Can BMX rider recover from ‘worst injury’ of Tokyo Olympics?
HENDERSON, Nevada — Next to the upstairs room where Connor Fields displays the choicest mementos of his BMX racing triumphs — framed jerseys, championship trophies, the Olympic gold medal from 2016 — is a laundry room. It holds a different kind of souvenir, the flip side of success.
On a hanger is a shredded, stained United States racing jersey. It is torn across the shoulders and the back from a wreck that Fields does not remember. It is sliced open in the front, the blunt work of paramedics trying to save his life.
On another hanger are his Team USA racing pants, chewed open at the knees.
Down in the garage, the walls papered with so many giant novelty winners’ checks that they now get put on the ceiling, is a plain brown box. In the box is the red, white and blue helmet that Fields wore when he crashed, headfirst, in the kind of life-altering wreck that every racer fears.
The helmet saved his life, Fields is certain. It is intact, but grated on the chin and the forehead, and a piece is missing.
“I’d rather tear every ligament in my body before I had a gnarly concussion,” Fields said. “This was my nightmare.”
The nightmare is a traumatic brain injury. Dr. Jonathan Finnoff, the chief medical officer for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, attended to Fields in Tokyo and shepherded him through his early care.
“It was the worst injury the Olympics had,” Finnoff said. “Not just Team USA. It was the worst injury of the Tokyo Summer Games.”
Fields, 29, is recovering quietly at home, with his fiancée, Laura Gruninger, and their two dogs, and the outward signs are positive. He is up and about, able to drive, to talk, even to make public appearances. He can fool people into thinking he’s back to normal. He is not. He knows it.
The forgotten or confused words. The fatigue. The mood swings. The annoyance of background noises. The persistent need for naps. The occasional imperative for quiet and dark.
The lingering question, unanswerable and unnerving, is whether his brain will ever get back to what it used to be.
“The way I feel today is not how I want to feel for the rest of my life,” he said.
Most progress after a brain injury comes in the first three months, doctors said. And no one knows how to quantify any of it with precision. Is Fields at 50%? 80%? Will he ever know that he’s fully healed?
For now, he is not cleared to do anything remotely risky, even get on a bike to ride around the neighborhood. The season ticket he bought long ago to snowboard this winter is likely to go unused.
“We’re talking about the rest of my life here,” Fields said. “I can wait a few months, if it means not hurting my brain anymore.”
‘There’s zero we can do’
Fields’s view of the crash is only through replay video. The blank spot in his memory extends from several hours before the wreck until about five days after it.
He does not remember the first two semifinal runs on July 30, where he finished third, then first. He remembers nothing of the third run, where he was injured. But scattered memories are resurfacing. A clip of the rain delay that morning, of wiping down his tires with a towel, popped into his head recently, like a discovered Zapruder film.
Last weekend, Fields sat at his kitchen table and watched the televised version of the race on a laptop.
“At this point we’re pretty even, me and the two Frenchmen,” Fields said, pausing the video after the race’s first couple of seconds.
The event took place at Ariake Urban Sports Park, on a serpentine track of three banked corners and four straightaways filled with rolls and jumps. Top racers got to the finish line, unscathed, in about 40 seconds.
BMX racing can be both dazzling and dangerous. Like driving in NASCAR, speed and tight cornering raise the stakes, but other racers are the wild cards. BMXers dip and weave like birds in a flock. One rider out of sync can cause chaos.
Because Fields won the second run, he had his choice of lanes for the third. He took Lane 1, the inside track to the first big turn.
Romain Mahieu, a 26-year-old racer with a reputation for not being aggressive enough, was in Lane 8, on the opposite end of the starting gate.
The two quickly burst to the front. They launched off a jump, one with a big lip and a short landing area that had vexed riders in practices and races.
Fields had a slight lead but flew a bit long — a mistake. Mahieu, on the outside, landed perfectly on the downslope and got a boost in speed. He instinctively saw an opportunity and angled left, toward the inside, just as the riders hit another jump.
“We’re both in the air right now, and there’s zero we can do,” Fields said, pointing at the screen and playing one frame at a time. “He lands right in front of me and — bang — hits my tire, and his hip hits my hand. Just looking at how my bike’s positioned, I’m going down. There’s nothing I can do.”
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: