Chris Del Bosco: The fall from glory

Chris is smart, good looking, kind and quiet. He prefers to let others take the spotlight.  He has been crowned U.S. national champion in downhill bike racing. He has won countless hockey trophies. His ski-racing medal collection is massive. There was a time when his success just never stopped. 

I can only imagine the pressure he must have felt. I used to think it was the pressure cooker he lived in that made him crack. The expectations to win. The expectations to get straight A’s. The expectations to just be better than everyone else. All that and to attempt to live a normal teenage life.

Chris and I can thank our father for our athletic talent and our mother for our work ethic.  Our father was a Junior A hockey star from Sudbury, Ont., who came to the U.S. on a hockey scholarship and never left (57 years later, he is still a Canadian citizen). My mother was an army brat who spent much of her childhood in Europe. 

The beginning of the fall 

Our parents are some of the hardest-working people I have ever known. They have given us so much over the years. They have dug deep in their pockets when there was nothing but lint, yet still found a way to give us the best. I know they sacrificed some of their happiness to see us succeed. All they have ever wanted was for us to be happy and successful.

I don’t know the exact day or time when our happiness and success began to unravel, but I have a guess. While Chris was enjoying his triumphs as a 10-year-old boy, I was in the hospital. I was in a major ski-racing accident at a downhill race in Aspen, Colo., in January 1991 and badly injured my leg. I spent the next four years in and out of hospitals recovering from one surgery after another.  My mother was usually with me while my father almost always stayed behind to look after Chris. It was really the first time Chris and I spent long periods apart. Chris was busy training and attending school in Vail, and I was far away, busy waiting for my next operation to begin. 

The stress definitely took its toll on all of us. I think I stunned my family when I told them in the summer of 1994 that I was giving up my fight to save my leg and thought it was time to have it amputated. I know this idea I had was frightening. How could a strong-willed athlete like myself decide to give up? Athletes don’t give up. Athletes don’t like to see other athletes hurt. And athletes certainly don’t like to see things end up the way they did for me. After the amputation, I was eager to move on. I plowed through learning to walk again, enrolled in university a semester late and left home. Chris was left in the house alone. No big sister to encourage him, to get after him or in some cases to cover for him.

Fury and resentment

At the height of his career as a successful junior athlete, I was away at college and Chris was at home.  I remember hearing the panic in my mother’s voice as she would tell me that things were changing with Chris. I think it was around his 13th birthday when things really seemed to be off balance. The easiest solution was to ignore the irrational behaviour. Chalk the laziness up to an overburdened teenager. Look the other way, right?

Needless to say, there was a powerful concoction of fury and resentment brewing inside Chris. I am not going to sit here and say that I never did anything wrong, but even as an experimenting teenager, I seemed to be able to hold things together. I guess in a way, Chris did too. Even as he began to drink heavily and hide it, he still succeeded. He still won. He still got his homework done. He still played the part. Maybe this is a mark of a true overachiever. You can pull things off that the normal Joe never could do. 

With the drinking came drugs or maybe it was the other way around. It really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change the facts. When he was drug tested at the 1998 U.S. nationals and subsequently kicked out of the U.S. alpine skiing program, he hit the first of many lows. There always comes a time in life when you deserve to be loved the most, even though the circumstances say otherwise. I truly believe this was the turning point. Rather than beat him down for the drug use, Chris needed the most encouragement from his coaches and peers. At that crucial moment, he didn’t get it. 

Chris continued to race his mountain bike and took part in many of the new extreme skiing events that sprouted up. He, of course, found success in these adventures. He, of course, continued to drink. He, of course, denied any sort of problem. 

Next Part Three:  The way down