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ORLANDO, Fla. - I'm going to tell you something embarrassing about Bonnie Blair, the five-time Olympic gold medalist and greatest female speed skater of all time.
But don't worry, she doesn't mind if I share it with you.
Not long after giving birth to her first child, Blair was on one of her morning jogs when she noticed her shorts were soaked. Only it wasn't from sweat.
It was from urine.
She kept quiet about it, even though the loss of bladder control occurred frequently.
Too humiliated, she didn't say a word to her husband. Too convinced it was normal, she didn't say a word to her doctor.
"I lived in silence with it for a year," she said.
This is not the sort of thing you ever imagine happening to the fastest woman on ice.
We want athletes to be impenetrable and invincible. We want them to have everything all figured out.
And a lot of times, they don't.
Even though we're in the hero-making business, sometimes it's better to learn athletes have problems. This way, they don't seem as far away from us.
"I didn't get into speed skating so I can talk about this," Blair said, "but having some notoriety, maybe people will think if this could happen to her, it could happen to anybody."
You're probably thinking this is a distasteful thing to talk about on a sports page. And that it doesn't belong amid the discussion of the NBA and NHL playoffs and Barry Bonds' pursuit of the all-time home run record.
One figure justifies its place here: More than 13 million Americans suffer from stress urinary incontinence (SUI).
And not all of them are women.
And certainly not all of them are world-class speed skaters.
Almost every day, some athlete achieves something indescribable, unbelievable and remarkable.
But how much can we identify with a man who has hit more than 700 home runs? One that's scored 80 points in an NBA game? Or even a five-time gold medalist?
Hardly any of us will ever do that in our lifetimes. But at some point, we will definitely have a terribly embarrassing problem and be forced to confront it.
The U.S.'s most decorated winter athlete was once a cough, sneeze or laugh away from total embarrassment.
One of the greatest female athletes of all time had to wear dark shorts and limit the amount of fluids she drank because like so many others with SUI, she just accepted that this was how life was going to be.
Thirteen million of you know exactly what that feels like.
Blair is stopping in Orlando on Thursday to talk about SUI. And she is hoping people forget about the medals, her once being Sports Illustrated's sportswoman of the year and see her as just another woman who dealt with something uncomfortable.
"It's a common problem," Blair stressed. "When I got cured, I was just so excited this was a real medical issue and that there was actually a cure for it."
Blair's SUI was corrected three years ago in a 30-minute outpatient surgery. The people at Gynecare, the makers of the mesh that now supports Blair's urethra, are the ones who tagged Blair as a spokesperson for SUI.
But now that you know Blair's secret, it shouldn't change the way you feel about her or her accomplishments.
She'll always be an incredible athlete, a five-time gold medalist and a three-time Olympian.
She's just a little more human to us now. That's the best thing an athlete can be.
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(c) 2006, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.). Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
