London 2012: Kayaker Scott Parsons is back for a final shot at medal

A light rain was falling, so two-time Olympic kayaker Scott Parsons tugged on a vinyl jersey before hauling his kayak down a steep hill that runs next to his rental apartment in Bethesda. He crossed the Clara Barton Parkway in his bare feet, walked gingerly down a gravel path, then slid his kayak into the Feeder Canal on the Potomac River to train. ¶ Seven years after his first retirement, and three years after his second, Parsons is back in his boat, driven once again by the nagging sense that he never got to finish his career properly. He finished sixth in the 2004 Summer Games in Athens. He missed the final at the Beijing Games in 2008 after a crushing late penalty pushed him from third place to elimination. ¶ He looks to the 2012 Summer Games in London for an Olympic medal, and closure. He hopes, most of all, to find the validation and satisfaction missing on previous Olympic trips.

“I didn’t exactly know why I had to try again,” Parsons, 32, said. “There’s a big difference between quitting and retiring, and I didn’t want to quit. . . . I think my potential now is greater than it was five years ago.”

Parsons’s journey in and out of kayaking has featured so much mental and psychological wrangling he sometimes forgets about the purely athletic sacrifices. The hours of paddling, long workouts, dryland training, intense competition — none of that compares to the conflict that has waged for years in his own head.

Living for the eighth straight year in a tiny basement apartment in a huge home owned by somebody else, he has tried to weigh the toll his low-budget sport has inflicted against the possibility that a long-sought Olympic medal — and the childhood dream it would fulfill — might yet await. The calculation has been agonizing, and ever-changing.

“He knew his dream wasn’t realized in 2008,” said Lauren Bixby, whom Parsons married in 2009. “For better or worse, he’s put pretty much everything in his life on hold. Really, all of his effort has gone to this one thing. If it ended up being a failure, that would be really hard for him to take. And it would be hard for me to see him deal” with it.

It was Bixby, who teaches special education at Wheaton High, who urged him to try again. Parsons announced his parting with the sport just minutes after pulling himself and his kayak out of the whitewater on the Beijing course, his medal hopes extinguished after an inexplicable error during a qualifying run: He missed the 20th of 21 gates on the course.

‘This is kind of who I am’

Seventeen years after having made his first national team, Parsons went home to Bethesda and stewed. All that work for what? He felt certain he should get a job or go back to school. Yet his choices seemed limited in a bad economy. He had never been to college; the day he graduated from St. John’s Jesuit High in Sylvania, Ohio, he had driven to Washington to begin his professional kayaking career. He had worked part-time as a technician at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, but he never held a full-time job.

For months after Beijing, as his wife went to work every day, providing the income to pay their bills, he watched his waistline get bigger while his self-respect shrank. He felt paralyzed.