It wasn’t just winning my medal, it was really a celebration of life and being able to share that. – Chris Klug
It is rare for a family dinner to pass without some discussion of February 2002.
“When my extended family sits down for dinner each month, every February and on these milestones, it is really significant,” said Chris Klug, who won a bronze medal in parallel giant slalom snowboarding in the Salt Lake Winter Games. “Part of me feels like it was yesterday and part of me feels like it was a lifetime ago … But it was, without a doubt two of the most fun weeks of my life. … It shaped me into who I am.”
Klug was part of the U.S. team’s massive snowboard success, but his story was also individually compelling because he’d had a liver transplant just 19 months before the 2002 Olympics. In fact, he qualified for the Feb. 15 finals the day before, which happens to be National Organ Donation Awareness Day.
From the blue sky to the massive crowd cheering him on, he said it was everything he’d dreamed about and more.
“For me, winning a medal and really fulfilling a lifelong dream after coming up short in 1998 in Nagano, and then to return home to compete in Salt Lake, on home turf, just six hours from home, and win a medal in front of over 100 friends and family, who’d made the trip from Aspen, going through a life-saving liver transplant, just everything. It was the highlight of my life.”
Klug said the experience shaped the rest of his life, including his accomplishments away from the slopes and in how he raises his two children, now 3 and 5 years old.
“For one, it gave me an amazing platform to speak from, to share my message of organ donation,” he said. “But also, I think it shaped me in so many other ways … It shaped my attitude, how I parent, I really believe in the power of visualization and goal-setting.”
Klug went from thinking he was going to die to waking up from a six-hour transplant surgery determined not only to return to the slopes, but to make the 2002 Olympic team.
He was snowboarding seven weeks after leaving the hospital. There was one thing that made him more nervous than chasing his Olympic dream on the world’s biggest stage, and that happened in the house he’d rented the day after he won the bronze medal.
He met the family whose 13-year-old son had donated the liver that changed his life.
“It was very powerful,” he said of meeting the parents of the teen, who died in a gunshot accident. ”It was an awesome experience, the whole two weeks. It wasn’t just winning my medal, it was really a celebration of life and being able to share that. Nagano was amazing, Vancouver was amazing, but six hours from my home in Aspen, Colorado, surrounded by so many friends, representing our country after 9/11 and carrying the flag that was found in the rubble (of the World Trade Center buildings), I can’t say it was one event. It was the two weeks, and it was so special.”