The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (29 page)

In the 1950s, Canadian psychologist Ronald Melzack was working toward his Ph.D. at McGill under psychologist D. O. Hebb, who was studying how extreme deprivation of life experience affects intellect. Hebb was experimenting on Scottish terriers.

The dogs were well cared for, groomed, and fed, but they were totally isolated from the outside world. Hebb was interested in how that would alter their ability to navigate a maze. (The answer: very negatively.) But it was in the holding room, before the maze, where Melzack made the observation that started him down the road to becoming the most influential pain researcher in the world. “The water pipes in the room were at head level for the dogs,” Melzack says, “and these wonderful dogs would run around and bang their heads right into the pipes, as if they felt nothing. And they kept running around and banging their heads on the water pipes.”

Melzack was a smoker at the time, so he struck a match. “I held it out, and they’d put their nose in it,” he says. They’d back up, “and then come back and sniff it again. I’d put it out and light another match, and they’d sniff it again and again.” The dogs obviously had normal cerebral hardware, but had missed the critical developmental window for downloading the brain’s pain software. They never learned to be deterred by the flame. Just like language, or hitting a baseball, even though each of us may be born with the requisite genetic hardware, if
we miss the window for acquiring the software, the genes are of little use. Adds Jeffrey Mogil, of McGill’s Pain Genetics Lab: “The fact that something like pain would have to be learned at all is pretty surprising.”

•

Pain is innate, but it also must be learned. It is unavoidable, and yet modifiable. It is common to all people and all athletes but never experienced quite the same way by any two individuals or even by the same individual in two different situations. Each of us is like the hero in a Greek tragedy, circumscribed by nature, but left to alter our fate within the boundaries. “Maybe if you’re a worrier by genotype, it’s a better idea not to be a warrior by profession,” says Goldman, the neurogeneticist. “Then again, it’s hard to say, because people overcome so much.”

Like most traits discussed in this book, an athlete’s ability to deal with pain is a braid of nature and nurture so intricately and thoroughly intertwined as to become a single vine. As one scientist told me: without both genes and environments, there are no outcomes.

It reinforces the idea that any notion of finding an “athlete gene” was a figment of the era of wishful thinking that crested a decade ago with the first full sequencing of the human genome, before scientists understood how much they don’t understand about the complexity of the genetic recipe book. What, exactly, most human genes do is still a mystery. Sure, the ACTN3 gene may tell a billion or so people in the world that they won’t be in the Olympic 100-meter final, but chances are they all already knew that.

If thousands of DNA variations are needed to explain just a portion of the differences in height among people, what are the chances of ever finding a single gene that makes a star athlete? Slim? Or none?

And yet . . .

The Gold Medal Mutation

I
t is December 2010, and human civilization in northern Scandinavia is temporarily reduced to a layer of sediment beneath the snow. Excavation will come only with spring. The last few days have seen record snow and a constant -15 degrees Fahrenheit at the Arctic Circle in Finland—the Napapiiri, as the Finns call it—where I am now. There’s no wind, so the first crunching step outside each morning is deceptively placid, before nose hairs morph into ice daggers.

The Finns call this part of the year “
Kaamos
time.” There is no exact English word for
Kaamos
, but it roughly means polar night. It means the time of the year when northern Finland is tilted so far from the sun that daylight is really three hours of twilight that around two
P.M
. flickers out as if under a cosmic candle snuffer.

I’m driving north along highway E8, in search of a ghost. And this is the perfect place for one to live—among the pines and spruce made hard by the cold and made white by the snow; beside the Swedish whitebeam and the European white elm; and amid the silver birch and the downy birch with their white skins wrapped in a blanket of white mist. Reindeer prance beside the road and disappear into whorls of snow. It is all thick and white, as if some celestial milk bottle had toppled over and I’m driving through the puddle. This is a land of austere beauty, of the most gleaming whites of sky and snow and the most vacuous blacks of night.

But Iiris Mäntyranta was born not far from here, and she can see colors. To her, the sky has a bluish tinge, and the walls of cloud give passage to the occasional spangle of purple light.

Before I made contact with Iiris months earlier, I was not sure whether my ghost—her father—was even still alive. His words had not appeared in any English-language press I could track down since the 1960s, when he emerged from his tiny Arctic hamlet and won seven Olympic medals, three of them gold. Now we are traveling north, together, to meet him.

After three hours of driving from Luleå, Sweden, where Iiris works as a county government administrator, we are getting close. Just past the Arctic Circle, we drive through Pello, a town of four thousand that is the last semblance of a city we will see along the road. On our way out of Pello, we pass a granite pedestal atop which sits a larger-than-life bronze statue of a man in mid-cross-country ski stride. The man is Iiris’s father.

A half hour later we pull off the paved road and drive down a narrow pass among the pine trees. We stop in front of a cream-colored house on the west side of a large lake. As I get out of the car, I’m conscious of being watched. I turn to look back at the pass down which we came. A sandy-colored reindeer has come around the corner and has its gaze fixed on me, as if it can smell the Brooklyn on my clothes. It’s frigid and snowing, so we hurry inside the house.

No sooner do I step inside and kick the frost from my boots onto the welcome mat below the rifle rack than an oddly Mediterranean face appears in the entryway. It is the man from the statue, the great Eero Mäntyranta. I’m taken aback. In pictures I had seen of him from the 1960s his skin was perhaps slightly too dark for the Arctic, but it was nothing that would warrant a second look. But now he is closer to the hue of the red paint that comes from this region’s iron-rich soil than to that of the snow. Iiris told me on the drive up that her father’s unique gene mutation had caused his skin to redden as he got older, but I didn’t quite expect this shade of cardinal, mottled in places with purple.

The contrast is stark when Eero’s wife, Rakel, with her glacier blue
eyes and alabaster skin, steps into the entryway. Eero speaks no English, but he greets me with a wide smile. Everything about him has a certain width to it. The bulbous nose in the middle of a softly rounded face. His thick fingers, broad jaw, and a barrel chest covered by a red knit sweater with stern-faced reindeer across the middle. He is a remarkable-looking man. His dark hair is meticulously slicked back and he has prominent cheekbones that seem to draw up the edges of his thin lips so that he looks constantly pleased and inquisitive. There is also an unmistakable strength about him, never mind that he is seventy-three years old. The middle finger of his right hand is bent sharply at the top joint, a periscope peering at the index finger. His hands look as if they could snap a ski pole in two, a supposition backed up by his handshake.

Eero ushers me to the kitchen where Rakel serves tea and coffee to me and to Iiris and to Iiris’s Swedish husband, Tommy, as well as to Iiris’s son Viktor, a musician—his band Surunmaa plays a fusion of folk, blues, and tango—who is staying in a cabin on Eero’s property while he films a documentary about his grandfather’s life.

The wide windows in the kitchen look out into the snowy forest. This used to be an area of extreme poverty, but now even the remote north of Finland has prospered from the country’s trade in timber and electronics, and the residences are as impeccably kept as dollhouses. Sitting here sipping tea from a tiny porcelain cup, grinning at a red-nosed man in a reindeer sweater, I feel certain that I have stepped into a Christmas snow globe.

After introductions and tea, I follow Eero outside where he feeds a dozen reindeer handfuls of pale green lichen. The reindeer are used for racing and also for meat. When I walk up to one of the animals, Viktor translates Eero’s warning that, unlike horses, reindeer do not like to be touched by human hands. Some of the reindeer are teddy bear brown, and others are chalk white. Outside, against the falling snow, the redness of Eero’s face is in its greatest relief.

With daylight quickly fading, we return indoors. Over the next few hours I interrogate Eero about his remarkable athletic career. Iiris,
Tommy, and Viktor take turns translating the language that to my ears sounds like a stream of deep “ess’s,” punctuated by crackling “k’s” and “cox’s” spliced with the occasional Spanish-sounding rolling “r.”

When the sun fades, we will take a break from talking for a meal of reindeer meat and potatoes. And Eero will laugh deeply when the fork he is holding returns his mind to a time more than forty years ago, when he was one of the greatest athletes in the world.

•

It was 1964 and Eero Mäntyranta was once again in the uncomfortable position of honored guest. Surrounded by the clinking of crystal, he furrowed his heavy eyebrows at the three forks flanking his plate. He had just won two golds and a silver medal at the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, dominating the cross-country skiing competition to such an extent that the media deemed him “Mr. Seefeld,” a reference to the competition venue. In the 15K race, Mäntyranta finished forty seconds ahead of the next skier—a margin of victory never equaled in that event at the Olympics before or since—while the next five finishers were within twenty seconds of one another. In the 30K race he won by over a minute. Now came the hard part: dinner. Becoming one of your nation’s all-time great athletes necessarily comes with a glut of honorary feasts.

After his first gold, in a relay at the 1960 Games in Squaw Valley, California, Mäntyranta attended a celebratory meal in Los Angeles organized by Finland’s Olympic committee. That time, he was about to drink from a goblet on the table when a group of urbane guests strode up and began washing their hands in it. But the three forks presented a new puzzle.

When Mäntyranta was a child growing up in rural Lankojärvi, Finland, in the 1940s, his family shared a single fork. It was passed around the 170-square-foot room that was their house, overlooking the lake for which the town was named. In lieu of cutlery, the children used sharpened sticks to spear chunks of potato and slices of bread.

The Mäntyranta brood would have numbered twelve had all the
children survived. As it was, they were six. Still, with Eero, his parents, his brothers and sisters, and his older sister’s husband, the single room could be a bit cozy. Add the neighbors who would stop by to shoot the breeze and have a cigarette, and it was not uncommon to have a dozen people in the room. In that atmosphere, young Eero first employed the admirable capacity for solitary focus that would later serve him well during the lonely training hours on the ski trail under the black sky of
Kaamos
time. He was an excellent student, only because he could block out the commotion in the room, curl up underneath the smoke, and do his schoolwork by the fickle light of an oil lamp. Those were spare days in postbellum Finland, with the country locked in two decades of war debt to the Soviet Union.

Eero was only six years old in the winter of 1943, when Nazi soldiers pushed north and Lankojärvi was evacuated. He was put on a truck with all the women and children from the town and told by a Finnish soldier to keep quiet lest German soldiers hear them. He shuddered when one old woman refused to heed the advice and belted out Communist work songs. The truck eventually made it to a ferry that took them across the border into Overtornea, Sweden, where Eero gazed in wonderment at the bullet shells that lay across the ground like a dusting of leaden snow. He and his family stayed in Sundsvall, Sweden, through the winter, until they were allowed to return to a Finland free of snow and free of Nazis.

The trek back home in the spring was a journey of diminishing hope. They had to take a horse and carriage through the woods because the roads were strewn with live landmines. The German military set fires on their way out of Finland, and in a country whose towns are but clearings amid dense forest, tinder was in hearty supply. Lapland burned like a vast fire pit, making smoldering embers of what were once doorjambs, staircases, and gables crafted from pine.

But the Mäntyrantas returned to find their home one of the few standing. They lived on the remote side of the water, with no road, so Nazi soldiers didn’t bother to venture over the lake and through the
woods to raze the few nondescript shacks on the other side. The lake had saved their home. The same lake that started Eero’s skiing career.

While the Germans didn’t try to cross the lake, many of the children of Lankojärvi had no choice. School was on the other shore. Almost as soon as Mäntyranta could walk, he could ski, and within a year of returning from Sweden, he was joining other kids in skating—he once fell through the ice and nearly drowned—or skiing across the lake to school, on nothing more than wooden planks nailed together. It took about an hour to make the trip, and during winter it was pitch black the entire way, so the kids would simply aim at the far shore and hope for the best.

Out of necessity, everyone in Lapland skied. But it did not take long for Mäntyranta to stand out. As early as seven years old he would win the cross-country-ski races at school. When he was ten, he started winning the races that brought kids from local villages together. At eleven, he polished off the youth competition in the entire municipality of Pello.

Unlike the Finnish youth in the south, Mäntyranta never dreamed about sporting glory as a boy. Sports had been integral to Finland’s identity ever since the country declared independence from Russia in 1917. National sports organizations were formed, and they paid off in spades—and medals. The “Flying Finn” distance runners dominated the world in the 1920s. After World War II, when Helsinki was awarded the 1952 Olympics, sport again became a beacon of unity for the Finnish people. But Finland’s sporting tradition had no impact on young Eero. With no radio or newspapers in Lankojärvi, he had no idea who the great Finnish athletes were. He didn’t have the chance to be inspired by the words of the beloved Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, who told the world, “Mind is everything. Muscle—pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind.” Mäntyranta’s only exposure to the ’52 Helsinki Games was a picture that he saw in a neighbor’s house of a Brazilian man triple-jumping. For Eero Mäntyranta, skiing was a mode of transportation and a chance for a better job.

For twenty years after the end of the war, Finland’s economic growth was stunted by having to send surplus money and resources to
Russia to pay off war debt, so the only job for a young man in Lapland was cutting and hauling wood from the forest. At fifteen, Mäntyranta was living in the forest among grown men, many of them criminals who came to the far north to evade the law. The men spent their leisure time drinking, playing cards, and fighting. Mäntyranta slept with a block of wood under his pillow in case he had to bludgeon an attacker during the night. It was both a harrowing and exciting existence for a young man. But after two years, he’d had enough.

He knew that the government had a habit of giving promising young cross-country skiers cushy jobs as border patrol guards where they could essentially ski along the border for both training and work. So he started training in his free time from forest work, and his progress was stunning. At nineteen, he traveled to Switzerland for a series of races that, if he performed well, would push him toward the Finnish national team. He won all of them, and a job as a border patrol guard followed soon thereafter.

Mäntyranta’s mother warned him that it was time to save money, not to go chasing girls. He heeded that advice for a good two weeks, until he spent a night in Pello dancing with his blond-haired, blue-eyed future wife. When the couple later had children, Mäntyranta would often train in the summer by sending Rakel and the kids off in a car to their cottage twenty miles away. He would then run or walk to meet them.

Despite regular smuggling over the Sweden/Finland boundary, the border north of the Arctic Circle was generally quiet, especially in winter, so Mäntyranta had plenty of time to throw himself into training. At 5'7" (in thick socks), he was very small for a cross-country skier. With black eyebrows arcing over dark brown eyes, and a slight tan complexion to his skin, he looked more like someone born of an Italian beach, not the lower Arctic pine forest. But there he was, for fifty miles a day, jabbing away with his poles at the snowy blanket that covered the earth. He often trained by the moonlight. Or, if he was near the road in Pello, he would exist for a moment in the beams of a passing car, before fading back into the darkness. When the moon was obscured, he
worried that he would ski headlong into trees, but he managed to stay clear of accidents, and his progress continued at a remarkable clip.