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Sunday, August 22

Gold medal helps rower put 9/11 aside, briefly

SCHINIAS, Greece — It was in the boat with him, that hellish world-altering day. Where else could it possibly have been? You don't pull body parts from the ruins of the World Trade Center, hop into your bow seat less than three years later, and simply dump the memories and haunts in a pile of sweat clothes on an Olympic Games dock.

"How can you let that go?" Jason Read asked.

You don't. The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, never loosens its grip. A few thousand innocent souls were lost, and Read picked through their smoky, bloody graveyard, searching for a heartbeat while he choked on the vile fumes of death.

"When a woman is pulled out in front of you without a head," Read said, "that changes your life."

So a day of unimaginable horror was sitting right there between his legs, in a boat built for speed. This was the men's eight, the prestigious men's eight. Eight rowers, one coxswain, one mission.

Win the first United States gold medal in this event in 40 years.

The Americans were the favorites, and they would hear an unexpected pep talk in the minutes before the start. "Just go out there and have the best race of your lives," Carl Lewis told them. The legendary sprinter was charging a bunch of strangers to cover 2,000 meters faster than the teams from Australia, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands and France.

Read appreciated the words, even if he didn't need to hear them.

"I recognize that mortality can become reality in a nanosecond," he said.

The 26-year-old chief of operations of the Amwell Valley Rescue Squad in Ringoes, N.J., had already found out the hard way: there was no time to waste. "We can't presuppose that there's going to be an infinite number of tomorrows," he said.

Tomorrow never came on Sept. 11.

Read didn't know it, but he'd been training for 9/11 across most of his life. He bought his first scanner at age 11. When he'd hear the local fire whistle, he'd feel the urge to grab a hose and fight.

Read started volunteering with the fire department at 14. At 16, he was one of the youngest EMTs in New Jersey. At 21, he was the state's youngest fire chief. As a part-time emergency services consultant and 911 dispatcher for a health group, Read had fielded more than 1,000 emergency calls and hundreds of 911 calls.

After the planes hit the towers, Read ended up at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, where he helped set up a field hospital that would represent the largest mobilization of response teams in state history. Trauma surgeons rushed over to the field hospital.

"They came expecting to see hundreds, thousands of patients," Read said, "from the overflow of Lower Manhattan hospitals unable to handle what we thought would be walking wounded.

"As it turned out, we weren't going to see any walking wounded."

Read would cross the river and see something far worse. The financial district had become the killing fields in a war against American money and might, and the volunteer fire chief wouldn't let himself stay on the perimeter.

His father was an Army spy who kept tabs on the KGB, and his uncles and great-uncles were veterans of World Wars I and II. Read had to dive into the boil of the fight.

He spent days crawling through the pile, fooling himself on his hands and knees. Read surveyed the wreckage and figured there had to be small sanctuaries inside, open pockets that were keeping alive dozens of civilians, firefighters and cops.

Read figured wrong. On September 14, while using a blowtorch to cut through the fallen beams, he only found body parts that had to be moved into refrigeration.

The experience almost ruined him. Almost. His mother, Joan, said her son withdrew from life. "He was generally a mess," she said. "(Rowing) was the only thing he didn't give up, because he really shut everything else out. I really think the rowing is what kept him going."

It kept him going all the way to Greece, all the way to the man-made lake on an old military runway, where Read played center field in the U.S. boat operating out of Lane 3, swiveling his head left and then right to warn of enemy advances.

Thirty meters into the race, Read shouted at his teammates that they were holding a three-seat lead. "I make a lot of calls from the bow," Read said. "I encourage the crew. I lead the crew. I inject enthusiasm in a relentless effort to never be behind."

At 1,000 meters, the Americans held a 3.26-second advantage over the Australians, and Read shouted profane encouragement. He knew the race was long over. The Americans are great closers; even the charging Dutch didn't stand a chance.

Read stood up after his boat crossed the finish line and fell sideways into the water. Soon enough, Read was sobbing and smiling and singing on the gold-medal stand. He sobbed when he thought of the Ground Zero flag. He smiled when he thought of his medal. He sang when he thought of the anthem.

Joan rang her cowbell and wept in the stands. "Everybody deserves a moment like this," she said, "and it comes to so few."

Her son and his teammates got back in the boat and made off on their victory lap. Read began waving an American flag, then struck a George Washington-crossing-the-Delaware pose. "It's so surreal," he said, "to have the privilege of representing America during these very tumultuous times. Most of us are unapologetic patriots, and that kind of energy fuels you to go above and beyond what the expectations are."

Expectations. They weren't in ample supply for a 6-1 athlete in a sport belonging to 6-6 men. But when rowing took on a higher purpose for Read, there was no knocking him out of that boat.

There was no knocking 9/11 out of that boat, either.

"There's no way to jettison that," Read said. "How do you forget (the victims) like that?"

You don't. You just keep racing for the finish line, and living a life without an infinite number of tomorrows.

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