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Dussault Is Praying for a Miracle
"He is the patron of my journey," Rebecca Dussault, above, said of Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died 80 years ago and was devoted to the needy.
(By Matthew Stockman -- Getty Images)
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But in that bliss the old sport tugged at her soul. It began with short skiing runs, with Tabor tucked in a pack against her chest. Then it manifested itself at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, where she watched her old teammates and felt the old longing.
"I should be here," she whispered to herself.
"No, I shouldn't," she answered.
"Yes, I should."
A few months after the Olympics, almost as a lark, she entered a race for some of the top skiers in the west. She tied for first. And this time it was Sharbel who offered the words she knew she needed to hear.
"You're wasting your talent," she remembers he said.
So tepidly, Dussault waded back into her old world. She insisted Sharbel and Tabor go with her everywhere. She told people it was a three-for-one deal and that it was a heck of a bargain. She found a team, sponsored by Subaru, that accommodated her lifestyle, found a director of the team who shared her faith. Her teammates took time they never took before to understand her.
And she started to win again, initially in the local races around Colorado, then the regionals and finally the nationals. Even this past year, weakened by the sinus problems, she was good enough to make the U.S. team.
But it wasn't until Frassati that this all made sense. She discovered him in the midst of her comeback at a Frassati festival in Denver. Immediately she was touched. He came from the family that published La Stampa, the main newspaper of Turin, and was considered extremely wealthy by Italian standards. He was an outdoorsman who also cared for the poor, contracting polio from one of those he helped and dying of the disease at 24.
According to legend, his last act was to place a package of medicine in his gnarled fingers and hand it to his sister. "Please take this to the man I was supposed to see today," he supposedly said. And when he died, some 10,000 people poured into the streets to follow his funeral procession.
As Dussault learned these things, she began to weep.
"There are so many parallels," she said. "He's from Turin, the Olympics are in Turin. I'm 24 and he died at 24. He was a model for living life to the fullest. He lived the gospel perfectly. I said, 'He is the patron of my journey.'
