormone spike it delivers dissipates so soon after the square is discarded. "It's more difficult to detect . . ." says Christiane Ayotte, director of the Montreal lab that tests for the World Anti-Doping Agency. "It's causing us a major problem."
To make matters even worse, Mr. Connor's urine sample also turned up signs of nandrolone. This was especially troubling. Surgery or not, if testosterone made an appeal to Canadian doping authorities difficult, the evidence of a second performance-enhancing substance made it nearly impossible.
Nandrolone is a curious steroid. It has been known to arrive in the body through tainted supplements taken by tennis players. It's also one of the easiest steroids to detect, since evidence of its use lingers for weeks. It can be masked to some degree, but athletes who use it are inviting a positive doping test.
Mr. Connor remains steadfast that he has no idea how nandrolone got into his system. The CCES finds this hard to believe, but doesn't press the point, since he accepted the two-year suspension for the testosterone patch and served the penalty without raising a fuss.
"I have asked him," his father says, "and he has said he doesn't know. So I take his word and leave it at that. The bottom line is, whatever goes into a person's body is their own responsibility. If he did try to cheat, he got caught. If he didn't, and something was in there, it happened. I just told him that I was behind him."
Cheating isn't unknown in the Paralympics. For example, wheelchair athletes have been known to use a tactic called "pinning," in which they poke needles into unfeeling limbs to produce adrenaline before a competition. "A lot of times, when people talk about 'cutting corners' in disabled sports," Mr. Connor says, "they're talking about pinning."
But breaking the rules is not widely talked about, so when it become public, the sport is shaken even more than mainstream athletics.
Everybody was talking about Mr. Connor. Word of the suspension sparked more media coverage than he had ever received as an athlete. He made the CBC National. His cousin Chuck Tersky was travelling in Europe on his way to Athens at the time, and he remembers watching Mr. Connor's name flash across a TV set in Holland.
Patrick Jarvis remembers that he was walking through a park in New Brunswick when his cellphone rang. He stopped in his tracks the moment he heard a colleague say: "We've had an incident with testing, but you're not going to believe who it is."
It was a devastating blow. "I know everybody likes to talk about the feel-good stuff in our sport," Mr. Jarvis explains. "But for us, when it comes to our legitimacy, results matter. And Earle was breaking those misconceptions."
The man he had seen as the next great ambassador for the disabled sport was now its biggest pariah.
This spring, Mr. Connor decided he had had enough despair. He had lost friends and his sponsors, except for Ossur, a prosthetic manufacturer who fixes his leg. Nike, which had signed him just a month before the doping test, exercised a clause to cancel the deal.
But a month after his suspension he had been introduced to Stephanie Sterne, who knew about him only from a newspaper article about the day he set the three world records that had been posted at the Calgary gym where she worked.
On their first date, they went to a movie. But the second one was unusual, to say the least. Over dinner, he told her everything -- the surgery, the suspension and the life he no longer lived.
As time went by, she realized that he was not ready to move on. "He just used to dwell on it all the time." Sometimes she would console him, and sometimes "I would just say, 'It's over. Enough is enough.' "
By then, the world of disabled sprinting had crowned a new king. Wojtek Czyz was four years younger, had a website, six figures' worth of endorsements and one of Mr. Connor's records. None of this sat well with his predecessor, whose racing leg sat buried in the back of a closet. He decided it was time to rescue it from purgatory.
Mounting an assault on Mr. Czyz would not be easy. The rules of his suspension prevented Mr. Connor from training with a coach and from running alongside other top-ranked athletes -- the key ingredient, he says, that had brought him to the cusp of breaking the 12-second barrier.
In April, when the snow melted in Calgary, he took a tape measure to a lonely schoolyard near his house and began pacing off 100 metres. He didn't own starting blocks -- he had never had to buy them -- so he just crouched on the grass, day after day.
Every so often, softball players from a nearby diamond would wander over and strike up a conversation. "They would get a few beers into them and say, 'What's that thing on your leg?' " He always obliged those who stopped to talk, but he never told them who he was. He wanted solitude.
To simulate the sound of a starter's pistol, he had Stephanie smack two small blocks of wood together. Every night before going to sleep, they would do 10 practice starts, with him crouching on the bedroom floor.
He set only one rule while training: no clock. The risk was too high. Stop the watch too quickly and his times would be spectacular, wait a fraction too long and it would crush his confidence. As a result, when he boarded the plane for Germany, he had no idea what he was capable of running.
Leverkusen was exactly as he remembered it. John McFall, the British amputee who had been there the day he set all those world records, was in Lane 2. And over on the sidelines was the hometown favourite: Mr. Czyz.
But five minutes before the race, the champ -- primed and ready to go -- suddenly gathered his things and left. He and his coach had been watching intently as Mr. Connor warmed up, doing a sprinter's typical mock starts: crouching in the blocks, imagining the sound of the gun and charging forward for 15 or 20 metres.
Without a coach to calm his nerves, however, the comeback kid was tense and emotional, trying too hard and running too fast. Had Mr. Gramantik been there, he would have spotted the problem immediately and told him to save it for the race. Sitting in a Calgary pub months later, Mr. Connor admits that "I was showing off, trying to show everybody I was still fast."
But would that alone be enough to make the German bolt? Mr. Czyz did not respond to requests for an interview, but Mr. Gramantik says that sprinting is much like boxing. If the champ doesn't get in the ring, he can't be dethroned. Had Mr. Czyz somehow lost to Mr. Connor in Leverkusen, he risked losing his sponsorships as well. There aren't many dollars to go around in amputee sprinting, so it's usually winner take all.
"These guys, more so than anybody else, live and die by their endorsements," Mr. Gramantik explains. "And sometimes the smartest thing to do is not race, if you don't think that you can win."
Also, the world championships were just around the corner, and everybody knew that Mr. Connor wouldn't be there because his suspension had kept him off Canada's roster. So this race wasn't crucial.
When the gun went off, sounding remarkably like two blocks of wood being smacked together, Mr. Connor leaped forward and, at the 10-metre mark, couldn't stop himself from taking a slight glance to either side.
Mr. McFall was slightly behind. By 60 metres, he could no longer be seen or heard -- which was important, since prosthetics make a thundering racket on the track. At 95 metres, Ms. Sterne nearly jumped from the bleachers as Mr. Connor crossed the finish line in 12.67 seconds -- a time he later dismissed as "pedestrian" even though he was well out in front.
Track officials quickly approached, and said: "Mr. Connor, please come with us." He was led to a small room where Ms. Sterne, as his witness, watched him suck back water and then urinate into a cup.
The tests would came back clean -- as did a second random test back in Calgary three months later. Mr. Connor says he has sworn off the testosterone patch until he and Stephanie decide to have children, which he hopes will be after the 2008 Paralympics in China. He wants another chance to run for his country -- for redemption. And maybe respect.
A few weeks after Leverkusen, Mr. Connor is back in Calgary, living in anonymity. Late one night, he gets out of bed and walks to his computer. There, in the glow of the screen, he waits for the results from the world championships in Holland to be posted.
When they finally appear, Wojtek Czyz has won. But the time is a mere 12.79. Mr. Connor picks up the phone and starts leaving messages for people he knows. "I feel great," he says. "I'm back. I'm ready for Beijing."
Grant Robertson is the media writer with the Globe and Mail's Report on Business. |
