By Juliet Macur, NY Times, July 26, 2012
LONDON—Before life threw more adversity at him than one person ought to bear, Kieran Behan told his mother that he would be an Olympic gymnast someday.
He was just a boy, maybe 6 years old, when he fell in love with gymnastics, drawn to the thrill of it while watching the Summer Games, enamored by the possibility that he too could defy gravity and flip through the air as if he could fly.
But that was before a series of injuries, two so severe that doctors told him he would never walk again: a botched leg operation that caused nerve damage and a brain injury that kept him from doing even the simplest things, like sitting or eating.
Yet Behan, a 5-foot-4-inch plucky phoenix, pushed on.
“Doctors told me, stop thinking about your crazy dreams because you’ll never walk again and you must accept that it’s over for you,” Behan said. “But I just kept saying: ‘No, no, no—this is not the rest of my life. This is not how it’s going to play out.’ And look at me now, an Olympian. They said it was impossible, but I did it.”
Behan, 23, barely clinched an Olympic berth in January, qualifying second to last at the Olympic test event to become the first Irish gymnast to make it to the Games by his own talent, not by wild card. He benefited from a new Olympic rule that limits each team to five gymnasts instead of six, to make more spots available to individuals whose country does not field a full team.
Many of the powerhouse squads, including the United States’, criticized the rule change, saying it watered down the competition and forced some teams to leave a world-class gymnast at home. But the rule has an upside: it allows athletes like Behan to compete on the sport’s highest stage.
“Kieran has gone through so much,” his mother, Bernie Behan, said through tears. “He deserves this.”
Kieran Behan started gymnastics when he was 8, showing a talent for the tumbling. But soon came the first of many obstacles: when he was 10, he found a lump the size of a golf ball on his left leg.
During surgery to remove what turned out to be a benign tumor, doctors kept a tourniquet on him too tight for too long, causing nerve damage that left Behan with limited feeling in his left foot. It also caused such pain that even a slight brush against his leg would cause him to scream. He could not walk, heading to school at one point to the taunts of other youngsters who already had it out for him.
“They’d say, ‘Oh, look at the cripple,’ and that was so hard for me because, already, I was doing gymnastics and I was short, and I was doing a girls’ sport,” he said. “So a lot of times, I would sit at the kitchen window and watch all the kids running around the park and playing football, and I’d get pretty emotional. All I wanted to do was be an ordinary kid again.”
Doctors warned him that the damaged nerves might never regenerate. A psychiatrist told him to prepare him for life in a wheelchair. They were wrong.
Although it took 15 months, Behan did become an ordinary kid again. And he went back to gymnastics.
But about eight months after he returned from his leg injury, disaster hit again. In what he calls a freakish accident, he smacked the back of his head on the metal horizontal bar during a routine and tumbled to the ground in a lump.
The accident caused a traumatic brain injury and severe damage to the vestibular canal of his inner ear, which affected his balance so much that even the slightest movement could cause Behan to black out. And black out he did, hundreds of times, maybe thousands of times, his mother said, as Behan struggled to turn his head, feed himself and walk without stumbling and looking as if he were dead drunk.
Frustrated by his slow progress after two months in the hospital, Bernie Behan went home with her son in her arms because doctors would not discharge him. She quit her job as an aerobics instructor to care for him.
“He kept telling the doctors, ‘I can walk—tell them, Mom, that I can walk,’ and my heart was breaking,” she said. “I’d go to the car park and cry my eyes out, then walk back and say: ‘Yes, Kieran, you can do this. We can do this. I believe you, son.’ “
Nearly two years after his accident and after unrelenting physical therapy, Kieran Behan—the miracle boy, doctors said—regained his hand-eye coordination and got back onto his feet again.
And back to gymnastics he went. He swept the floors of his gym to finance his training and jumped subway turnstiles to get to practice because there was no cash to spare. His parents held bake sales, candy sales and carwashes to raise money for him.
But, again, there were rough patches. He broke his arm. He fractured his wrist. He visited the hospital so often as a teenager, officials there suspected he was being abused. In 2009, he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee, requiring six months of rehabilitation.
Yet he did not quit the sport.
But in 2010, six weeks before his senior debut at the European championships, he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his other knee. After all he had endured, the injury nearly derailed him.
“He made it back from all of those other setbacks, but that one was the hardest for him because the championships were just around the corner, and he was ready,” said Simon Gale, one of his coaches. “He couldn’t handle it. I wouldn’t say he was suicidal, but I’m just glad that his girlfriend was there to watch him at night.”
Behan, though, did what he innately did best: he picked himself up again. And he returned to gymnastics.
Finally, in 2011, he reaped the benefits of his persistence. He won three World Cup medals, including Ireland’s first World Cup gold medal, in the floor exercise, setting himself up for 2012—his best year yet.
But Behan, who has a slightly torn rotator cuff and was frightened of further injury, could barely make it through his last practice before heading to the Olympics last week. When he reached the end of it, he laughed. Then, he cried.
“I felt like I was in a fairy tale when I got here,” he said of the London Games. “All I could think about was: ‘Is this a dream? Tell me this really happening.’ “
Behan is competing in the vault, the horizontal bar and his specialty, the floor exercise, but is not fooling himself into thinking he could win a medal—or even make the finals. He just hopes his tale might inspire others to overcome hardship, whether it is in sports, at work or at home.
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