She admits the national magazine cover floored her. The headline read: Olympian Silken Laumann’s Shocking Secret.
“Shocking secret!” said Laumann, interviewed recently at home. She let out an exasperated laugh. It seemed, well ... like a National Enquirer headline, for gosh sakes.
The Maclean’s magazine story was about the Olympian’s 292-page memoir. Unsinkable: My Untold Story is a candid — and often brutally frank — examination of Laumann’s life.
The book’s climax is the famous story of how the rower won a bronze medal at the 1992 Summer Olympic Games. The miracle: She managed it despite having suffered a ghastly leg injury just 10 weeks before (“it was like a shark bite,” Laumann now says).
Instantly, the Canadian rower was an international hero. Her Herculean feat ranks as one of the great comeback stories in Olympics history.
So what’s the so-called “shocking secret” revealed in Unsinkable? It’s Laumann’s description of her mother’s abuse when the athlete was a child.
It’s not a pretty picture.
Laumann is 49 and living with her husband, GoodLife Fitness founder David (Patch) Patchell-Evans, and their children in a gated North Saanich waterfront home. In her memoir, she recalls how her mother, Seigrid, delivered verbal attacks that “left me convinced I was a devious, bad person” as a child.
According to Unsinkable, her mother, when enraged, would say: “I could kill you and then kill myself.” The book continues: “She would howl that she was going to gas us all. Her threat was that she would kill herself and take us with her. She never did anything to show that she’d go through with it, but I slept with my window open.”
The situation left young Laumann battling anorexia and, at times, cutting herself. Happily, sports became a salvation for the troubled teenager struggling with self-doubt.
Media reports about Laumann’s memoir, which had already drawn national attention, became even more sensational after family members publicly weighed in. Her mother, father Hans and older sister Daniele wrote a letter circulated to media outlets that said many incidents portrayed in Unsinkable were “either not true or exaggerated.”
Chatting at her seaside home office, Laumann seemed charitable about her family’s reaction. She said her younger brother, Joerg, does support her recollections of family disharmony. (In her book, she says he slept with a knife under his pillow as a kid because he “didn’t trust Mom.”)
She acknowledged being “hurt” by her family’s renunciation, but added the reaction wasn’t completely unexpected.
“Everyone sees their family differently. But there’s also the truth,” said Laumann.
“I took five years to write this book. It took a long time to process all my experience. I had the help of a counsellor. I’m ready to tell the story. I’m ready to say: ‘You know what? This is what happened.’ If my other family members aren’t ready, I can’t criticize them.”
She said these days her mother, remarried and living in Florida, makes little effort to contact her children. Why would she have behaved so strangely when the family was together? Laumann’s book suggests her mother — a talented sculptor — might have felt stifled by the task of raising children.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes our parents remain a mystery to us. My mom has never gone to get a diagnosis of what goes on in her mind. Her behaviour was sometimes so bizarre and so destructive, it does lie quite far outside of normal.”
Laumann said it was a tough slog writing a book chronicling her Olympian achievements, a childhood mixed with joy as well as despair, disappointments (her first marriage failed) and eventual stability and happiness.
A motivational speaker for two decades, Laumann had noticed bits and pieces of her untold story were beginning to surface in her public talks. She decided she had reached a point where it was essential she write her autobiography, so she could move forward in her life.
“I just had to allow the story to be told. I had to stop self-editing and self-censoring,” said Laumann, who underwent therapy before writing Unsinkable. “I wanted people to know how I felt when I was five and when I was 10. How I felt on the starting line in Barcelona.”
Laumann was a writer before Unsinkable. As well as articles, she had written Child’s Play (2007), her book on encouraging children to become active and healthy. But a memoir was different. Several times she hit dead ends.
She fretted over how revealing to make her autobiography. What would her family think? What would the Canadian public think?
Encouragement from close friends got her through. As well, Laumann — grappling with how to structure the book — enlisted the help of writer Sylvia Fraser.
To write Unsinkable, to view her life objectively, Laumann realized she would have to “disengage” from the task. The dispassionate approach had worked for her before — albeit in vastly different circumstances. It helped her get through her infamous collision with another boat in Essen, Germany, in 1992.
She writes of the injury to her right calf: “... it was torn open, the bone exposed and the flesh folded down so that it dangled below my ankle like a piece of meat. … it seemed unrecognizable as my leg.”
Laumann explained in the interview: “There is a disassociation that happened. I almost disassociated my body instantly. It was like I was out of my body, staring at my leg, going: ‘Oh, that’s really bad.’ ”
After five operations and 27 days of rehabilitation, Laumann was back in her shell, training. She described her thoughts as she raced, neck and neck, to score the bronze medal at a singles event at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
“There was that good old stubbornness that came into play in those last 50 strokes,” said Laumann, who’d fought exhaustion half-way through the race. “At that point there’s no oxygen going to your brain. It’s like seeing this number: ‘Fourth?’ No frickin’ way I’m coming in fourth!”
Her wound is displayed boldly, even proudly, for the sepia-toned photo on Unsinkable’s cover. It was a brave decision. Laumann’s lower right calf looks as if she survived a bad car accident or a bear attack.
The injury left her with “foot drop” — she lifts her foot with her knee because the muscles that would normally lift it no longer work. She also has arthritis in her right ankle.
Asked how she views her injury today, Laumann recalled reading James Orbinski’s A Perfect Offering, about his humanitarian efforts in Rwanda and elsewhere, which forced him to face atrocities regularly.
“He says: ‘No scars, no story, no life.’ If you go out and do the real business of living, putting yourself out there and taking some risks, you’re going to have some scars. And you’re going to have a story,” Laumann said.
Her overwhelming feeling after Unsinkable’s publication? Relief.
“There’s been a serious sense of ‘dropping the load’ — that load of secrecy. For me, what happened in our home growing up, some of that was really hard. But what also was really hard was pretending it hadn’t happened.”