Craig Bowen 
It becomes the morning after Katie Uhlaender arrived in South Korea for the Winter Olympics, her fourth as a U.S. skeleton racer. She was worn-out, jet-lagged, disoriented from crossing the Pacific Ocean and the global dateline. Then she noticed a Facebook publish in damaged English from someone she didn’t understand in Russia: Better watch your back whilst coming home from training, you whore.
- Then every other: You make my heart puke.
- Then every other: Dumb complain from scum country.
- Then any other: Your medal is wooden.
Another from an unknown sender connected to a piece of writing on a Russian internet site. She wrote again that, sorry, she doesn’t examine Russian. They respond: Your place is fourth. Uhlaender’s coronary heart sank. She wasn’t dreaming, wasn’t in some woozy, hallucinatory country. She knew precisely what had occurred. The bronze medal — her bronze medal — turned into a long past.
“A big intestine punch,” she says.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport had overturned the International Olympic Committee’s November selection to difficult lifetime bans to 28 Russian athletes linked to the heinous Sochi doping scandal and erase their outcomes from the 2014 Winter Games. Uhlaender had completed fourth in Sochi in the back of Russia’s Elena Nikitina — via four-hundredths of a second after four runs — and turned into multiplied to 0.33 whilst Nikitina turned into banned.
For 70 days.
The CAS selection remaining week reinstated the Sochi outcomes, returning Nikitina to 0.33. The girl who overcame 12 surgical procedures, the loss of life of her father, the death of her fine friend, and her own near-death in pursuit of five-ring salvation become again in fourth via 4-hundredths of a 2d. The pebble crushed by the wheels of forms, the collateral damage from a turf struggle at the highest degrees of worldwide game, the harmless bystander gunned down inside the crossfire. The person who was given screwed even as the fits adjourn their meetings and head to their five-megastar resorts for the nighttime.
“When the IOC took one of this strong stance to ban Russia and droop the federation absolutely and strip the medals,” Uhlaender says, “it gave the wish to the athletes who have been preserving onto the spirit of recreation. And whilst CAS took that away, it did the opposite. “We’re conserving onto an Olympic spirit that feels love its death.” The remaining crime, of course, is that few humans encompass that spirit of perseverance and courage extra than Uhlaender. She has been racing inside the anonymous recreation of the skeleton, a one-person sled you experience headfirst down a snooze, icy, curving music, in view that 2003 and completed a promising sixth place in the 2006 Winter Games in Torino. Then she shattered her kneecap in a snowmobile twist of fate that required four surgical procedures.
Then her father, former Major League Baseball outfielder Ted Uhlaender, died of a heart assault at the same time as Katie became competing in a World Cup occasion. She wears his National League Championship Series ring from the 1972 Cincinnati Reds around her neck on a series, flipping at the back of her and tucking it into her match when she races so he’ll experience with her. There might be eight more surgeries on her left foot, her left ankle, her proper knee, her left hip, her stomach, her liver. In 2016, an auto-immune disorder nearly killed her. Last May, she hadn’t heard from a satisfactory friend and gold medal bobsledder Steve Holcomb. She went to his room on the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, N.Y., and observed his body. An autopsy located dozing capsules and alcohol in his system, a probable suicide.
Through all of it, she endured chasing her Olympic dream, even flirting with weightlifting and music biking in a bid to compete in the Summer Games as well. She becomes 11th in 2010 in Vancouver, then an agonizing fourth in Sochi with the aid of the kind of time it takes to install a vehicle’s airbag. Soon reports started to surface approximately a nefarious scheme with the aid of the Russians, pumping athletes with a powerful cocktail of detectable, banned substances, however, drilling a hollow inside the Olympic doping lab and swapping out grimy for clean urine earlier than the exams can be carried out.
The director of the lab, in the long run, defected to the USA and got here smooth approximately being dirty, presenting names, dates, materials, details. A whistleblower leaked a digital database from the Russian lab that corroborated his allegations. Two exhaustive investigative reviews from the World Anti-Doping Agency observed overwhelming evidence of kingdom-subsidized, systemic doping, as did separate IOC commissions. By November, Uhlaender had a “3” after her call within the Sochi outcomes, and there was the communication of reallocation medal ceremonies for affected athletes — at some point in the Pyeongchang Games, or maybe a private rite in their hometowns, or possibly with the IOC president on the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.
“I became confident by way of a couple of human beings that it became a performed deal, that it becomes real,” Uhlaender says. “People have been like, ‘Congratulations, you’re a bronze medalist.’ I became like: ‘Wait, am I?’ Because I didn’t have it. I sought to focus on the reality that it turned into a superb step in a larger sense for the complete Olympic motion. I can’t tell you the burden is lifted from all of our shoulders to recognize they weren’t going to get away with a country-extensive doping device. “I don’t think everybody saw this CAS choice coming.”
Your medal is wooden. Your region is fourth.
She has attempted to dam it out, attempted to focus on what, at age 33, might be her remaining Olympics, attempted to live within the moment, tried to appease her anger by way of analyzing scripture. It’s tough. “I’m a man or woman,” Uhlaender says. “I even have emotions.” This has been a hard season, ranked outdoor the arena top 10 and complicated by way of a pulled hamstring. This is only simply now recuperation. She hit the wall nine instances on her first practice run down the 1,376-meter Pyeongchang tune by her count.
But she’ll preserve telling herself what Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the current Olympics, stated a century in the past, that “the most critical factor within the Olympic Games isn’t triumphing but taking element; the crucial issue in lifestyles isn’t conquering but preventing nicely.” And she’ll strive no longer to think about the glistening bronze medal, the tangible representation of a lifetime of sacrifice and braveness that was hers until unexpectedly it wasn’t. Uhlaender by no means received the medal, in no way had it grasp from her neck, by no means felt its weight in her hands. But she’s visible it several times.
