Win at Losing: How Our Biggest Setbacks Can Lead to Our Greatest Gains by Sam Weinman

Author:Sam Weinman [Weinman, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-12-20T08:00:00+00:00

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ONE WORD I’VE sought to avoid using in this book is “tragedy” because tragedy denotes something else entirely. I’ve worked my entire career in sports, and abuse of the word there is epidemic. Not giving the ball to Marshawn Lynch at the goal line in the final seconds of the Super Bowl was a tragedy. The New York Rangers not winning a Stanley Cup with Henrik Lundqvist would be a tragedy. Neither of these scenarios remotely meets the definition, and one needs to scroll the front page of any news website these days to appreciate the difference. Sometimes, though, real tragedy infiltrates the sports world, and in the most public of ways, this is what happened with Dan Jansen.

Of the nine Jansen kids, Jane Beres was the third youngest. She was five years older than Dan, but those two, along with Mike, were grouped together as “the young kids,” a tight subset within an already tight family. “Jane was easily the most sensitive Jansen, the one most attuned to other people’s feelings and most vulnerable to criticism from the outside,” Dan writes in his memoir, Full Circle. “I’m like Jane in a lot of respects in that I’m sensitive to the way people feel about me, although I try not to show it.”

By 1987, Dan was enjoying the transition from a promising up-and-comer to one of the best skaters in the world, his measurement of success no longer just holding his own but winning. It’s important to note that Jansen has always been a competitive guy. He might have digested failure better than others because his family had infused him with perspective, but his objective was no different from every other elite athlete. Skating was paramount, and as he bounced around the globe for various races, he was consumed by the efficiency of his stride and whatever else stood between him and another personal best time.

Then Dan came home to Wisconsin from a World Cup meet to find out Jane, just six days after giving birth to her third daughter, had been diagnosed with leukemia.

“My heart sank. Just sank,” Jansen wrote in his memoir. “To that point in my life I hadn’t known real tragedy.”

Jane’s illness was devastating to the entire family, forcing them all to recalibrate their lives. In Dan’s case, it wasn’t that his sister’s condition had halted his career, because he continued to compete after her diagnosis, and even win. But everything now seemed so fleeting, like building a sand castle you knew would be toppled by the next big wave.

Over the ensuing months, as Jansen built toward the 1988 Olympics in Calgary and Jane underwent various transplants and treatments, Dan was forced to confront the reality of his world opening up right as his sister’s was closing. He tried to do his part by offering to donate his bone marrow, but a recent bout of mononucleosis was a complicating factor. Plus his family was leery of the disruption it would cause at such a pivotal moment in his skating career.

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