Champions are Raised, Not Born & No End In Sight

Champions Are Raised, Not Born: How My Parents Made Me a Success by Summer Sanders with Melinda Marshall

and
No End in Sight: My Life as a Blind Iditarod Racer by Rachael Scdoris and Rick Steber

These were sort of random choices, I know, but I read them one after the other on purpose. I picked up Summer Sanders's book at Book Corner's big outside sale last summer. I'd wanted to read it because I used to be/am a swimmer, and I'm always interested in reading books about swimming (my favorite is Lynne Cox's Swimming to Antarctica, but I also love Swimming the Channel by Sally Friedman and One Hell of a Life by Dawn Fraser and a couple of others that are in storage with maddeningly unrememberable titles). Anyway, Summer Sanders chose to write her Olympic memoir as a tribute to her parents because she's so often approached by sports parents and asked for advice.

Summer's parents divorced when she was seven and her brother was nine. From then on, they lived for six months a year at one parent's house and then moved to the other parent's house for the next six months. Summer doesn't lie about how difficult this was, but she praises both of her parents for making it work. Summer and her brother got to know each of their parents as individuals, and their parenting styles combined to support Summer and help her become successful at whatever she chose to do. She swam from the age of four because her dad had a pool and because swimming was fun, not because her parents wanted her to be a swimmer. As she got older, it became more and more fun for her because her parents, as she constantly says, "matched their level of commitment to hers" and allowed her to succeed and fail on her own terms. As a former sports kid reading this book, I wished that my parents could have read it when I was younger. They weren't bad sports parents, by any means, but I think they might have learned a few things from Summer's parents' example.

The book isn't great. It's often repetitive, and kind of preachy, especially because it's written by someone who had the experience of being a child, but not having children of her own yet. But it's fun to read about what a great time Summer and her family had, and how she managed to reach the top of her sport not by depriving herself but by challenging herself for the hell of it. One interesting thing is that Summer was fine and happy when she trained and swam in relative obscurity, but had a difficult time dealing with her success after the media got its claws into her. More interesting is the fact that she became a member of the media eventually, working the sidelines at WNBA games, commentating during the Olympics, and hosting a kids' game show. She discusses how difficult her transition was between Summer Sanders, swimmer; and Summer Sanders, Olympic Gold Medalist. Overall, this book seemed honest and well-intentioned; Summer wrote it as a love letter and a thank-you note to her parents. The writing is good enough to let the reader feel like she knows the major players -- the parents and the coaches -- and not just Summer, as the point-of-view person.

I read No End in Sight next because I had become interested in the sports parent thing and wondered how it affected Rachael Scdoris, a 21-year-old sled dog racer. I had bought the book a couple of weeks ago because it was in amazing, pristine used condition and because the cover drew me in. I found this book incredibly interesting, but didn't come away with a lot of answers about what really was going on in Rachael's head.

She was born with congenital achromatopsia, which means that she has a shortage of rods and cones in her retinas. This means that she's legally blind even in a light-controlled clinical setting, but her eyesight deteriorates in bright sunlight. Her childhood dream was to race in the Iditarod.

This book brings up the necessity of a good co-writer. I didn't notice the lack of writing skills so much in Summer Sanders's book -- Summer's "voice" seemed a natural, enthusiastic one, and although I wish her book had been organized a little better, it seemed like Summer was the one telling her own story. I didn't always feel that way with No End in Sight. Rick Steber is "a close family friend", an "engaging Western personality" (according to the author's note) and former sled dog racer. Rachael might just have been a strange teenager with a quirky set of expressions and perceptions. It's probable, given that she lived "off the grid" with her sled-dog racer father in her formative years. But I think at least some of it is bad writing. You shouldn't notice the writing in a book like this, and I was usually aware of it. Rachael's parents, like Summer's, are divorced, but Rachael's mother is strangely absent from much of the book. I never knew much of anything about her, even though Rachael lived with her during the week when she was in grade school. The father is more present, but I still didn't feel like I knew much about him.

Reading this book, I so often wondered what the real story was. I could never get a handle on whether her father pushed her to succeed in this sport -- it seems like most of it was Rachael's own initiative and interest. But reading between the lines it also seems that the father was criticized by outsiders for his involvement. Rachael also talks about criticism of her quest to run the Iditarod on Iditarod chat boards, which I haven't tracked down yet. She also said she was openly criticized in Anchorage newspapers. I waited until after I had finished the book to do an internet search, and when I did I was disappointed to find mostly glossy sponsor websites (gorachaelgo.com) and one strange "open love letter" (ohrachaeloh.com). The controversy revolved around the fact that Rachael needs a "visual interpreter" to run sled dog races. This person tells her when a sharp curve is coming up, for example, but is not allowed to help her care for her dogs or her sled or herself. There was much oppositon to the change in rules that would be necessary to allow this, but Rachael, armed with the Americans with Disabilities Act, won her chance to race in the end.

It's an amazing story, no matter how you spin it. But the book... the book is ultimately disappointing. SPOILER ALERT:

The racing passages are amazing -- I felt like I was there with Rachael during the races, and I felt like I learned a lot about a sport I knew basically nothing about before. Here's the thing. The book covers up until the 2005 Iditarod, which Rachael had gained permission to run with an interpreter. But there's absolutely no indication that Rachael doesn't finish the race until I suddenly realized, with four pages and four hundred miles to go, that there wasn't time for the authors to go over anything but a scratch from the race. And that's how the book ends. Rachael is forced to scratch from the race because, and only because, her dogs are sick. She's already pulled as many of them as she can, and she's forced to make the difficult decision to pull out for the good of the dogs that remain. In four pages, she scratches and the book ends. Nothing about what it was like to see her father and (possible -- it's not clear) boyfriend at the end of the race. Nothing about how she felt even a month or a day later. Just a bitter, fast end. Had I read this a couple of years ago, I would have been incredibly disappointed. But luckily I could go right to the internet and see that Rachael finished the race the next year, 2006. It appears that she's not running this year's race, but I have no idea why.

I was disappointed because in spite of the odd voice and characterization, in spite of the distance in this memoir that decidedly does not "tell all", I felt like I was along for the ride and then the curtain was suddenly pulled. It was jarring. No doubt a movie is forthcoming, but it's doubtful that it'll tell any more of the "truth" than the book does. Something Rachael and Summer have in common is the overwhelming pressure of the media, which had Rachael hiding in a Chevy Suburban with another famous female sled dog racer before the start of the Iditarod. Rachael tried hard to accommodate the media, because she felt it was good for the sport of sled dog racing. She tried hard to be gracious and present for her sponsors and to let her hard work and determination show through in all of the difficulties leading up to and during the Iditarod. All she wanted was to race like any other rookie musher. And if any of this incredible story is to be entirely believed, she proved all her detractors wrong by working as hard as she possibly could have to overcome her "disability" and, maybe more significantly, the ridiculous media pressure, to live her dream.

March 5, 2007