When you’re deeply passionate about something, there is no obstacle that can stop you. Bonnie St. John was immortalized by Starbucks on their mugs with a quote from her experience as a champion skier. She said, “I was ahead in the slalom, but in the second run everyone fell on a dangerous spot. “I was beaten by a woman who got up faster than I did. I learned that people fall down, winners get up, and gold-medal winners just get up faster.”
Bonnie is experienced at getting up. At the age of five, she found herself without her right leg. She is an African-American who had a dream of being an Olympic skier. She began her training at the Ski Racing Academy in Vermont with a broken leg. Then, after that leg healed, her artificial leg broke in half. None of that could stop her.
Bonnie became the first African-American to win Olympic ski medals as she captured two bronze and the silver medal in overall performance at the Innsbruck Paralympics in 1984. She didn’t stop there, though. She also became a Rhodes Scholar, graduated with honors from Harvard, served in the Clinton Administration and wrote four books, with the fifth, Live Your Joy, on its way.
“NBC Nightly News” selected Bonnie as one of the five most inspiring women in America. She has also been featured on the “Today Show,” “Good Morning America,” CNN, “Montel,” and the Discovery Health Channel. Leading publications such as The New York Times, People magazine and Healthy, Wealthy nWise have profiled Bonnie and noted her extraordinary achievements.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Bonnie, thank you so much for being with us tonight. It’s such an honor and a privilege to be with you.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: Thank you; likewise. You have an illustrious group of people who you’ve had on the show. It’s an honor to be here.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Thank you, Bonnie. I think you are in good company. I want to begin where we always begin, with just asking you how your passions, the things that matter most to you, led you along your journey to the work that you do today.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: The skiing, becoming a ski racer, certainly was following a passion. There was nothing logical about it at all, and then my passion for the rest of my life has been motivating people. Even when I was writing a proposal to get money for skiing, to get sponsors for skiing, even in that proposal when I went back and looked at what I wrote when I was 15 years old, part of what I said was, “I want to do this because it will inspire other people.”
It’s funny how you can go back, read something like that, and not realize that you knew inside. It’s like it’s in your DNA. This is who I am, this is what I do. I inspire people.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: You do that so wonderfully. Would you tell us the incredible story of how you went from having your right leg amputated at age five to becoming an Olympic medalist, to becoming a national speaker and a television personality?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: It’s a crazy story. Just stop right there! One-legged black girl from San Diego, where there is no snow, wants to be an Olympic skier. That is a crazy story! It is so funny. Our family didn’t have a lot of money, and my mom was a single mom, a school teacher with three kids, and even the idea of going skiing was kind of crazy. My mom came home from work one day and she gave me a brochure with a silhouette of an amputee on it.
I remember just looking at it; it was like a bolt of lightening for me. Wow! A one-legged kid can go skiing. You have to understand that I was the kid who was exempt from PE. I had a special bus to take me to and from school. I wasn’t allowed to walk home with other kids. I got teased on the playground. I couldn’t jump rope with the other kids. The idea of saying, “You can go skiing,” was like saying, “Let’s go to the moon!”
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Absolutely, especially since you grew up in San Diego because you have to go a pretty good distance to find some skiing around here.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: We didn’t have money. We were black, and black people don’t ski. That is the stereotype; I’m not saying that’s true. Actually, African-Americans have the largest ski convention in North America.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Is that right?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: It is. Ten thousand African-Americans get together every other year for a ski convention, so it’s a myth that we don’t ski. It’s like we don’t golf, right? It’s the kind of thing that you grow up with, and you can see that you don’t see a lot of black skiers. You don’t see a lot of blacks in the Olympics, and it is easy to take those stereotypes and internalize them as limits.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: It is true. Until you came along there weren’t any models of African-American Olympic skiers. There certainly were plenty of African-Americans in other sports, but not in skiing, right?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: I’m the first African-American to win a medal, I think, in winter Olympics, period. I was talking with Debi Thomas, who was the first African-American in ice skating, and I interviewed Vonetta Flowers for my last book, who was the first African-American to win a gold medal in winter Olympics and she was in bobsled. I think I am the first African-American to win a medal in winter Olympics.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Wow! That’s just amazing. How did that happen? How did you go through the transition? You said that you wrote a grant or you wrote proposals. How did you get the money to be able to put this all together?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: Even before you get to the point of searching for money to go skiing, the first thing was that my mother gave me this brochure, so I saw the picture, I got the vision. Then a friend of mine in high school, Barbara Warmath, invited me to go skiing with her family over Christmas vacation. She invited me on my birthday, which is in November.
I spent the whole time, from my birthday at the beginning of November up to Christmas, just trying to solve all of the problems I had to solve in order to accept the invitation. Whenever you get a big vision, if you have a big vision for your life, something you want to do, something that is a stretch, the minute you say yes to that vision, you create a bunch of problems for yourself.
If it was easy, if you had no problems, it wouldn’t be a big vision. I said yes to the invitation. I had no winter clothes, never mind ski clothes. I didn’t have anything to wear. I didn’t have any money to buy something. It was scary for me to go on this trip, because you’re going to go far away from home, you’re going to be at this rich place. Just to say, “I don’t have any pocket money,” was a big deal for me. I needed special equipment.
I had seen in the brochure that one-legged skiers have the poles with the little ski tips on the end. All of these problems I had to solve, and I remember there was no Internet. It wasn’t just, “We’ll look it up on the Internet” back then. My mother gave me the Yellow Pages and said, “Why don’t you look up sporting-goods stores and see if you can find the equipment?”
CHRIS ATTWOOD: I have to just stop you for just one second, Bonnie, because it is also clear in this that you had some pretty incredible parents, that they would encourage you to think in that direction. Isn’t that the case?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: My dad left before I was born, so my mom was a single mother and, again, she wasn’t the kind of person to say, “Oh, honey, I’ll get the skis for you. I’ll get the money for you.” She wasn’t the kind of person to solve all my problems for me. She said, “Here are the Yellow Pages,” and she walked away. She had to cook dinner. She worked hard. She worked long hours. She wasn’t that kind of person. She would say, “Dream big dreams,” but she couldn’t hand it to you.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: That’s kind of a good thing, isn’t it?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: Yes, it is. I think it’s very difficult. When you think about that brochure that she gave me, just to have given me that; she might have picked it up somewhere, wherever she was, found it and she could have thought, “We don’t have snow; we don’t have money,” and just thrown it away.”
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Right, exactly.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: Why would she keep it? To be embarrassed; there is a humiliation factor for a parent to say, “I don’t have the money to take her skiing, so I don’t want to show it to her, because I don’t want her to be disappointed.” We can be protective of our kids. There are so many things that can get in the way of extending other people’s possibilities. We’re trying to protect them. We don’t want to be embarrassed ourselves, and all that stuff. Yes, she was extraordinary in that sense, but she couldn’t solve all the problems for me.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Yes, you had to do that. How did you manage to do that?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: I don’t want to drag you through all of it, but I ended up going to the Salvation Army to find some old ski pants. I called around and called around, and I finally found a club of amputees that did sports, and the president of the club lent me his outriggers. I saved up some money. I did odd jobs to save up some spending money, and I went. When I went out skiing with my friend, it was absolutely horrible. Horrible! You have this vision that you are going to do this beautiful, graceful thing called skiing.
I stood up on one leg. I couldn’t do a lot of sports in school; I wasn’t a big athlete, and I was used to walking around on two legs all day because I have an artificial leg. You put me on one leg, I wobble and I fall over like anyone else. I fell and I fell. I was all bruised. I wore knit mittens, because I didn’t know anything about snow. I’m from San Diego! My hands are all wet, I was bruised, and I was beat up. It was horrible, horrible. It would have been really easy to quit at that point.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Then what happened? How did you keep going?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: One thing was Barbara Warmath’s brothers took turns picking me up by the scruff of my neck over and over. That’s the thing; you fall down, you get up. You fall down, you get up. What makes you get up? What is it that makes you want to get up after the 200th time you fell over? To me, it’s that vision; it’s that sense of something. I had seen Teddy Kennedy, Jr. on one leg, on television, skiing down a hill.
I was thinking, “Wow! He’s fast and he’s graceful.” I was the crippled kid at school. To go fast and feel graceful for once in my life, I wanted to know what that felt like. That’s passion.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Yes, absolutely. Not everyone who might have a passion, in your situation would chose to actually set a goal of being an Olympic skier. How did you set that goal?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: You’re right. For me, the first challenge was just to go skiing. That was a huge challenge. I didn’t think when I first went skiing, “I’m going to go to the Olympics.” That’s not even part of the deal. The first thing was just to let me try skiing. There is always a blessing in the challenge or an opportunity in the obstacle. Part of the challenge was that I didn’t have the equipment, but I found the Ski Club, and the blessing in that was that I ended up skiing with the Ski Club.
I ended up skiing with the other amputees, and so that got me more involved. I saw that they raced, and I thought, “I’ll try racing with them.” That was when I had to start raising money and trying to get more money to be able to go to the races. Once I went to the first National Championships I said, “I did pretty well. If I could get more training…” After I went to my first National Championships, that is when I thought, “If I really work at this, I could be good enough to be on the US team.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: What did it take to actually be able to get on the US team? What are just some highlights of the things you had to go through in order to make that happen?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: What didn’t I have to go through? I’m sitting there after going to the National Championships thinking, “What am I missing? What do I need to go, to make it to the Olympics?” I’m asking you.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: What do you need? You need training. You need a coach. You need top-quality equipment.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: You need snow.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: You need snow; snow would help, yes, that’s true.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: I lived in San Diego, which is not really optimal. I’m missing all of those things. It’s funny, I’m working with a series of speeches I’m doing for Price Waterhouse Coopers, and we were talking about you have a vision and then you look at your gap analysis. My gap analysis is snow, training, coaches, equipment, and all that. I started coming up with ideas.
My first idea was to look for sponsors in Southern California and to get a team of us amputees together. We’d put together a proposal and we’d look for sponsors, which totally failed. We had a nice proposal. We did some pitches in some different companies, and we totally failed. I was in a used-book store, and I found this book called How the Racers Ski and my first reaction was, “This is my coach. This is a book on how to race, so I can use this as a coach.”
There aren’t many books on how to race, because it’s a small market. Most people can write a book on how to ski, because more people ski so you can sell more books. There aren’t many books on how to race. I found this book and I was so excited. I thought, “This is my coach,” and then I looked at the back, and it said that the author was the headmaster of a school in Vermont.
I thought, “Wow! A school for ski racers. That’s exactly what I need.” It was like, ‘Ding’. If I could go to a high school in Vermont where there’s snow, they have coaches who work on the staff. This is the school where the best skiers go. This is the place. If I want to be the best, this is where I should go. I remember that I sent away for the brochure. I remember sitting on my bed with my brother looking through the pictures.
They had kids doing dry-land training in fall, running obstacle courses and lifting weights. Then in winter, they’d load onto a bus and go to a race. They had little log cabins where they’d have their classes. I’m thinking, “Oh, my gosh! This is perfect!” Never once do I remember ever looking at those pictures and saying, “There are no black people here. I can’t go.”
Never once did I look at the picture and say, “Everybody has two legs. I might not fit in.” That’s where the best went. That’s where I wanted to go. The fact that, of course, I had no money was another issue, a tiny issue. I didn’t think that way. Again, when you have a vision, you have a focus and you have a passion, you’re focused on filling the gap analysis.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Isn’t it the case, Bonnie, that so many of us stop ourselves from achieving the great visions in our life because we sort of layer over all these concepts and beliefs? The kinds of things you weren’t having, so many of us do. “There are no black people there, so how could I go there? Everyone has two legs, so how could I go there?” With these concepts, isn’t it the case that so many of us stop ourselves?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: Absolutely.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: What a gift that you didn’t have those thoughts. Share with us then what happened? You didn’t have the money, so how did you make that happen?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: I sent in an application to the school and said, “Can I get in?” and I asked for a partial scholarship. I figured that was polite. I said, “I’m going to try to raise the rest of the money.” I put together a proposal-again, I am 15 years old-and I type up this proposal that says, “Will you help her make it to the Olympics?” I put in some local newspaper articles that I’d been featured in for going to National Championships, a budget of what I needed, and why I’m passionate about skiing.
That’s the proposal I was talking about earlier. I look back and like I said, I want to inspire other people. I want to raise the bar in what amputees can do and how disabled people are perceived. By training with two-legged skiers at the best place in the country, I will raise the level of Paralympic sport, of disabled sports. I was really passionate about all that. I went to the library, and I looked up organizations that sponsor youths, women, minorities, anything I thought might help.
This is so funny when I think about this one. When I was 15, it wasn’t like I got on the computer and printed 40 copies. I had to typewrite them. I had to do it on a typewriter; I had to make photocopies and staple it together.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: You didn’t just enter it into your word processor and print them out?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: No, and then I got on the phone to follow up with the different people. I actually got on the phone with the President of General Mills and told him I really thought he ought to put me on the Wheaties box.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: I love that.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: I actually got through. It was good training for being in sales to get past the secretary guard dogs.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Absolutely.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: I never got on the Wheaties box. I contacted all kinds of people and followed up on things. I started at the end of winter, and then school was going to start in September, so I was doing this all summer long. By the time school rolled around I had raised $100.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Oh, dear.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: You thought I was going to say $100,000, didn’t you? I only made $100, which is clearly not enough, so I called up the headmaster, Warren Witherell, and I said, “I failed. I failed to raise the money. I tried.” I’d sent him copies of this proposal and told him what I was doing and everything. “I failed.” He said two words. He said, “Come anyway.” I was stunned. I thought, “Wow! These people must be rich.”
This was beyond my comprehension that somebody could just say, “Forget the tuition, come anyway, ” but when I got to the school and I showed up-even just doing that, trying to get the airfare to get there was challenging-I looked around. It’s this small school with 65 kids. They were not rich. It was a rag-tag little school. There were a couple of log cabins for the school rooms and there were converted barns for the dining hall. They literally just made another bed out of 2 x 4s and plywood and another space in the dining hall, because they believed in my dream.
That’s another thing about the vision and the passion when you’re fueled by passion and you are communicating your passion. That’s what I tell kids. When I speak to kids in school, I say, “You’ve got to share your passion. If you don’t talk about it, if you don’t let it out from inside, how can anyone help you?” Your passion sweeps other people along, and he was excited. Here’s this one-legged black girl from San Diego who has the guts to say, “I need to be at your school.”
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Yes, it’s a fabulous story. Most of us would still say what an incredible story and incredible guts, and yet to become an Olympic skier is still another level. Will you just tell us how that happened? What did it take for you to go from getting into the school to not only just competing in the Olympics, but actually medaling in the Olympics?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: On the first day of school at Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont, I broke my leg on a skateboard. As you mentioned earlier, six weeks later, when I got out of the cast from the one leg, I broke my artificial leg. It happened, and then it got lost in the mail when I sent it in to be fixed.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Oh, no!
BONNIE ST. JOHN: I went through so many horrible things. The head coach at Burke Mountain Academy, Finn Gunderson, and I ran into each other in Salt Lake in 2002, at the Olympics. We were there, and he said, “I am so sorry.” I said. “Why?” He said, “I had never met a disabled skier before, so when you came to Burke I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.”
He was the head coach, and he didn’t want to coach me because he didn’t know what to do. What I love about that story, though, is the punch line. I ran into him in Salt Lake because he was the Chief Alpine Official for the Paralympics. I just get chills when I say that. He, Finn Gunderson, was heading up all the disabled downhill skiing. He went from, “I didn’t know what to say,” to being ‘the man’.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Bonnie, I don’t want to take you too far afield from the story, because it is a wonderful story, but I have to ask you this. I think anyone would have to agree that you had a pretty huge vision.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: From what I had and where I came from, yes, that was big.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Yes, it was a huge vision. What you’re telling us is challenge after challenge after challenge. To be honest with you, from the people I’ve talked to who have huge visions, it’s a fairly common theme. Do you think that when you set a huge vision that it’s almost like you’re being tested to see how serious you are about really achieving this big, huge thing? Why do you think there are so many things that seem to come up when one sets such a big vision for oneself?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: If it was easy, everybody would do it.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Yes, that is true.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: I don’t think it’s any kind of a metaphysical test; I just think it’s life. Reality doesn’t just roll over and say, “That’s your vision? Great!” Life doesn’t always work that way. I guess sometimes you feel like that, that you’re on your path and things are falling into place. That’s a great feeling, but life is messy. It’s just the way life is. I think I obviously set a big goal.
For somebody else to have gone skiing, if they had a lot of money, if they lived near snow, if they had parents who skied, it wouldn’t be as big a vision. It’s setting your sights on something that is challenging to do, like trying to create more cooperation between the three main religions on earth. Now there’s a big challenge!
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Yes, absolutely.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: It’s sort of saying a big vision is something worth doing because it is not easy. I think that’s what gets us excited about it, too. If it was something that just anyone could roll over and do, it wouldn’t be as exciting to try to do it. You have to have that passion. Some people hate skiing. What is your vision? What is your passion?
It is going to be different from mine. You have to figure out how you’re wired, how you are created. It has to be something that you can be passionate enough about that when you get knocked down 10 times, you’ll get up 11.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: That’s absolutely the case. When you are so passionate about something, it doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked down; there is nothing that can keep you down.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: No, but there is a slight difference here. I never felt like I was the kind of person who would say, “Never say die. I’m going to do this no matter what.” I always felt like people who say that didn’t come from my neighborhood. In my neighborhood, we don’t just say, “I’m going to do it no matter what.” It’s not like that. In my neighborhood, where I came from, with my life, you need a plan A, B, and C. Things don’t always work out.
I always knew that I wanted to go to college and I wanted to get good grades, and that’s why it was important to me to go to a school that had ski racing, because I wanted to finish school. It’s difficult to do that. It’s difficult to have different things that you’re juggling and keep going. When I was at Burke Mountain Academy I had no money, I broke both my legs, and I was still looking for sponsors while I was at Burke Mountain Academy because I still needed to raise money for racing expenses.
I wanted to pay back some of the tuition. I was always struggling with so many different things, but people asked, “Why didn’t you quit? Why didn’t you go home?” I was crying myself to sleep a lot of nights. I thought about it and I said, “I didn’t want to be the one who stopped me.” If somebody came, like the principal, and said, “We tried, but this really isn’t working. You have to go home,” I would have had to go home.
If my mother said, “You’re really far away from home. I’m not comfortable with this. You have to come home.” I would have had to come home, but no adult stopped me. I wasn’t going to be the one to stop me. I was okay with saying, “I might fail,” but I wasn’t going to be the one to make me fail. That’s a tremendous think to look at. If you simply make the decision that you aren’t going to be the thing that makes you fail, it’s kind of amazing what you can do. I’ve still always had plan A, plan B, plan C. I don’t put all my eggs in one basket.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Obviously, you graduated from Harvard magna cum laude and then became a Rhodes Scholar, but let’s finish the Olympic story first. Tell us how you went from the academy to being one of the top skiers in the world.
BONNIE ST. JOHN: Burke was a tough year. It was my senior year in high school. Even when I was in casts with both of my legs, I was still going to the weight room and lifting weights. I was doing the stomach routines, the abdominal exercises, with everybody. I was still writing proposals. It was a tough year, but by the end of it I was changed from the disabled kid, the nerd in school, to being an athlete.
I knew how to work out. I knew how to train. I had learned a lot about myself. Within 24 hours after my graduation, I was living on a glacier in Oregon. I had a job in the gift shop there. I had hired my own coach. I was part of a coaching program, because I had the contacts through Burke Mountain Academy and could put all this together. I spent the summer training on a glacier.
I had been accepted to Harvard. I ended up taking a year off and training in Colorado, and I went back to the glacier again. I think I trained in Lake Tahoe too, so I trained in different places, qualified for the team, and made it. Being at Burke Mountain Academy was really the crucial turning point to turn me into the kind of person who really could be good enough to be on the Olympic team.
CHRIS ATTWOOD: Fantastic. You obviously have been through a lot. You’ve had a lot of experience. You now have achieved great recognition. It’s interesting that your most recent book is called How Strong Women Pray, and in that book you interviewed some extremely well-known women, people like Maya Angelou and Edie Falco, Barbara Bush, Kathy Lee Gifford, as well as a number of unsung heroes, people who we may not have heard of, but are women who have achieved great things. What was it that inspired you to write that book after all you have achieved in your life?
BONNIE ST. JOHN: The funny part is that I got the idea while I was praying. At that time I had a routine where I would …
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