Vancouver Now - McKeever sees the big picture

When Brian McKeever was very young, perhaps three or four years old, his parents warned him that if he ever experienced problems with his vision, if he saw anything strange at all, he was to tell them. Right away.

VANCOUVER -- When Brian McKeever was very young, perhaps three or four years old, his parents warned him that if he ever experienced problems with his vision, if he saw anything strange at all, he was to tell them. Right away.

They didn't elaborate, because he was just a child and he couldn't fully understand. But his father and his father's sister had both found their vision vanishing from the centre of their eyes early, in the first or second grade, and they knew it lived in their genes. It was about a 50-50 shot. Brian's brother Robin was six years older and had no problems seeing.

Maybe, just maybe, Brian would get lucky, too.

And as Brian progressed through elementary school, through high school, towards university and beyond, it looked that way. He read books, watched movies, got a learner's driver's license. And like his brother, who would reach the 1998 Olympics in cross-country, he skied in God's country, in the beauty of the Rockies. His brother made the 1998 Olympics in Nagano; that year, Brian skied in his first junior world championship. As he puts it, "It was right at the moment that my career was taking off."

Then letters started to dance on billboards. He was diagnosed with Stargardt's disease just after his brother Robin returned from Nagano. At first, his eyes failed slowly. Then, quickly.

"In one semester of university I went from being able to sit at the very back of a 400-person lecture theatre and read the boards to within four months to being right at the front," McKeever said yesterday at a news conference in Vancouver. "So that went quick. And within two years, I was declared legally blind.

"The best way I can describe it is like flashbulb eye -- somebody shines that bright light at you and you get that fuzzy blob in the middle ... It's hard to describe, because it's not, like everybody asks me, a black spot. Just a fuzzy area. It tends to take its shade from the colours and light that are around it."

His peripheral vision remained intact -- the doughnut and not the Timbit, as he puts it -- and after a brief burst of bewilderment and fear, Brian kept skiing; as long as it was safe, he would say. And he kept skiing. He adjusted. He joined the Paralympic team.

And after his brother missed qualifying for the Salt Lake City Olympics, Brian asked him to work with his as a guide, since Paralympic cross-country skiers work in teams. It was a tough time for Robin, but he said yes.

"He saw it as a big ask," Robin said, "and I saw it as: What else am I going to do?"

And so they trained together every day, won seven Paralympic medals together, and McKeever looked for something bigger. The Olympics, at home. He had one race to do it, in Canmore in December. No Winter Olympian had ever previously competed in the Paralympics.

Well, here he is. If you can find a more inspiring story at these Games -- a story richer in the stubbornness of the human spirit -- it will be surprising.

"I don't think it took much away from me, to be perfectly honest," McKeever said. "Reading is difficult ... I do miss reading, for sure; it was one of my big hobbies before. It just takes me so long to get through a book now that I get tired. I can't drive, which is always a limiting factor in this day and age. But we make do."

He makes do because his father, Bill, did the same.

Matter-of-factly -- "Dad's pretty dry," says Brian with a smile -- Bill told his children what would happen if they shared the disease. And then he showed them how to live with it. Bill would pop them on the back of his bike, and ride to the grocery store. He would teach elementary school. He would never dance around the issue. And neither does his youngest son.

"That's good, because it takes the mystery out of something like this, and it also makes you deal with things," McKeever said. "OK, so dad doesn't drive. Dad doesn't see well. You just deal with it. I mean, he built our cabin by himself, basically by hand -- just totally normal things that dads do. I still remember going to the hardware store with him with two bicycles to go pick up two or three sheets of drywall, and wheeling them back with these bikes, sitting on the pedals. So he was able to adapt, and do all that stuff without waiting for mom to come home with the car.

"And [I have] no real bitterness, I don't think," he added. "It is what it is. You can't change the hand you're dealt in that case, and the best thing to do is just to get on with it. One of the things I always say is there's not a day goes by that I don't wish that I saw better. It seems so easy to get into a car and run an errand, sometimes.

"And yet, it's made me who I am. It's a part of who I am. And I like the person that I am. So if that's the case, then I'll deal with that. I certainly wouldn't wish it on anybody else."

He won't win a medal here. At times, he will fly downhill at almost 70 km/h alone, mostly blind. He will pick his way through a mass start of some 100 skiers. He will rely on memory, on preparation, on his slender ring of vision.

And no matter what, you can be damned sure he will make us proud. And we will understand that sometimes a burden isn't really a burden at all.

"To be quite honest, in a lot of ways, I viewed it as a positive," Robin said. "He changed his life around in a lot of ways. If he didn't make it onto a national team, which he did in Paralympics, and didn't get the support and the training, then maybe he never would have made the Olympics. If he wasn't at that level at 24, 25 years old, it would have been time to move onto something else.

"He used it to create the person that he is."

Not only that, but Brian and Robin were six years apart, and if Brian had not kept skiing, then they would not be as close, as bonded, as they are now. Brian compares it to his mother, who typed his father's papers in college.

If Brian had not had to ask his brother to ski with him, then Robin would not have become involved with Canada's Paralympic ski team, and eventually its coach, just as he needed to reorient his life with a baby on the way.

If Brian had not kept skiing, then his parents, who missed Nagano but will be here, would never have experienced the boundless pride of seeing one of their sons at the Olympics. And neither would we.

So maybe in some ways, Brian McKeever and his family didn't get lucky. Or maybe, without knowing it, they did, and so did we. After all, if Brian McKeever had not been blinded, none of us could see him now.

McKeever sees the big picture

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