Free Blood by Lawrence Hill Page A

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 through the TV screen and give Paula Findlay a hug. I thought her courageous to complete the race. I believe that it takes as much courage to suffer and finish last as it does to vanquish all your competitors and run away with the gold medal. I am not an elite athlete and have never been one, but I could certainly identify with finishing last in a running race — something that I had experienced many times as a teenage middle-distance runner.
    I began to dream, at the age of eleven, of becoming a champion runner. By the time I joined a track club at the age of twelve, I had a plan in place. The year was 1969. One year earlier, American 200-metre sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos had raised their fists to make the black power salute as they stood on the podium with their gold and bronze medals at the Mexico City Olympics. They were expelled from the Games and vilified back in the United States, but I loved them for their daring chutzpah and for their fearlessness about expressing black pride. I had no thoughts about imitating their protests, but certainly wanted to achieve the same degree of success and fame. The blueprint was clear. By the 1984 Olympics, by which time I would be twenty-seven, I expected to win the gold medal in the Olympic 5,000-metre race. I would hang behind the race leaders for the first 3,000 metres, surging to break their will (and empty their lungs) until the 4,500-metre mark. At which point I would accelerate again, steadily pulling away from my last rival over the final 150 metres. I would cross the finish line 20 metres ahead of the next runner.
    This grandiose dream was all to please my father, although I didn’t understand it at the time. A hard-working, domineering, charismatic, brook-no-dissent-at-home African-American immigrant to Canada, my father had little interest in relaxation, except when it came to turning on the “boob tube,” as he called it, to watch westerns and sports. While he whooped and hollered at the athletes on the TV screen, I studied him. Dad had three sporting passions, all left over from the near-religious worship of sport that had marked his own upbringing in the United States: boxing, football, and track and field. In our household, two athletes in particular became my father’s obsessions: the heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, also known as the Brown Bomber, and the track and field star Jesse Owens. Both sprang into international prominence as a rebuttal to the notion of Aryan superiority in Nazi Germany, Louis by trouncing the boxer Max Schmeling in 1938, and Owens by winning four track and field gold medals in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.
    I decided that the most effective way to