Free Blood by Lawrence Hill

agree to keep paying taxes to keep you in Buckingham Palace, and in our collective imagination, your corpuscles are indeed of an elevated, unusual, and vaunted quality. If somebody makes your blood boil, you have become so upset that you have temporarily lost your humanity and become another sort of animal entirely, whose blood is allowed to change temperatures radically. If somebody says of you that “blood will out,” you know it is an insult, to the effect that your family characteristics cannot be concealed. In a sonnet called “Blood,” first published in the Nation in 1928, the American poet Robert Frost wrote: “Oh, blood will out. It cannot be contained.”
    Blood, indeed, filters into every aspect of our language and defines who we are: in our emotional states, in our social ranking, in our state of innocence or moral guilt, and most important of all, in our relationships to each other.
    Blood is truly the stuff of life: a bold and enduring determinant of identity, race, gender, culture, citizenship, belonging, privilege, deprivation, athletic superiority, and nationhood. It is so vital to our sense of ourselves, our abilities, and our possibilities for survival that we have invested money, time, and energy in learning how to manipulate its very composition.

TWO
    WE WANT IT SAFE AND WE WANT IT CLEAN:
BLOOD, TRUTH, AND HONOUR
    I FELT A WAVE OF EMPATHY when I watched Paula Findlay finish last in her triathlon at the 2012 London Olympics. The Canadian crossed the line crying and in obvious discomfort. Findlay is an elite athlete. Prior to the Olympics, she had won numerous international triathlons, been ranked number one in the world, and considered a medal favourite in London. General Mills, the cereal company, was using her image on boxes of Reese’s Puffs. However, on an August day in London’s Hyde Park, Findlay, twenty-three at the time, was the last of fifty-five female competitors to cross the line after a 1.5-kilometre swim, a 43-kilometre bike ride, and a 10-kilometre run. Posting a post-race description on her blog, Findlay mentioned that her swim went poorly and her bike ride even worse, but that she felt wobbly and powerless after running the first of four 2.5-kilometre laps. “I pulled off to our team doctor, crying that there was no way I could physically finish three more. He encouraged me to pull myself together and finish if I could, I’d be more satisfied with crossing the line than not. So I ran three of the most painful, embarrassing laps ever, being lapped by the race that I was supposed to be a contender in, humiliated and screaming at myself inside.”
    Findlay had recently come off a hip injury, but another problem contributed to her poor showing at the Olympics. In a blog post five weeks after the race, Findlay wrote: “I had some blood work done about a week after I arrived just to make sure that everything was normal. I was feeling tired but assumed this was just an effect from training hard again. Unfortunately the numbers came back with some of the lowest iron levels that the doctors had ever seen. It is a simple but quite serious problem that likely had a huge impact on my race in London, and got overlooked because of the focus on healing my injury.”
    At the time that this book was going to press, Findlay appeared to be not just healthy and fit but a threat to her competitors again. In March 2013, she won one triathlon in Florida and another in Austria. Competitive sport is unforgiving. Bringing a serious iron deficiency to the starting line of the world’s most competitive triathlon is akin to missing an organ or a limb. You need the iron to produce the blood cells to carry the oxygen to keep you in the race. Minus iron, you will finish in the position that someone, from some country, must occupy: dead last. Findlay competed with honour at the 2012 London Olympics. But she would have had more success had her blood been in order.
    Watching the Olympics, I wanted to reach