It would be remarkable enough if the story were just about what Todd Lodwick did last Friday in Liberec, Czech Republic, winning a gold medal at the nordic world championships after a two-year “retirement” and filling a hole in his otherwise stellar nordic combined career.
It’s mind-boggling given what happened Sunday, when the 32- year-old Steamboat Springs native won again and teammate Bill Demong joined him on the podium with a bronze medal, thereby doubling in one day the number of world championships medals for the U.S. in the history of the sport.
But the most amazing aspect of this feel-good story is that Lodwick became a double world champion less than a month after his 6-month-old son, Finn, began having unexplained seizures — a nightmare that almost kept Lodwick in Steamboat.
“It’s the most terrifying thing as a parent, to see your child do that and there’s absolutely nothing you can do,” said Lodwick’s wife, Sunny.
When the seizures started in early February, U.S. Ski Team coaches told Lodwick they understood family had to come first and that if he needed to skip the world championships, they would support that decision. Lodwick did skip a World Cup he’d planned to do the week before the world championships.
“It gave me an opportunity to train a little bit more, and I really left Steamboat with a clear head and an understanding that everything was going to be OK at home,” Lodwick said. “It was a burden off my back, and I was at ease coming to the world championships.”
The extra training didn’t hurt, especially given that the ski jumps in Steamboat have similar profiles to the ones in Liberec, but Lodwick still had to deal with fear for his son.
“It’s hard, especially when they’re so little,” Sunny said. “He can’t tell us how he feels or what he’s experiencing. Todd was having a really hard time sleeping. He was getting up constantly to check on him. You never get into that deep sleep, because you’ve always got your ear out.”
After seeing doctors in Steamboat, the Lodwicks brought Finn to Children’s Hospital in Denver for more tests. The seizures still are unexplained but have been controlled with medication.
“Every time I ask, they say we just have to wait and see,” Sunny Lodwick said. “He has to be on this medication for a year. It’s wait and see. They don’t know how it’s going to play out.”
Sunny has known Lodwick throughout his 15-year career in this obscure but fascinating sport combining ski jumping and cross country racing that is deeply woven into the culture of Steamboat. Lodwick went to the world championships with her blessing.
“She knew how hard he had worked to get where he was,” said Lodwick’s mother, Jeannie. “She convinced him it would be OK, and we would handle it here at home. He had his job to do, and she had her job to do. They have a support system of friends and family, and everybody has played a part in this.”
Lodwick also got a push out the door from his mother.
“Before he left, I said, ‘Todd, here’s the deal: Go, ski fast, jump far, have fun, get on a podium, come home,’ ” Jeannie Lodwick said. “He said, ‘You make it sound pretty easy, Mom.’ You know, sometimes it’s not as complicated as it seems.”
Perhaps, but before Friday, Lodwick had never finished better than 13th in an individual event at the world championships — in a career that includes six World Cup wins, two dozen podiums and a fifth-place finish at the 2002 Olympics, plus fourth-place finishes in the four-man team event at the 2002 Olympics and 1995 world championships.
Now he’s a double world champion.
“It’s surreal,” Lodwick said. “You always hope you have a stretch of time where you’re just on fire and you can’t be beat. Fortunately for me, it was this week.”
Fortunately for him, he’s got Sunny too.
“Obviously it was worth it,” Sunny said. “I couldn’t be happier for him.”
