‘A sense of purpose’ Near-death episode changes Wylie’s life forever


BY DAVE LEMIEUX Paul Wylie’s greatest comeback


wasn’t his unexpected silver medal at the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, France. Nor was it coming within a whisker


of the top 10 at the 1991 World Cham- pionships in Munich, Germany, after barely finishing 20th in the short pro- gram. Nor was it an emotional appear-


ance at “An Evening with Champions” at Harvard in the autumn of 2015 (though that came close). Wylie’s biggest comeback was lit-


“Learning jumps in skating taught me a lot about life. If I didn’t fall I wouldn’t learn. It was true about my Axel, my double Axel, my triple Axel. Whether I have faced struggles in competition or in business, the approach was the same: Go back to the basics and build up the elements that make your performance complete. That life experience spoke volumes to me as I recovered from sudden cardiac arrest. As soon as I was allowed, I began to “Get Up” and walk around the hospital, do squats and stretch. After I received my ICD, I started to walk the dog, then get back on the ice, then jog. Finally, after about six months, I was doing my double Axel again and performing in a televised show with my family. I realize there are people who have overcome much more than me, but what I have learned is this: If you can, you have to challenge yourself to get up and do something every day!”


30 DECEMBER 2016


erally from the dead after suffering a sudden cardiac arrest five months before that stirring performance at his alma mater. From the second he collapsed during a sprint workout on April 21, 2015, until he emerged from an in- duced coma two days later, Wylie’s fate was completely out of his hands. “I spent the first few days with


the thought in my mind of how close to eternity I had come and what did it mean,” Wylie said, while hustling between commitments on a typically busy day in late October. “It continues to be something that amazes me. It scared me at first. When you experi- ence this you think, ‘Why am I here? What is my purpose?’” A year and a half afterward, Wylie


thinks he has some answers to those questions. “As an athlete you think the most important thing is skating, but I’ve moved on. As a husband and father, those are the most important things. I feel a real sense of purpose.” Wylie and his wife Kate, who


played Division I hockey at Brown University, have been married for 17 years and have three children — Han- nah, Emma and Caleb. They live in Charlotte, North Carolina. As Wylie lay unconscious on the


surface of a North Carolina running track on a spring day over a year ago, the chance he’d reach his 17th wed- ding anniversary was thinner than the hollow ground edges of a figure skat- ing blade.


It seemed impossible it was hap-


pening. Wylie was extremely fit and in perfect health, yet his heart had stopped beating and he would soon stop breathing. It wasn’t a heart at- tack, but something even more dead- ly — a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). “A heart attack is a plumbing prob- lem,” Wylie explained. “Your pipes are blocked; sudden cardiac arrest is an electrical problem.” Extremely rare in athletes, SCA


is the leading cause of natural death among


American adults. Of the


326,200 who suffer a SCA each year, only 10.6 percent survive, according to the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Founda- tion. Of those, 8.6 retain good neuro- logical function. That is, without brain damage. The only time your chances of sur-


viving a SCA are better than 1 in 10 is if one of the 3 percent of Americans who knows CPR happens to be nearby or there’s an automated external de- fibrillator (AED) close. In those cases, your odds improve to almost 1 in 3. So, however you cut it, the odds


weren’t good for Wylie when he col- lapsed in the midst of a 600-yard sprint near the end of crushing inter- val workout. He’d pushed his heart past its max, he said. It began beating uncontrollably fast. It was, in fact, sim- ply quivering, incapable of pumping blood to his body and, more critically, to his brain. If normal rhythm wasn’t restored within minutes he’d die, or, at best, suffer irreversible brain damage. Farther up the track Erik Kop-


co finished his 600, turned and saw Wylie lying crumpled on the ground. Wylie’s odds were about to get better. Wylie was still breathing when Kopco reached him, but it wasn’t long before he stopped. Kopco and Billy Griggs, who’d also rushed over, began CPR. When EMTs arrived a few min-


utes later Wylie’s odds improved even more, then plummeted again when his heart did not respond to defibrillation. With Wylie’s chances fading fast, the EMTs got his heart beating regularly


PHOTO COURTESY OF VICK PHOTOGRAPHY


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72