UK Edition
Olympic champion and world record breaker Aries Merritt on track to complete remarkable comeback after transplant
Barely a year after he broke the world record, Aries Merritt, Olympic champion over the high hurdles in London, knew that his body was failing him. He was battling extreme fatigue, shortness of breath and an inability to recover properly. So it transpired that this consummate technician of an athlete, one whose potential appeared limitless when he ran an astonishing 12.80 seconds in Brussels in 2012, found himself in a spartan room at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona 13 months later, being told that he would never run again.
“I was depressed, I was angry,” Merritt reflects. “I was a truly mean person. It was like all the joy had been snatched from me.”
The charming, garrulous former college star from Chicago – who, in 2012, became the first man ever to win hurdles titles at the Olympics and world indoor championships, US indoors and Olympic trials in the same year – had been diagnosed with a rare genetic kidney disorder identified principally in African-Americans.
His kidneys, further compromised by a virus that was attacking his bone marrow, were functioning at no better than 20 per cent of their usual level. Doctors alarmed by his dialysis results informed him that he needed a transplant, fast. Merritt kept his shattering diagnosis a secret to everybody besides his family and closest friends in the sport.
His training partner, Mitchell Watt, the Australian long jumper, told him that he could have his kidney if their blood and tissue types matched. So did his coach and his London-based massage therapist.
Eventually, his elder sister, LaToya, was selected as the best possible donor. “She has O-positive blood, whereas mine is A-negative,” Merritt, 30, explains. “But the tissue fit was more successful. There is a higher chance of success if transplant conducted with a family member than with anybody else.”
First, though, Merritt had a global title challenge to worry about. The 110 metres hurdles final at last summer’s world championships was scheduled for the final week of August, in Beijing, and he was warned he could undergo the transplant no later than September 1, in Phoenix.
Extraordinarily, despite this psychological burden and a pair of all but useless kidneys, Merritt claimed a bronze medal. The champion, Sergey Shubenkov of Russia, had, like most of Merritt’s rivals, been oblivious to the American’s predicament on the start line. “You’re going to have a kidney transplant and you’re here?” he asked him afterwards, shaking his head in wonder. “I’m not too sure how I did,” Merritt acknowledges. “I guess I thought it would be my swansong.”
The success of his 10-hour operation is reflected in the fact that he is in Portland this week and preparing to defend his Olympic gold in Rio de Janeiro in 154 days’ time. He had wanted a realistic shot at a second world indoor gold in Oregon, over 60 metres, but his convalescence has been fraught with complications.
“Eight weeks after surgery, I needed a second procedure,” he says. “I had developed a haematoma from a single day of training. Plus, the kidney was so delicately placed, it was moving.”
As he talks, Merritt chews through long strings of lurid red candy to keep his blood sugar levels up. He had lost 10 pounds in weight through all the hours spent under anaesthetic, as the body’s key nutrients and minerals flooded into the incision area besides his new kidney to help him heal. He is under instructions to drink at least a gallon of water of day, while he must avoid eating pomegranates and Seville oranges. Set against the starvation diet he had to endure before, as a consequence of renal failure, these are privations he can tolerate.
“I feel now as if I’m not going to fall asleep during interviews,” he says. “I feel like a whole human again. When you don’t have kidneys, you can’t process protein or toxins. You can’t have potassium or magnesium. I was eating like a bird and yet trying to compete at world level.”
For six weeks after he went under the knife for a second time, Merritt was house-bound and frustrated. “I couldn’t even go to the cinema, because I was on immuno-suppressant drugs and the doctor didn’t want me to have contact with the public. They didn’t want me lifting anything heavier than 2lb, either, because I would have put too much strain on my abdomen and risked a hernia.”
Such tribulations were as nothing, however, compared to the experience of pounding the track again with somebody else’s kidney inside him.
“The first time I went over hurdles, in December, was horrible, scary,” Merritt recalls. “It was sloppy, like a baby deer trying to walk. My coach tried to be encouraging, saying that it was a start. But I disagreed. Just a few months earlier, I had been among the best in the world. Now my knees weren’t coming up as they should, and my trailing leg wasn’t flicking around quickly enough. I suppose I just had faith, with my athlete’s muscle memory, that I would bounce back.”
A 60-metre indoor time of 7.58sec, recorded in Flagstaff last month and just 0.1sec outside his personal best, is testament to his perseverance. At Merritt’s rate of progress, a second Olympic gold in Rio, one that would complete one of the most implausible comebacks of all, is not inconceivable.
“As soon as people know about my condition, most write me off,” he says. “Just expressing to you what I’ve been through is a huge weight off me. I’m ready to show the world what I can do, now I have a working kidney again.”
The most perilous phase of his recovery is, he hopes, behind him. “There was a 25 per cent chance on the operating table that the body would reject the kidney while it was being put in,” Merritt says. “Even though they shut my immune system off, there was still that danger.”
The prognosis is encouraging. “You have two kidneys, but they’re lazy. One healthy kidney can still do all the work.”
Merritt is filled with gratitude to his sister for affording him the chance to continue leading a fulfilling and athletically fruitful life. Their relationship, strong to begin with, has grown exceptionally close through a shared ordeal in which they both left hospital together.
“LaToya is an amazing person,” Merritt says, quietly. “It takes a lot of guts to give somebody an internal organ. If I do win in Rio, my first reaction will be to seek her out, give her a hug and say, ‘We did it'.”