Olympic Hopeful's Dreams Include Beating Cancer
TK2
Seun Adebiyi was looking for a challenge because graduating from Yale Law School and missing a spot on the Nigerian Olympic swim team by one-tenth of a second was not enough.
Neither was earning his pilot's license, overcoming a fractured spine, immigrating to Alabama when he was 6, helping his mother pick crops to make ends meet, and majoring in mathematics and classics in college.
Always an athlete, always proud to be Nigerian, Seun, which he pronounces "Shawn" for the benefit of American ears, sat down and scientifically studied Olympic sports to see which one would be his next.
In Search Of Inspiration
It makes sense. His mother and father are both professors. Well, professors and, in the case of his mother, the founder of a program to boost the job skills of inner-city Alabama youth. And in the case of his father, the founder of a microfinance program for rural Nigerian women.
Oh yeah, Dad also dabbles in solar farms and AIDS work. And Mom commuted nine hours between Huntsville, Ala., and Jacksonville, Fla., each week to provide her only son with a top-flight private school education.
So that's where Adebiyi comes from. His question was where he was going.
Adebiyi decided that the Winter Olympics would be his best bet because Nigeria has never sent a single athlete to the winter games.
He crossed skiing off the list — cross-country was too hard and downhill was too dangerous. Luge was downright scary, and since he has never shot a gun, biathlon was unrealistic.
"And then we found skeleton," Adebiyi says. "Everyone was like, 'What's this?' "
Skeleton
Skeleton is headfirst, one-man bobsled. Drivers run 30 meters, then slide down a nearly 1 mile track, where they can achieve speeds of 80 miles per hour.
For Adebiyi , it was perfect. "As a sprint swimmer I believe I have the explosive movement," he says. "Even better, my body density, which used to work against me in swimming, actually works to my advantage in skeleton."
He took a crash course — literally — in Lake Placid, N.Y., home to one of the U.S.'s two skeleton tracks, and then moved to Salt Lake City, home of the U.S.'s other track.
I know what you're thinking. Oh no, not another Yale Law School grad turned Nigerian Olympic athlete story.
Everything Changes
Sadly, that's not it at all. About the time Adebiyi started taking skeleton seriously, he noticed a lump in his groin.
Because Adebiyi was otherwise in great health, doctors first dismissed the lump. But further tests revealed the worst possible news. Cancer. Specifically stem cell leukemia and lymphoblastic lymphoma, two aggressive forms of cancer that ultimately require a bone marrow transplant to give Adebiyi the best chance to survive.
But the bone marrow registry is made up of only 8 percent donors of African ancestry. Plus, because there is more genetic diversity among Africans and blacks than among Caucasians, finding a match is that much harder, according to Katharina Haarf, co-founder and executive vice president of the German Bone Marrow Donation Center.
"Because of the bad statistics, only 17 percent of African-Americans who could wind up benefiting from a transplant get a transplant," she says. "The number is close to 40 percent among Caucasians."
Adebiyi wasn't in the 17 percent, so he relied on an initially successful round of chemotherapy to contain the disease and will soon be getting a cord-blood transplant as his next best option.
New Goals, Same Dream
But none of this means that Adebiyi is giving up on the Olympics. "You don't harbor a dream your whole life and then sell out when you're 26," he says.
Indeed, Adebiyi has expanded his goals. He recently traveled to Nigeria to start that country's first ever bone marrow registry. Three hundred cheek swabs later, that part of his dream is under way.
Additionally, Adebiyi has a goal of registering 10,000 new bone marrow donors here in the United States. He hopes many of these donors will go to the Yale Club in New York City on Jan. 10, for a simple cheek swab, which will also place them on the national registry.
Ten days later, Adebiyi will enter the hospital and get a cord-blood transplant, which will give him the defenses of a newborn, or almost none. He will be in isolation, "basically a bubble boy," he says, for about six weeks. Then he will slowly try to rebuild his immunity and his life, including getting back on the track.
"There's a strong parallel between the challenges of transplant and the challenges of being a skeleton athlete," Adebiyi says. "There's a time for all-out effort, and there's a time for surrender."
Surrender, to Adebiyi, means making peace with uncertainty, giving up some control, relying on others for a moment. His list of goals for 2010 is beating leukemia, registering 10,000 bone marrow donors, passing the bar exam, and establishing a Nigerian National Skeleton Team — which he fully intends to be on.
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MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Nigeria has never competed in the Winter Olympic sport called skeleton. In fact, Nigeria has never sent any athlete to any Winter Games event. One Nigerian-American wants to change that. A 26-year-old graduate of Yale Law School has decided that the headfirst sled is the way to bring his home country winter glory, hopefully in 2014.
But his obstacles go far beyond sport, as NPR's Mike Pesca tells us.
MIKE PESCA: Seun Adebiyi was 6 years old when he left Nigeria and arrived in Alabama. It was the only place his mother, a math professor, could get a job. She was the kind of woman for whom the challenge of being a single mom in a new country wasn't enough. She founded a nonprofit to educate schoolchildren. To fund her teaching, she and Seun picked crops, but that was a lesson as well.
Mr. SEUN ADEBIYI (Athlete): My mother has a Ph.D. She went to Oxford on full scholarship, and here she is working in the Alabama sun, picking crops because she has a dream.
PESCA: By the time he was a teenager, Seun landed at a private school in Jacksonville, Florida, as a scholar and a swimmer. He fractured his spine. He made a comeback. He missed swimming for Nigeria in the Olympics by a tenth of a second.
Seun wound up majoring in math and the classics as an undergrad, and then enrolled in Yale Law School. By the time graduation came around, he knew he could rededicate himself to his Olympic dream. He figured the Winter Games might be his ticket, but which sport? He and his friends began watching some YouTube videos.
Mr. ADEBIYI: And we decided cross-country skiing was way too hard. We decided I'd probably kill myself in downhill skiing. I've never shot a gun. Biathlon was out.
PESCA: Hockey, no. Luge, suicide.
Mr. ADEBIYI: And then we found skeleton. And everyone was like, what's this?
PESCA: Skeleton became Seun's new passion. He took a job with Goldman Sachs in Salt Lake City, home to one of the country's two tracks dedicated to this headfirst, sliding sport that reaches 80 miles an hour. Seun began training five hours a day. It was daunting but doable until...
Mr. ADEBIYI: Until life comes and knocks along, and you just take another route.
PESCA: Seun is standing in the kitchen of an apartment on Manhattan's East Side. The location is significant because it's two blocks from Sloan-Kettering Memorial, a hospital known for its cancer care.
Mr. ADEBIYI: Right now, I've got two teaspoons of posaconazole. I've got some lansoprazole. I've got...
PESCA: A few months ago, Seun found out that he had stem cell leukemia and lymphoblastic lymphoma, two particularly aggressive forms of cancer for which a bone marrow transplant was the best treatment. But Seun couldn't find a match.
This isn't unusual for Africans or African-Americans, who are underrepresented in the registry and have a tissue type that's harder to match than Caucasians. Seun decided he needed to do something about this.
He got in touch with Katharina Harf, the executive vice president of the bone marrow donor center DKMS.
Ms. KATHARINA HARF (Executive Vice President, DKMS): You know, the first time I met him, I just, I just was like, oh my God, we have to work with this guy, and he's just so incredibly inspiring.
PESCA: So with DKMS's help, he flew with his mom to Nigeria, where they established the country's first bone marrow registry. This Sunday, he's sponsoring a bone marrow drive at New York City's Yale Club. And he still trains, even through chemotherapy.
Mr. ADEBIYI: When I was staying in the hospital for seven weeks, I would do lunges in the hallway and push my IV tube beside me, and the nurses would line up behind me and start doing lunges.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. ADEBIYI: So I had this little parade going on.
PESCA: Seun smiles a lot more than you'd except from a person who'll enter the hospital in two weeks to get a cord blood transplant, then spend about six weeks in isolation, and then the better part of a year without a functioning immune system.
He says living with cancer is like living a highly concentrated, extremely potent version of life.
Mr. ADEBIYI: I feel very free. At the same time, I know that in a couple of weeks, I'm going to have - I'm going to lose a lot of freedom. I'm going to lose all control over my schedule. I'm going to lose control over what I eat, who I see. I'm going to lose my bone marrow, and then I'm going to literally be reborn.
PESCA: Seun says there's a parallel between being a skeleton athlete and his overall life. There's a time for all-out effort, and then there's a time for surrender.
Soon, this super-achieving young man will rely on his doctor's skill, his body's resilience - and just plain luck. He refers to this as the risky time. And then, he says, the dream begins anew. Mike Pesca, NPR News, New York.
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