August 1, 1996
Pride propels injured paddler to finish line
By CHRIS STEVENSON -- At The Olympics
LAKE LANIER, Ga. -- She paddled despite a badly injured neck, she said, because it was her sister's birthday. This is the Olympics and, after all, she wanted to be an Olympian.
"I wanted to go down the course for her," said kayak racer Heidi Lehrer of Antigua and Barbuda. "I wanted to be part of the Olympic experience."
And she was. She paddled yesterday in a women's K1 500-metre heat. A couple of things made her hard to miss.
A cervical collar is not standard issue in kayak racing.
Her stroke lacked the smoothness evident in the other lanes.
ONLY BOAT IN VIEW
She was also, for much of the race, the only boat in view.
In a 500-metre sprint, you can pretty much throw a blanket over the boats at the finish. The first boat across the line yesterday finished 69 seconds ahead of Lehrer. She was more than a minute behind the second-last.
The 30-year-old's boat lurching badly - her balance thrown off by the collar and the pains which shot through her back, arms and legs - she came close to capsizing a couple of times as she struggled down the course.
As she neared the finish line, the roar of the sparse crowd grew, the few people out to see the preliminary heats recognizing they were seeing something special.
You have heard of Heidi Lehrer, though the name probably doesn't ring a bell immediately. She was the athlete injured last week when a bus crashed into a concrete barrier near here.
Lehrer and her brother, Jake, who also paddles for Antigua and Barbuda, as does another brother, Pieter, were sitting in the school bus with their feet up, backs to the windows, facing each other.
There are a couple of security checkpoints on the road that winds toward the Lake Lanier regatta course. Police had placed concrete barriers that force vehicles to perform a sharp, slow S to get through.
"We were going 35 or 40 miles an hour," said Lehrer. "And the lady driving the bus didn't see the barricade. We swerved left and it felt like we were going to turn over. It was doing things buses don't normally do.
"The sounds I remember most were seconds before we smashed into the barrier, I heard screams."
When Lehrer climbed out of the bus, her back hurt. She was taken to hospital, examined and released.
That night, she said she developed intense headaches, tingling in her arms and legs and numbness in her neck.
Days passed and her condition worsened. They had done a lumbar x-ray when she had been examined at the hospital, but not one of her neck.
Tuesday night, the night before her heat, she went for another examination and an x-ray revealed a piece of bone had been completely chipped from her seventh cervical vertebra.
"There's a piece of bone swimming around my body somewhere," she said. "It's painful and extremely scary."
One doctor advised her not to paddle yesterday, that she could risk permanent damage.
But she raced for her sister, her family and herself.
"It was a special event for everyone," she said. "They had supported us."
TIPPING CONCERNS
"I was concerned about tipping over," she said. "But I'm happy to see this through. I was looking ahead at everyone and I said, `they're miles ahead of me.' It was like I had a really good seat at the race.
"It was important for me to see it through to the end. I gave it my best," she said. "I couldn't give it my all, but I gave it my best."
But she could not enjoy it yesterday.
Lehrer stood up slowly, the neck brace in her hand.
She had come to the Olympics hoping only to register a personal best finish.
Yesterday, her personal best was just finishing.
