U.S. flag bearer has taken big steps

TURIN, Italy – Speedskater Chris Witty will lead the American team into the Olympic Stadium tonight as the 2006 Winter Games begin. She’ll hold the flag and her head high. The frightened, confused and violated little girl in her will have taken another step in a lifelong process of healing.

Every day, in fact, the child she was and woman she is become more fused in a happy and peaceful way. She is outspoken now as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

“I’m a completely different person,” she said. “I don’t feel I have a cloud over my head. I can be more relaxed, focus on my sport and be more comfortable with the people around me.”

At 30, Witty is one of the United States’ finest athletes. This will be her fifth Olympic appearance, fourth in the Winter Games. She also competed as a cyclist in the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney. She is one of just nine Americans to have competed in both the Summer and Winter Olympics.

In early 2002, though, Witty felt lost in the darkest times of her life. Physically, she was recovering from mononucleosis. Emotionally, she was finally dealing with the sexual abuse she’d been subject to from age 4 to 11 at the hands of a neighbor in her hometown of West Allis, Wis. The man was a longtime “family friend.”

Witty never told anyone in her family. Her story is heartbreakingly familiar.

“For 20 years I believed it was all my fault,” she said. “If a kid is out there and it’s happened to them, they should know: The adult knew better, you were a child. You were innocent. It’s OK to talk about it.”

But it took a long time for Witty to do that. She slowly began confronting the monster of her past about 1996, when she found out the neighbor was being prosecuted for abusing another girl, a neighbor for whom Witty had been a babysitter. He pleaded guilty to molesting a child and served four years in prison.

Witty said she had warned the girl’s family about him, but then felt guilt that she hadn’t been able to stop it from happening to someone else.

“For a long time, I blamed myself,” she said. “I should have done more.”

Witty said that guilt and memories flooded her mind, and she dealt with severe depression that twice kept her in bed for a week. Then about a month before the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, she found out the ankle bracelet that had been used to monitor the man during his parole had been removed.

“I was overwhelmed with emotions and went to our team psychologist,” she said. “He said, ‘Don’t deal with it now, just focus on the Olympics. But promise me one month after the Olympics, you’ll come see me.’ He lifted a huge weight off my shoulders, and made me free to go compete in Salt Lake, which obviously worked. And I kept my promise and went to therapy.”

In Salt Lake City, Witty pulled out the performance of her career. She skated a world-record time of 1 minute, 13.83 seconds in the 1,000 meters, earning her first Olympic gold medal.

In therapy, she began to regain the power that had been stolen from her.

“Once I realized it wasn’t my fault,” Witty said, “that’s when the healing began.”

After almost two years of therapy, Witty was ready to take another move. She agreed to tell her story to reporter Lucinda Dillon Kinkead in Salt Lake City, where Witty now lives and trains. Kinkead’s lengthy piece in the Deseret News, detailing Platteter’s criminal history and how Witty had dealt with the abuse, ran in October 2004.

That was another big part of healing, she said. Secrecy and shame are often the abusers’ greatest allies. By publicly telling her story, Witty was able to reach thousands of people dealing with the same issues.

“It was a relief for me to get it out there,” she said. “I can see the second the subject comes up, people squirm a little bit. They don’t know what to say. Friends, strangers, even reporters, they’re like, ‘Can we talk about this? Are you comfortable?’ I appreciate their sensitivity, but for me, it’s a reality.”

Tonight she will be deluged with the best of emotions: pride in her country and her sport. And herself. To be voted flag bearer by one’s fellow athletes is as great an honor as any in sports, Witty said.

And now, she can fully appreciate and embrace these grandest of moments – and everything else.

“I didn’t know how to trust people and now I do,” she said. “I missed a lot of years of getting to know people and having deep relationships with them just because I couldn’t trust.

“I’m just really happy. I’m a homeowner; I have two dogs. I’m able to enjoy everything about life now.”