Athlete’s view of the world

With the Vancouver Olympics quickly approaching, all eyes turn to the athletes preparing for the games. They represent our hopes of glory for our country. How many medals will they get?

However, we really know little about what it takes for the athletes to achieve their goals—the long hours of training and the tough discipline of coaches.

I’d always thought, for example, that these athletes were a happy lot—training hard but joyous about the route to winning.

Not so, says novelist Angie Abdou, master swimmer and author of The Bone Cage (Newest Press). These athletes are dedicated, her novel tells us, but they are also tired of routines and fatigued by the continual push to get better and be at the top.

Abdou was in Castlegar recently to read from her novel as the featured writer in the “One Book, One Kootenay” series sponsored by the Kootenay Library Federation.

Abdou’s novel follows the lives of two athletes, one a National swimming champion and the other a National wrestling champion. The swimmer Sadie is in her twenties, lives with her parents to save rent, and works in the “cage” at the University of Calgary, handing out towels to earn a bit of money. Early in the novel she wins at the Nationals, and so is headed to the Olympics. Her personal life, however, is a complete drag.

The wrestler Digger lives in a run-down rental with his buddy Fly, also a wrestler for the University of Calgary Dinos. With their friend Ben, they live and breathe wrestling. Only Digger, however, wins the Olympic trials and is headed to the top. Other than wrestling and a bit of partying, we sense he has no “real” life either.

The novel deals with the grind and the dullness of training. Sadie is often in a trance while swimming, but still notices the gobs of gum at the bottom of the pool. On and on, this routine goes day after day.

Digger trains on the “same” mats each day in the “same” sweat box, with the “same” partners and the “same” coach. And so it goes.

Despite the repetition and the dullness of their lifestyles, both athletes are the best in their events in Canada. And yes, they do meet and become training friends—with very few emotional or sexual overtones. As Digger’s coach tells him, he can’t afford to get involved because he’s so close to being an Olympic champion.

The lives of these athletes are horrible from the throwing up to the immense fatigue to the feeling of being caged with no way out. None of them know what they’ll do when they’ve finished with their sports—whether they win or not.

In fact, the novel is quite critical of the aftermath. What happens if you don’t win and don’t get to go?

One of Digger’s wrestling friends, for example, ends up in a psychiatric ward. What happens to Sadie when she is badly injured in a traffic accident and can’t go to the Olympics is incredibly depressing. At the height of her career and ready for fame, life becomes one big downer.

There is a bit of hope in the novel’s ending, though, and several episodes are quite humorous. But Abdou’s novel doesn’t leave much room for affirmation. To emphasize how swimmer Sadie is feeling about having trained for years and then to miss the Olympics, she quotes famous swimmer Mark Tewkesbury—“The Olympics leave athletes broken souls.”

And that’s what this book depicts for us—a bunch of broken souls, and if one of them wins an Olympic medal, we applaud without understanding the struggle and angst involved in getting there. This novel shows us what these athletic lives are like beneath the podium.

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