Of course the old man was with him. Right there in his head, rattling around in his helmet, helping him make those split-second decisions. Right there on the sled, riding shotgun, making the appropriate body-position adjustments in those icy turns.
Jack Shea was there on the boy’s joyous sled ride. That’s what Wednesday turned out to be, you know. A boy and his grandfather, feeling the cold wind rushing over their bodies and forgetting that only one of them would be on hand to clutch an Olympic gold medal.
If you don’t believe in this sort of thing–if you don’t believe in fate or karma or God’s fingerprints on human events–there’s no place here for you today, no place for you in this schmaltzy tale. The rest of us understand one thing: Fate knows a good story line.
A month after 91-year-old Jack Shea was killed in a car accident, Jim Shea Jr. slid headfirst into a beautiful dream. He won gold in the skeleton by 5/100ths of a second, which translates into a blink of an eye, which translates into forever in Olympic history.
There have been all sorts of technical improvement to skeleton equipment, but at its core, this is a sled going down a hill. A boy and his sled and his grandfather. Perfect.
Jim Shea Jr. put Jack’s funeral card inside his helmet for inspiration Wednesday, but he might as well have put another card in there that read, “Remember to breathe.” Some things are unnecessary.
A father and son embraced afterward.
“It would have been great if Grandpa saw this,” Jim Sr. said into his son’s ear.
“He did,” Jim Jr. said. “He was with me.”
Jack Shea won two gold medals in speedskating at the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics. His son, Jim Shea Sr., competed in the nordic combined at the 1964 Innsbruck Games. And here was the third generation, 33-year-old Jim Jr., taking part in an obscure sport on home soil and home snow.
But that’s too easy a story, so a leg injury that Shea thought was fully healed came back with a vengeance recently. The veins in his left calf are collapsing, reducing the blood flow to his toes. He pulled up his pants leg Wednesday night to show me the scar from the surgery that was supposed to repair the problem. That was the surgery that required 400 stitches.
Two weeks ago doctors suggested he have surgery again. Shea suggested they were out of their minds. He couldn’t walk more than a block without the pain overtaking him, but he could run far enough to get a good start on his sled.
A wet, heavy snow fell Wednesday morning, not the best conditions for fast sledding. But what is it that football coaches like to say? It’s the same muddy field for both teams? Yeah, that’s it. It was the same snowy course for all the competitors.
Shea led after the first run. On the second and final run, he was second going into the last turn, then caught the ice just right into the finish. By the time he was done, he had no feeling in his left foot.
That was OK. The rest of him was about to go numb anyway. He was pulled into the stands and carried along on a sea of people and emotion. There might be some emptiness to this for Jim Jr. because the pain is still fresh and the grieving process is in its infancy. But the best part of the story, the part that won’t get much play, is that Shea said the medal doesn’t mean everything to him.
If you’re going to swallow this whole story, you have to swallow that part of it too. Jack Shea was a believer in the Olympic experience, that all competitors are created equal, from the lowliest bobsledder to the loftiest medalist. He passed that belief on to his grandson.
Jim Jr. said being selected to take the Athletes’ Oath at the Opening Ceremony was no less an honor than winning a gold medal, just as competing in the Olympics was no less an honor than winning gold.
“It’s not about winning,” he said. “That gold medal doesn’t mean as much to me as high-fiving the athletes from every single country at the Opening Ceremony. That was cool.”
Wednesday was cool too. It’s said children and grandparents have the sweetest of bonds because they have a few things in common. They have time on their hands and love in their hearts.
So, of course, Jack Shea was there Wednesday. Going 80 m.p.h. in the straightaways and loving every 1/100th of a second of it.
