The Gold Medal Mutation
It is December 2010, and human civilization in northern Scandinavia is temporarily reduced to a layer of sediment beneath the snow. Excavation will come only with spring. The last few days have seen record snow and a constant -15 degrees Fahrenheit at the Arctic Circle in Finland—the Napapiiri, as the Finns call it—where I am now. There’s no wind, so the first crunching step outside each morning is deceptively placid, before nose hairs morph into ice daggers.
The Finns call this part of the year “Kaamos time.” There is no exact English word for Kaamos, but it roughly means polar night. It means the time of the year when northern Finland is tilted so far from the sun that daylight is really three hours of twilight that around two P.M. flickers out as if under a cosmic candle snuffer.
I’m driving north along highway E8, in search of a ghost. And this is the perfect place for one to live—among the pines and spruce made hard by the cold and made white by the snow; beside the Swedish whitebeam and the European white elm; and amid the silver birch and the downy birch with their white skins wrapped in a blanket of white mist. Reindeer prance beside the road and disappear into whorls of snow. It is all thick and white, as if some celestial milk bottle had toppled over and I’m driving through the puddle. This is a land of austere beauty, of the most gleaming whites of sky and snow and the most vacuous blacks of night.
But Iiris Mäntyranta was born not far from here, and she can see colors. To her, the sky has a bluish tinge, and the walls of cloud give passage to the occasional spangle of purple light.
Before I made contact with Iiris months earlier, I was not sure whether my ghost—her father—was even still alive. His words had not appeared in any English-language press I could track down since the 1960s, when he emerged from his tiny Arctic hamlet and won seven Olympic medals, three of them gold. Now we are traveling north, together, to meet him.
After three hours of driving from Luleå, Sweden, where Iiris works as a county government administrator, we are getting close. Just past the Arctic Circle, we drive through Pello, a town of four thousand that is the last semblance of a city we will see along the road. On our way out of Pello, we pass a granite pedestal atop which sits a larger-than-life bronze statue of a man in mid-cross-country ski stride. The man is Iiris’s father.
A half hour later we pull off the paved road and drive down a narrow pass among the pine trees. We stop in front of a cream-colored house on the west side of a large lake. As I get out of the car, I’m conscious of being watched. I turn to look back at the pass down which we came. A sandy-colored reindeer has come around the corner and has its gaze fixed on me, as if it can smell the Brooklyn on my clothes. It’s frigid and snowing, so we hurry inside the house.
No sooner do I step inside and kick the frost from my boots onto the welcome mat below the rifle rack than an oddly Mediterranean face appears in the entryway. It is the man from the statue, the great Eero Mäntyranta. I’m taken aback. In pictures I had seen of him from the 1960s his skin was perhaps slightly too dark for the Arctic, but it was nothing that would warrant a second look. But now he is closer to the hue of the red paint that comes from this region’s iron-rich soil than to that of the snow. Iiris told me on the drive up that her father’s unique gene mutation had caused his skin to redden as he got older, but I didn’t quite expect this shade of cardinal, mottled in places with purple.
The contrast is stark when Eero’s wife, Rakel, with her glacier blue eyes and alabaster skin, steps into the entryway. Eero speaks no English, but he greets me with a wide smile. Everything about him has a certain width to it. The bulbous nose in the middle of a softly rounded face. His thick fingers, broad jaw, and a barrel chest covered by a red knit sweater with stern-faced reindeer across the middle. He is a remarkable-looking man. His dark hair is meticulously slicked back and he has prominent cheekbones that seem to draw up the edges of his thin lips so that he looks constantly pleased and inquisitive. There is also an unmistakable strength about him, never mind that he is seventy-three years old. The middle finger of his right hand is bent sharply at the top joint, a periscope peering at the index finger. His hands look as if they could snap a ski pole in two, a supposition backed up by his handshake.
Eero ushers me to the kitchen where Rakel serves tea and coffee to me and to Iiris and to Iiris’s Swedish husband, Tommy, as well as to Iiris’s son Viktor, a musician—his band Surunmaa plays a fusion of folk, blues, and tango—who is staying in a cabin on Eero’s property while he films a documentary about his grandfather’s life.
The wide windows in the kitchen look out into the snowy forest. This used to be an area of extreme poverty, but now even the remote north of Finland has prospered from the country’s trade in timber and electronics, and the residences are as impeccably kept as dollhouses. Sitting here sipping tea from a tiny porcelain cup, grinning at a red-nosed man in a reindeer sweater, I feel certain that I have stepped into a Christmas snow globe.
After introductions and tea, I follow Eero outside where he feeds a dozen reindeer handfuls of pale green lichen. The reindeer are used for racing and also for meat. When I walk up to one of the animals, Viktor translates Eero’s warning that, unlike horses, reindeer do not like to be touched by human hands. Some of the reindeer are teddy bear brown, and others are chalk white. Outside, against the falling snow, the redness of Eero’s face is in its greatest relief.
With daylight quickly fading, we return indoors. Over the next few hours I interrogate Eero about his remarkable athletic career. Iiris, Tommy, and Viktor take turns translating the language that to my ears sounds like a stream of deep “ess’s,” punctuated by crackling “k’s” and “cox’s” spliced with the occasional Spanish-sounding rolling “r.”
When the sun fades, we will take a break from talking for a meal of reindeer meat and potatoes. And Eero will laugh deeply when the fork he is holding returns his mind to a time more than forty years ago, when he was one of the greatest athletes in the world.
•
It was 1964 and Eero Mäntyranta was once again in the uncomfortable position of honored guest. Surrounded by the clinking of crystal, he furrowed his heavy eyebrows at the three forks flanking his plate. He had just won two golds and a silver medal at the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, dominating the cross-country skiing competition to such an extent that the media deemed him “Mr. Seefeld,” a reference to the competition venue. In the 15K race, Mäntyranta finished forty seconds ahead of the next skier—a margin of victory never equaled in that event at the Olympics before or since—while the next five finishers were within twenty seconds of one another. In the 30K race he won by over a minute. Now came the hard part: dinner. Becoming one of your nation’s all-time great athletes necessarily comes with a glut of honorary feasts.
After his first gold, in a relay at the 1960 Games in Squaw Valley, California, Mäntyranta attended a celebratory meal in Los Angeles organized by Finland’s Olympic committee. That time, he was about to drink from a goblet on the table when a group of urbane guests strode up and began washing their hands in it. But the three forks presented a new puzzle.
When Mäntyranta was a child growing up in rural Lankojärvi, Finland, in the 1940s, his family shared a single fork. It was passed around the 170-square-foot room that was their house, overlooking the lake for which the town was named. In lieu of cutlery, the children used sharpened sticks to spear chunks of potato and slices of bread.
The Mäntyranta brood would have numbered twelve had all the children survived. As it was, they were six. Still, with Eero, his parents, his brothers and sisters, and his older sister’s husband, the single room could be a bit cozy. Add the neighbors who would stop by to shoot the breeze and have a cigarette, and it was not uncommon to have a dozen people in the room. In that atmosphere, young Eero first employed the admirable capacity for solitary focus that would later serve him well during the lonely training hours on the ski trail under the black sky of Kaamos time. He was an excellent student, only because he could block out the commotion in the room, curl up underneath the smoke, and do his schoolwork by the fickle light of an oil lamp. Those were spare days in postbellum Finland, with the country locked in two decades of war debt to the Soviet Union.
Eero was only six years old in the winter of 1943, when Nazi soldiers pushed north and Lankojärvi was evacuated. He was put on a truck with all the women and children from the town and told by a Finnish soldier to keep quiet lest German soldiers hear them. He shuddered when one old woman refused to heed the advice and belted out Communist work songs. The truck eventually made it to a ferry that took them across the border into Overtornea, Sweden, where Eero gazed in wonderment at the bullet shells that lay across the ground like a dusting of leaden snow. He and his family stayed in Sundsvall, Sweden, through the winter, until they were allowed to return to a Finland free of snow and free of Nazis.
The trek back home in the spring was a journey of diminishing hope. They had to take a horse and carriage through the woods because the roads were strewn with live landmines. The German military set fires on their way out of Finland, and in a country whose towns are but clearings amid dense forest, tinder was in hearty supply. Lapland burned like a vast fire pit, making smoldering embers of what were once doorjambs, staircases, and gables crafted from pine.
But the Mäntyrantas returned to find their home one of the few standing. They lived on the remote side of the water, with no road, so Nazi soldiers didn’t bother to venture over the lake and through the woods to raze the few nondescript shacks on the other side. The lake had saved their home. The same lake that started Eero’s skiing career.
While the Germans didn’t try to cross the lake, many of the children of Lankojärvi had no choice. School was on the other shore. Almost as soon as Mäntyranta could walk, he could ski, and within a year of returning from Sweden, he was joining other kids in skating—he once fell through the ice and nearly drowned—or skiing across the lake to school, on nothing more than wooden planks nailed together. It took about an hour to make the trip, and during winter it was pitch black the entire way, so the kids would simply aim at the far shore and hope for the best.
Out of necessity, everyone in Lapland skied. But it did not take long for Mäntyranta to stand out. As early as seven years old he would win the cross-country-ski races at school. When he was ten, he started winning the races that brought kids from local villages together. At eleven, he polished off the youth competition in the entire municipality of Pello.
Unlike the Finnish youth in the south, Mäntyranta never dreamed about sporting glory as a boy. Sports had been integral to Finland’s identity ever since the country declared independence from Russia in 1917. National sports organizations were formed, and they paid off in spades—and medals. The “Flying Finn” distance runners dominated the world in the 1920s. After World War II, when Helsinki was awarded the 1952 Olympics, sport again became a beacon of unity for the Finnish people. But Finland’s sporting tradition had no impact on young Eero. With no radio or newspapers in Lankojärvi, he had no idea who the great Finnish athletes were. He didn’t have the chance to be inspired by the words of the beloved Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, who told the world, “Mind is everything. Muscle—pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind.” Mäntyranta’s only exposure to the ’52 Helsinki Games was a picture that he saw in a neighbor’s house of a Brazilian man triple-jumping. For Eero Mäntyranta, skiing was a mode of transportation and a chance for a better job.
For twenty years after the end of the war, Finland’s economic growth was stunted by having to send surplus money and resources to Russia to pay off war debt, so the only job for a young man in Lapland was cutting and hauling wood from the forest. At fifteen, Mäntyranta was living in the forest among grown men, many of them criminals who came to the far north to evade the law. The men spent their leisure time drinking, playing cards, and fighting. Mäntyranta slept with a block of wood under his pillow in case he had to bludgeon an attacker during the night. It was both a harrowing and exciting existence for a young man. But after two years, he’d had enough.
He knew that the government had a habit of giving promising young cross-country skiers cushy jobs as border patrol guards where they could essentially ski along the border for both training and work. So he started training in his free time from forest work, and his progress was stunning. At nineteen, he traveled to Switzerland for a series of races that, if he performed well, would push him toward the Finnish national team. He won all of them, and a job as a border patrol guard followed soon thereafter.
Mäntyranta’s mother warned him that it was time to save money, not to go chasing girls. He heeded that advice for a good two weeks, until he spent a night in Pello dancing with his blond-haired, blue-eyed future wife. When the couple later had children, Mäntyranta would often train in the summer by sending Rakel and the kids off in a car to their cottage twenty miles away. He would then run or walk to meet them.
Despite regular smuggling over the Sweden/Finland boundary, the border north of the Arctic Circle was generally quiet, especially in winter, so Mäntyranta had plenty of time to throw himself into training. At 5'7" (in thick socks), he was very small for a cross-country skier. With black eyebrows arcing over dark brown eyes, and a slight tan complexion to his skin, he looked more like someone born of an Italian beach, not the lower Arctic pine forest. But there he was, for fifty miles a day, jabbing away with his poles at the snowy blanket that covered the earth. He often trained by the moonlight. Or, if he was near the road in Pello, he would exist for a moment in the beams of a passing car, before fading back into the darkness. When the moon was obscured, he worried that he would ski headlong into trees, but he managed to stay clear of accidents, and his progress continued at a remarkable clip.
By twenty-two years old, he was clearly good enough to ski for Finland at the 1960 Olympics, but most of the best skiers were older, and team officials weren’t eager to allow an inexperienced skier to test his mettle on the biggest stage. Mäntyranta persuaded the team managers to allow an intramural time trial. He placed second, behind thirty-five-year-old skiing legend Veikko Hakulinen, who already had two Olympic golds. The performance earned Mäntyranta a spot on the 4×10K relay team at the Games, where they took home the gold.
That Olympic title was just the preamble. Two golds and a silver followed in Innsbruck in 1964. Then a silver and two bronzes in Grenoble, France, in ’68, and a bevy of world championship medals along the way. In all, he placed in five hundred races, amassing enough crystal glasses and silver bowls and dishes to fill a china shop. Even now, he will awake some days and tell Rakel that his legs are tired because he was again ski racing in his dreams.
But Mäntyranta’s trail to the skiing pantheon started long before the 1960 Games. It started before the work in the forest prodded him to seek a better life. Before he began skiing across the lake to school on warped planks. Even before he first stood on skis when he was three years old. It began when his great-grandfather made the trip to Finland.
•
The details of the Mäntyranta family’s beginnings in Finland are murky, but relatives were certainly in Lapland by the 1850s. It was probably Eero’s great-grandfather who came from Belgium to work as a blacksmith, forging coins. His son, Isak, married a woman named Johanna, whose father was just wealthy enough to own a swath of land north of Lankojärvi. Isak and Johanna lived in a cottage on the land on the condition that Isak help the resident farmers there with their work. But Isak was not one for manual labor and he soon wore out his welcome.
Eero would not inherit Isak’s lax work ethic, but—via his father, Juho—he would inherit a rare version of a gene that altered his body’s blood supply.
The first sign in Eero was during a routine medical exam when he was a teenager. A blood test showed that he had extraordinarily high levels of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in red blood cells. It is the iron in hemoglobin that gives blood its red color. Because Eero was perfectly healthy, there was little concern about his high hemoglobin levels.
But that began to change during his competitive career. Every time he was examined, Eero was found to have high hemoglobin and far more than the usual amount of red blood cells. Normally, those are signs that an endurance athlete is blood doping, often with a synthetic version of the hormone erythropoietin, or EPO. EPO signals the body to produce red blood cells, so injecting it spurs an athlete’s own body to bolster its blood supply.
At times, Eero’s extraordinary red blood cell count—measured at up to 65 percent higher than that of an average man—sullied his sterling career. Despite the fact that his blood levels had been documented since he was a kid, speculation was rife that his unusual blood profile was the result of doping. It was not until twenty years after his retirement from skiing that scientists pinpointed the truth.
•
From time to time, other members of the Mäntyranta family would discover through a routine medical test that they had elevated hemoglobin levels. Because there were no apparent ill health effects, doctors did nothing about it.
It was enough, however, to ignite the curiosity of Pekka Vuopio, the head of hematology at the University of Helsinki and a native Laplander who knew well the athletic exploits of Eero Mäntyranta. In 1990, Vuopio and his colleagues invited Eero to Helsinki for a series of tests in the hope that examining him might shed light on a condition called polycythemia, an elevation in red cells that can cause a dangerous thickening of the blood and that sometimes runs in families.
One of the doctors’ first theories was that Eero’s red blood cells might have a longer life span than normal, so that new blood cells were produced before old ones had been cleared away. But that turned out not to be the answer. Another possibility was that Eero naturally secreted high levels of EPO, thus instructing his body to overproduce red blood cells. But that wasn’t it either. The level of EPO in Eero’s blood was so low that it was nearly below the lower limit for healthy adult men.
But when hematologist Eeva Juvonen examined Eero’s bone marrow cells in the lab, she saw something astonishing. In order to test whether his bone marrow cells—which produce red blood cells—were particularly sensitive to EPO, the research protocol was to add EPO to a cell sample and track red blood cell production. Eero’s bone marrow cells began the process of creating red blood cells before Juvonen could even stimulate them with EPO. Whatever tiny speck of EPO that was already in the sample was enough to keep the red cell factories humming. So it was clear that Eero’s body heeded the call of even trace quantities of EPO with extraordinary vigor. Illuminating the reason why would require more members of the Mäntyranta clan.
•
Albert de la Chapelle identifies himself as a gene hunter. He is exceedingly good at tracking his prey. He is the geneticist who argued on behalf of María José Martínez-Patiño when she was barred from competing as a woman. These days he spends his time at Ohio State University training his sights on the genes that predispose people to the most deadly cancers ever known, like acute myeloid leukemia, which interferes with blood cell production and can put a previously healthy patient in the ground in a matter of weeks.
De la Chapelle spent most of his career at the University of Helsinki, hunting gene mutations that cause diseases that show up in Finland far more often than in the rest of the world. These diseases come from so-called founder mutations, meaning that a mutation arose in a member of a small group and spread through that population as it grew. De la Chapelle was part of a team that clarified the genetic basis of more than twenty diseases—multiple forms of epilepsies and dwarfisms among them—that are endemic to Finland. (And sometimes to Minnesota, a state heavy with residents of Finnish ancestry.)
Not long after Eero Mäntyranta’s blood was examined in the lab, de la Chapelle made a trip to Lankojärvi to meet a group of forty Mäntyrantas who had assembled at Eero’s house to talk with the researchers who were now studying their blood. It was winter, and de la Chapelle remembers marveling at the noontime sun as it kissed the surface of the lake.
After a lunch of fresh reindeer prepared by Rakel, de la Chapelle set to mingling in the living room. “I was sitting there on the couch with these three elderly ladies,” de la Chapelle recalls, “and I already knew two had the condition and one did not. And they went over their health with me and it was the one without the condition that had all the health problems and the two with it were quite healthy and were unaware of anything at all being different with them.”
Even if not for their slightly darker complexions, de la Chapelle would have known that the two healthy women had the blood condition. He had already been through their genomes.
In all, ninety-seven Mäntyrantas were examined, twenty-nine of whom had remarkably high hemoglobin, along with slightly ruddier complexions than the average Finn. Unlike the initial study of Eero, this examination went more than blood deep. De la Chapelle probed all the way down to a particular gene on the nineteenth chromosome, the EPOR, or erythropoietin receptor gene.
This particular gene tells the body how to build the EPO receptor, a molecule that sits atop bone marrow cells awaiting the EPO hormone. If the EPO receptor is a keyhole, it is one made specifically to accept only the key that is the EPO hormone. Once the key is in the lock, the production of red blood cells proceeds. The receptor signals a bone marrow cell to start the process of creating a red blood cell that contains hemoglobin.
Of the 7,138 pairs of bases that make up the EPO receptor gene, there was a single base that was different in the twenty-nine family members who had unusually elevated hemoglobin levels. Each family member, like every human being, had two copies of the EPOR gene. But at position 6,002 in only one copy of each affected family member’s two EPOR genes, there was an adenine molecule instead of a guanine molecule. A minuscule alteration, but the impact was immense.
Instead of adding information for the cellular machinery to continue to build the EPO receptor, the spelling change constituted a “stop codon,” the genetic equivalent of a period at the end of the last sentence of a chapter. A stop codon essentially tells RNA—ribonucleic acid, the molecule that reads DNA code so that it can be translated into action—that the instructions are finished. Move along, nothing more to read here, it says. So instead of coding for the amino acid tryptophan, as that section of the EPOR gene normally would have, the Mäntyranta family mutation caused the receptor simply to stop being built with over 15 percent of its construction unfinished. The unfinished portion in the affected Mäntyranta family members happens to be a segment of the receptor in the interior of the bone marrow cell. The piece of the receptor on the exterior of the cell awaits the EPO key, while the interior portion modulates the subsequent response, acting like a brake to halt hemoglobin production. In the affected Mäntyrantas, who are missing the brake, the production of red blood cells runs amok.
Fortunately for the family, the overproduction of red blood cells did not lead to ill health. Save for the slightly dark complexion, family members had no outward signs of abnormality and generally discovered their condition by accident during routine checkups.
The Mäntyranta EPOR gene finding was a major discovery in the early 1990s. The high hemoglobin condition in the Mäntyrantas was passed down through the family in an autosomal dominant fashion, meaning that only a single copy of the mutant gene was required for a family member to have the condition. Other dominantly inherited gene mutations had been discovered before that study, but they were generally tied to serious illnesses.
In the papers they published in 1991 and 1993, the researchers noted that Mäntyrantas who carried the family EPOR mutation had long lives. They had found, it seemed, a mutation beneficial for an athlete and otherwise of little consequence. De la Chapelle says, though, that he could never convince Eero himself that the EPOR mutation aided him in his Olympic quest. “He kept saying that it was not his bodily strength,” de la Chapelle says, “but his determination and psyche.”
•
Since I came all the way from Brooklyn to meet him, Eero is eager to tell me about his visit to New York City after the 1960 Winter Games. “Scary” is how he describes his first impression of the morass of Cadillacs, streetlights, and asphalt.
He has also laid out for me some of his most prized medals, the seven from the Olympics, and a medal of honor that the government normally reserves for military heroes. As they have for polar night, the Finns have an untranslatable word, sisu, that roughly means strength of passion, or calm determination in the face of obstacles. The Finnish government determined that Eero was the embodiment of sisu.
Iiris, wearing shoulder-length blond hair and black-rimmed glasses, translates a story from her childhood about the aftermath of the 1964 Olympics, when the local electric company paid for Eero to return home in a helicopter. It landed atop the ice covering the lake amid hundreds of revelers who had gathered to celebrate. Iiris was a little girl, and remembers running excitedly toward the helicopter. At first, Eero enjoyed the attention, and it afforded him a job working for the local government teaching physical education to children. But it quickly became a burden.
Through the mid-1960s, reporters would show up unannounced at Eero’s door asking him to “tell me a story, but not what you tell others,” Eero says through Iiris’s translation. Before competitions, tourists from southern Finland would drop by asking to see medals and to take pictures, requests that Eero and Rakel felt obliged to honor. For Eero, skiing had always been more about winning and getting a better job than an intrinsic love of the activity, so the unwanted attention was enough to push him to retire from ski racing following the 1968 Olympics, at the age of thirty.
At the behest of a Finnish celebrity magazine, he made a brief comeback before the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan. He had not skied a stride, or exercised at all, for three years, and he was well above his racing weight. The magazine promised to pay Eero’s training expenses so that he could take a break from work so long as he gave the publication access to document his comeback. Eero returned to the trails just six months prior to the Olympics but made the team and finished nineteenth in the 30K race in Japan before going back into retirement, this time for good.
Toward the end of my visit, we all take spots on couches and chairs in the living room, flanked by paintings of winter landscapes. Eero points out a series of sepia photographs hanging on the wall. They are of his ancestors. There is swarthy-skinned Isak, in a vest and newsboy cap, reclining on the ground of a forest clearing and enjoying a meal with Johanna, her head wrapped in a light-colored scarf. And above that is a picture of Eero’s parents, Juho and Tynne, sitting on wooden chairs in a patch of cleared land with several of their children.
Isak and Juho died before de la Chapelle ever started probing the family genome, but enough Mäntyrantas were tested that he was able to create a genetic family tree and deduce that they had the EPOR mutation. Juho’s two brothers, Leevi and Eemil, also carried the mutation.
But it will soon come to an end down Eero’s line. His son Harri had it and showed promise as a youth cross-country skier, but Harri died as a young man of an illness that had no relation to the EPOR mutation. Iiris does not have it, and of Eero’s remaining two children, fraternal twins Minna and Vesa, only Minna has it, but her only son does not.
When I ask Eero whether he was relieved that the University of Helsinki doctors lifted the suspicion of blood doping from his victories, he says yes, but that he disagrees with the suggestion that the mutation gave him an advantage. Eero’s feeling is that the increased viscosity of his red-cell-loaded blood would have hampered his blood circulation, thus balancing any performance benefits. De la Chapelle disagrees staunchly. “It’s an advantage, there’s no question,” he told me, noting that Eero’s hemoglobin levels were the highest he has ever seen. “If the blood didn’t circulate well, that would be a pretty serious situation and you would know.”
In recent years, Eero has had several bouts of pneumonia that his doctors think could be related to his thick blood, so he is now on blood-thinning medication. Iiris adds that the redness of his skin is also a recent development. During his competitive days, Eero showed no ill effects of his EPOR mutation, and other Mäntyrantas with the mutation have remained healthy into old age.
While the extensive scientific documentation of the Mäntyranta family’s mutation is unique in sports, there have certainly been other successful athletes with preternaturally high hemoglobin levels. Endurance sports like cross-country skiing and cycling have set up systems whereby an athlete with abnormally high hemoglobin or red blood cell levels can earn a medical exemption to compete if that athlete can prove that his hemoglobin is naturally elevated. A number of athletes have been given such exemptions, and have gone on to great success.
Italian cyclist Damiano Cunego was granted a medical exemption by the International Cycling Union and at twenty-three years of age became the youngest road cyclist ever to be ranked number one in the world. Frode Estil, a Norwegian cross-country skier who was given an exemption by the International Ski Federation, won two golds and one silver medal at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Neither of these men had hemoglobin levels as high as Eero’s—the normal range for men is 14 to 17 grams of hemoglobin per deciliter of blood, and Eero was high even compared with his own family members, consistently over 20 and as high as 23—but Cunego and Estil nonetheless had elevated levels that they could prove were natural and that were higher than those of their teammates and competitors who trained in similar manners.
Like the naturally fit six from the York University study, there was just something innately different about them.
•
With the three-hour drive back to Luleå in mind, Iiris tells Eero and Rakel that she will see them soon for Christmas, and tells me that we should hit the road.
As we are getting ready to leave, I suddenly chide myself for nearly forgetting to ask an obvious question. When I was told that the EPOR mutation will not continue down Eero’s direct line of descendants, I was disappointed that there would be no way to see whether it might push younger Mäntyrantas to athletic success. But from de la Chapelle’s family tree I know that there are extended family members who have the mutation.
“Do Eero’s siblings have the mutation?” I ask Iiris.
One of them does, she tells me. His sister Aune, and two of Aune’s children have the mutation, her son Pertti and her daughter Elli.
And did they ski? I ask.
They did, she tells me.
And were they any good?
Elli was twice a world junior champion in the 3×5K relay in 1970 and ’71. And Pertti, competing at the site of his uncle’s most famous triumphs, won an Olympic gold medal in the 4×10K relay in 1976 at the Innsbruck Winter Games. In 1980 he added a bronze at the Lake Placid Games.
No one else in the family races.
It is December 2010, and human civilization in northern Scandinavia is temporarily reduced to a layer of sediment beneath the snow. Excavation will come only with spring. The last few days have seen record snow and a constant -15 degrees Fahrenheit at the Arctic Circle in Finland—the Napapiiri, as the Finns call it—where I am now. There’s no wind, so the first crunching step outside each morning is deceptively placid, before nose hairs morph into ice daggers.
The Finns call this part of the year “Kaamos time.” There is no exact English word for Kaamos, but it roughly means polar night. It means the time of the year when northern Finland is tilted so far from the sun that daylight is really three hours of twilight that around two P.M. flickers out as if under a cosmic candle snuffer.
I’m driving north along highway E8, in search of a ghost. And this is the perfect place for one to live—among the pines and spruce made hard by the cold and made white by the snow; beside the Swedish whitebeam and the European white elm; and amid the silver birch and the downy birch with their white skins wrapped in a blanket of white mist. Reindeer prance beside the road and disappear into whorls of snow. It is all thick and white, as if some celestial milk bottle had toppled over and I’m driving through the puddle. This is a land of austere beauty, of the most gleaming whites of sky and snow and the most vacuous blacks of night.
But Iiris Mäntyranta was born not far from here, and she can see colors. To her, the sky has a bluish tinge, and the walls of cloud give passage to the occasional spangle of purple light.
Before I made contact with Iiris months earlier, I was not sure whether my ghost—her father—was even still alive. His words had not appeared in any English-language press I could track down since the 1960s, when he emerged from his tiny Arctic hamlet and won seven Olympic medals, three of them gold. Now we are traveling north, together, to meet him.
After three hours of driving from Luleå, Sweden, where Iiris works as a county government administrator, we are getting close. Just past the Arctic Circle, we drive through Pello, a town of four thousand that is the last semblance of a city we will see along the road. On our way out of Pello, we pass a granite pedestal atop which sits a larger-than-life bronze statue of a man in mid-cross-country ski stride. The man is Iiris’s father.
A half hour later we pull off the paved road and drive down a narrow pass among the pine trees. We stop in front of a cream-colored house on the west side of a large lake. As I get out of the car, I’m conscious of being watched. I turn to look back at the pass down which we came. A sandy-colored reindeer has come around the corner and has its gaze fixed on me, as if it can smell the Brooklyn on my clothes. It’s frigid and snowing, so we hurry inside the house.
No sooner do I step inside and kick the frost from my boots onto the welcome mat below the rifle rack than an oddly Mediterranean face appears in the entryway. It is the man from the statue, the great Eero Mäntyranta. I’m taken aback. In pictures I had seen of him from the 1960s his skin was perhaps slightly too dark for the Arctic, but it was nothing that would warrant a second look. But now he is closer to the hue of the red paint that comes from this region’s iron-rich soil than to that of the snow. Iiris told me on the drive up that her father’s unique gene mutation had caused his skin to redden as he got older, but I didn’t quite expect this shade of cardinal, mottled in places with purple.
The contrast is stark when Eero’s wife, Rakel, with her glacier blue eyes and alabaster skin, steps into the entryway. Eero speaks no English, but he greets me with a wide smile. Everything about him has a certain width to it. The bulbous nose in the middle of a softly rounded face. His thick fingers, broad jaw, and a barrel chest covered by a red knit sweater with stern-faced reindeer across the middle. He is a remarkable-looking man. His dark hair is meticulously slicked back and he has prominent cheekbones that seem to draw up the edges of his thin lips so that he looks constantly pleased and inquisitive. There is also an unmistakable strength about him, never mind that he is seventy-three years old. The middle finger of his right hand is bent sharply at the top joint, a periscope peering at the index finger. His hands look as if they could snap a ski pole in two, a supposition backed up by his handshake.
Eero ushers me to the kitchen where Rakel serves tea and coffee to me and to Iiris and to Iiris’s Swedish husband, Tommy, as well as to Iiris’s son Viktor, a musician—his band Surunmaa plays a fusion of folk, blues, and tango—who is staying in a cabin on Eero’s property while he films a documentary about his grandfather’s life.
The wide windows in the kitchen look out into the snowy forest. This used to be an area of extreme poverty, but now even the remote north of Finland has prospered from the country’s trade in timber and electronics, and the residences are as impeccably kept as dollhouses. Sitting here sipping tea from a tiny porcelain cup, grinning at a red-nosed man in a reindeer sweater, I feel certain that I have stepped into a Christmas snow globe.
After introductions and tea, I follow Eero outside where he feeds a dozen reindeer handfuls of pale green lichen. The reindeer are used for racing and also for meat. When I walk up to one of the animals, Viktor translates Eero’s warning that, unlike horses, reindeer do not like to be touched by human hands. Some of the reindeer are teddy bear brown, and others are chalk white. Outside, against the falling snow, the redness of Eero’s face is in its greatest relief.
With daylight quickly fading, we return indoors. Over the next few hours I interrogate Eero about his remarkable athletic career. Iiris, Tommy, and Viktor take turns translating the language that to my ears sounds like a stream of deep “ess’s,” punctuated by crackling “k’s” and “cox’s” spliced with the occasional Spanish-sounding rolling “r.”
When the sun fades, we will take a break from talking for a meal of reindeer meat and potatoes. And Eero will laugh deeply when the fork he is holding returns his mind to a time more than forty years ago, when he was one of the greatest athletes in the world.
•
It was 1964 and Eero Mäntyranta was once again in the uncomfortable position of honored guest. Surrounded by the clinking of crystal, he furrowed his heavy eyebrows at the three forks flanking his plate. He had just won two golds and a silver medal at the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, dominating the cross-country skiing competition to such an extent that the media deemed him “Mr. Seefeld,” a reference to the competition venue. In the 15K race, Mäntyranta finished forty seconds ahead of the next skier—a margin of victory never equaled in that event at the Olympics before or since—while the next five finishers were within twenty seconds of one another. In the 30K race he won by over a minute. Now came the hard part: dinner. Becoming one of your nation’s all-time great athletes necessarily comes with a glut of honorary feasts.
After his first gold, in a relay at the 1960 Games in Squaw Valley, California, Mäntyranta attended a celebratory meal in Los Angeles organized by Finland’s Olympic committee. That time, he was about to drink from a goblet on the table when a group of urbane guests strode up and began washing their hands in it. But the three forks presented a new puzzle.
When Mäntyranta was a child growing up in rural Lankojärvi, Finland, in the 1940s, his family shared a single fork. It was passed around the 170-square-foot room that was their house, overlooking the lake for which the town was named. In lieu of cutlery, the children used sharpened sticks to spear chunks of potato and slices of bread.
The Mäntyranta brood would have numbered twelve had all the children survived. As it was, they were six. Still, with Eero, his parents, his brothers and sisters, and his older sister’s husband, the single room could be a bit cozy. Add the neighbors who would stop by to shoot the breeze and have a cigarette, and it was not uncommon to have a dozen people in the room. In that atmosphere, young Eero first employed the admirable capacity for solitary focus that would later serve him well during the lonely training hours on the ski trail under the black sky of Kaamos time. He was an excellent student, only because he could block out the commotion in the room, curl up underneath the smoke, and do his schoolwork by the fickle light of an oil lamp. Those were spare days in postbellum Finland, with the country locked in two decades of war debt to the Soviet Union.
Eero was only six years old in the winter of 1943, when Nazi soldiers pushed north and Lankojärvi was evacuated. He was put on a truck with all the women and children from the town and told by a Finnish soldier to keep quiet lest German soldiers hear them. He shuddered when one old woman refused to heed the advice and belted out Communist work songs. The truck eventually made it to a ferry that took them across the border into Overtornea, Sweden, where Eero gazed in wonderment at the bullet shells that lay across the ground like a dusting of leaden snow. He and his family stayed in Sundsvall, Sweden, through the winter, until they were allowed to return to a Finland free of snow and free of Nazis.
The trek back home in the spring was a journey of diminishing hope. They had to take a horse and carriage through the woods because the roads were strewn with live landmines. The German military set fires on their way out of Finland, and in a country whose towns are but clearings amid dense forest, tinder was in hearty supply. Lapland burned like a vast fire pit, making smoldering embers of what were once doorjambs, staircases, and gables crafted from pine.
But the Mäntyrantas returned to find their home one of the few standing. They lived on the remote side of the water, with no road, so Nazi soldiers didn’t bother to venture over the lake and through the woods to raze the few nondescript shacks on the other side. The lake had saved their home. The same lake that started Eero’s skiing career.
While the Germans didn’t try to cross the lake, many of the children of Lankojärvi had no choice. School was on the other shore. Almost as soon as Mäntyranta could walk, he could ski, and within a year of returning from Sweden, he was joining other kids in skating—he once fell through the ice and nearly drowned—or skiing across the lake to school, on nothing more than wooden planks nailed together. It took about an hour to make the trip, and during winter it was pitch black the entire way, so the kids would simply aim at the far shore and hope for the best.
Out of necessity, everyone in Lapland skied. But it did not take long for Mäntyranta to stand out. As early as seven years old he would win the cross-country-ski races at school. When he was ten, he started winning the races that brought kids from local villages together. At eleven, he polished off the youth competition in the entire municipality of Pello.
Unlike the Finnish youth in the south, Mäntyranta never dreamed about sporting glory as a boy. Sports had been integral to Finland’s identity ever since the country declared independence from Russia in 1917. National sports organizations were formed, and they paid off in spades—and medals. The “Flying Finn” distance runners dominated the world in the 1920s. After World War II, when Helsinki was awarded the 1952 Olympics, sport again became a beacon of unity for the Finnish people. But Finland’s sporting tradition had no impact on young Eero. With no radio or newspapers in Lankojärvi, he had no idea who the great Finnish athletes were. He didn’t have the chance to be inspired by the words of the beloved Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, who told the world, “Mind is everything. Muscle—pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind.” Mäntyranta’s only exposure to the ’52 Helsinki Games was a picture that he saw in a neighbor’s house of a Brazilian man triple-jumping. For Eero Mäntyranta, skiing was a mode of transportation and a chance for a better job.
For twenty years after the end of the war, Finland’s economic growth was stunted by having to send surplus money and resources to Russia to pay off war debt, so the only job for a young man in Lapland was cutting and hauling wood from the forest. At fifteen, Mäntyranta was living in the forest among grown men, many of them criminals who came to the far north to evade the law. The men spent their leisure time drinking, playing cards, and fighting. Mäntyranta slept with a block of wood under his pillow in case he had to bludgeon an attacker during the night. It was both a harrowing and exciting existence for a young man. But after two years, he’d had enough.
He knew that the government had a habit of giving promising young cross-country skiers cushy jobs as border patrol guards where they could essentially ski along the border for both training and work. So he started training in his free time from forest work, and his progress was stunning. At nineteen, he traveled to Switzerland for a series of races that, if he performed well, would push him toward the Finnish national team. He won all of them, and a job as a border patrol guard followed soon thereafter.
Mäntyranta’s mother warned him that it was time to save money, not to go chasing girls. He heeded that advice for a good two weeks, until he spent a night in Pello dancing with his blond-haired, blue-eyed future wife. When the couple later had children, Mäntyranta would often train in the summer by sending Rakel and the kids off in a car to their cottage twenty miles away. He would then run or walk to meet them.
Despite regular smuggling over the Sweden/Finland boundary, the border north of the Arctic Circle was generally quiet, especially in winter, so Mäntyranta had plenty of time to throw himself into training. At 5'7" (in thick socks), he was very small for a cross-country skier. With black eyebrows arcing over dark brown eyes, and a slight tan complexion to his skin, he looked more like someone born of an Italian beach, not the lower Arctic pine forest. But there he was, for fifty miles a day, jabbing away with his poles at the snowy blanket that covered the earth. He often trained by the moonlight. Or, if he was near the road in Pello, he would exist for a moment in the beams of a passing car, before fading back into the darkness. When the moon was obscured, he worried that he would ski headlong into trees, but he managed to stay clear of accidents, and his progress continued at a remarkable clip.
By twenty-two years old, he was clearly good enough to ski for Finland at the 1960 Olympics, but most of the best skiers were older, and team officials weren’t eager to allow an inexperienced skier to test his mettle on the biggest stage. Mäntyranta persuaded the team managers to allow an intramural time trial. He placed second, behind thirty-five-year-old skiing legend Veikko Hakulinen, who already had two Olympic golds. The performance earned Mäntyranta a spot on the 4×10K relay team at the Games, where they took home the gold.
That Olympic title was just the preamble. Two golds and a silver followed in Innsbruck in 1964. Then a silver and two bronzes in Grenoble, France, in ’68, and a bevy of world championship medals along the way. In all, he placed in five hundred races, amassing enough crystal glasses and silver bowls and dishes to fill a china shop. Even now, he will awake some days and tell Rakel that his legs are tired because he was again ski racing in his dreams.
But Mäntyranta’s trail to the skiing pantheon started long before the 1960 Games. It started before the work in the forest prodded him to seek a better life. Before he began skiing across the lake to school on warped planks. Even before he first stood on skis when he was three years old. It began when his great-grandfather made the trip to Finland.
•
The details of the Mäntyranta family’s beginnings in Finland are murky, but relatives were certainly in Lapland by the 1850s. It was probably Eero’s great-grandfather who came from Belgium to work as a blacksmith, forging coins. His son, Isak, married a woman named Johanna, whose father was just wealthy enough to own a swath of land north of Lankojärvi. Isak and Johanna lived in a cottage on the land on the condition that Isak help the resident farmers there with their work. But Isak was not one for manual labor and he soon wore out his welcome.
Eero would not inherit Isak’s lax work ethic, but—via his father, Juho—he would inherit a rare version of a gene that altered his body’s blood supply.
The first sign in Eero was during a routine medical exam when he was a teenager. A blood test showed that he had extraordinarily high levels of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in red blood cells. It is the iron in hemoglobin that gives blood its red color. Because Eero was perfectly healthy, there was little concern about his high hemoglobin levels.
But that began to change during his competitive career. Every time he was examined, Eero was found to have high hemoglobin and far more than the usual amount of red blood cells. Normally, those are signs that an endurance athlete is blood doping, often with a synthetic version of the hormone erythropoietin, or EPO. EPO signals the body to produce red blood cells, so injecting it spurs an athlete’s own body to bolster its blood supply.
At times, Eero’s extraordinary red blood cell count—measured at up to 65 percent higher than that of an average man—sullied his sterling career. Despite the fact that his blood levels had been documented since he was a kid, speculation was rife that his unusual blood profile was the result of doping. It was not until twenty years after his retirement from skiing that scientists pinpointed the truth.
•
From time to time, other members of the Mäntyranta family would discover through a routine medical test that they had elevated hemoglobin levels. Because there were no apparent ill health effects, doctors did nothing about it.
It was enough, however, to ignite the curiosity of Pekka Vuopio, the head of hematology at the University of Helsinki and a native Laplander who knew well the athletic exploits of Eero Mäntyranta. In 1990, Vuopio and his colleagues invited Eero to Helsinki for a series of tests in the hope that examining him might shed light on a condition called polycythemia, an elevation in red cells that can cause a dangerous thickening of the blood and that sometimes runs in families.
One of the doctors’ first theories was that Eero’s red blood cells might have a longer life span than normal, so that new blood cells were produced before old ones had been cleared away. But that turned out not to be the answer. Another possibility was that Eero naturally secreted high levels of EPO, thus instructing his body to overproduce red blood cells. But that wasn’t it either. The level of EPO in Eero’s blood was so low that it was nearly below the lower limit for healthy adult men.
But when hematologist Eeva Juvonen examined Eero’s bone marrow cells in the lab, she saw something astonishing. In order to test whether his bone marrow cells—which produce red blood cells—were particularly sensitive to EPO, the research protocol was to add EPO to a cell sample and track red blood cell production. Eero’s bone marrow cells began the process of creating red blood cells before Juvonen could even stimulate them with EPO. Whatever tiny speck of EPO that was already in the sample was enough to keep the red cell factories humming. So it was clear that Eero’s body heeded the call of even trace quantities of EPO with extraordinary vigor. Illuminating the reason why would require more members of the Mäntyranta clan.
•
Albert de la Chapelle identifies himself as a gene hunter. He is exceedingly good at tracking his prey. He is the geneticist who argued on behalf of María José Martínez-Patiño when she was barred from competing as a woman. These days he spends his time at Ohio State University training his sights on the genes that predispose people to the most deadly cancers ever known, like acute myeloid leukemia, which interferes with blood cell production and can put a previously healthy patient in the ground in a matter of weeks.
De la Chapelle spent most of his career at the University of Helsinki, hunting gene mutations that cause diseases that show up in Finland far more often than in the rest of the world. These diseases come from so-called founder mutations, meaning that a mutation arose in a member of a small group and spread through that population as it grew. De la Chapelle was part of a team that clarified the genetic basis of more than twenty diseases—multiple forms of epilepsies and dwarfisms among them—that are endemic to Finland. (And sometimes to Minnesota, a state heavy with residents of Finnish ancestry.)
Not long after Eero Mäntyranta’s blood was examined in the lab, de la Chapelle made a trip to Lankojärvi to meet a group of forty Mäntyrantas who had assembled at Eero’s house to talk with the researchers who were now studying their blood. It was winter, and de la Chapelle remembers marveling at the noontime sun as it kissed the surface of the lake.
After a lunch of fresh reindeer prepared by Rakel, de la Chapelle set to mingling in the living room. “I was sitting there on the couch with these three elderly ladies,” de la Chapelle recalls, “and I already knew two had the condition and one did not. And they went over their health with me and it was the one without the condition that had all the health problems and the two with it were quite healthy and were unaware of anything at all being different with them.”
Even if not for their slightly darker complexions, de la Chapelle would have known that the two healthy women had the blood condition. He had already been through their genomes.
In all, ninety-seven Mäntyrantas were examined, twenty-nine of whom had remarkably high hemoglobin, along with slightly ruddier complexions than the average Finn. Unlike the initial study of Eero, this examination went more than blood deep. De la Chapelle probed all the way down to a particular gene on the nineteenth chromosome, the EPOR, or erythropoietin receptor gene.
This particular gene tells the body how to build the EPO receptor, a molecule that sits atop bone marrow cells awaiting the EPO hormone. If the EPO receptor is a keyhole, it is one made specifically to accept only the key that is the EPO hormone. Once the key is in the lock, the production of red blood cells proceeds. The receptor signals a bone marrow cell to start the process of creating a red blood cell that contains hemoglobin.
Of the 7,138 pairs of bases that make up the EPO receptor gene, there was a single base that was different in the twenty-nine family members who had unusually elevated hemoglobin levels. Each family member, like every human being, had two copies of the EPOR gene. But at position 6,002 in only one copy of each affected family member’s two EPOR genes, there was an adenine molecule instead of a guanine molecule. A minuscule alteration, but the impact was immense.
Instead of adding information for the cellular machinery to continue to build the EPO receptor, the spelling change constituted a “stop codon,” the genetic equivalent of a period at the end of the last sentence of a chapter. A stop codon essentially tells RNA—ribonucleic acid, the molecule that reads DNA code so that it can be translated into action—that the instructions are finished. Move along, nothing more to read here, it says. So instead of coding for the amino acid tryptophan, as that section of the EPOR gene normally would have, the Mäntyranta family mutation caused the receptor simply to stop being built with over 15 percent of its construction unfinished. The unfinished portion in the affected Mäntyranta family members happens to be a segment of the receptor in the interior of the bone marrow cell. The piece of the receptor on the exterior of the cell awaits the EPO key, while the interior portion modulates the subsequent response, acting like a brake to halt hemoglobin production. In the affected Mäntyrantas, who are missing the brake, the production of red blood cells runs amok.
Fortunately for the family, the overproduction of red blood cells did not lead to ill health. Save for the slightly dark complexion, family members had no outward signs of abnormality and generally discovered their condition by accident during routine checkups.
The Mäntyranta EPOR gene finding was a major discovery in the early 1990s. The high hemoglobin condition in the Mäntyrantas was passed down through the family in an autosomal dominant fashion, meaning that only a single copy of the mutant gene was required for a family member to have the condition. Other dominantly inherited gene mutations had been discovered before that study, but they were generally tied to serious illnesses.
In the papers they published in 1991 and 1993, the researchers noted that Mäntyrantas who carried the family EPOR mutation had long lives. They had found, it seemed, a mutation beneficial for an athlete and otherwise of little consequence. De la Chapelle says, though, that he could never convince Eero himself that the EPOR mutation aided him in his Olympic quest. “He kept saying that it was not his bodily strength,” de la Chapelle says, “but his determination and psyche.”
•
Since I came all the way from Brooklyn to meet him, Eero is eager to tell me about his visit to New York City after the 1960 Winter Games. “Scary” is how he describes his first impression of the morass of Cadillacs, streetlights, and asphalt.
He has also laid out for me some of his most prized medals, the seven from the Olympics, and a medal of honor that the government normally reserves for military heroes. As they have for polar night, the Finns have an untranslatable word, sisu, that roughly means strength of passion, or calm determination in the face of obstacles. The Finnish government determined that Eero was the embodiment of sisu.
Iiris, wearing shoulder-length blond hair and black-rimmed glasses, translates a story from her childhood about the aftermath of the 1964 Olympics, when the local electric company paid for Eero to return home in a helicopter. It landed atop the ice covering the lake amid hundreds of revelers who had gathered to celebrate. Iiris was a little girl, and remembers running excitedly toward the helicopter. At first, Eero enjoyed the attention, and it afforded him a job working for the local government teaching physical education to children. But it quickly became a burden.
Through the mid-1960s, reporters would show up unannounced at Eero’s door asking him to “tell me a story, but not what you tell others,” Eero says through Iiris’s translation. Before competitions, tourists from southern Finland would drop by asking to see medals and to take pictures, requests that Eero and Rakel felt obliged to honor. For Eero, skiing had always been more about winning and getting a better job than an intrinsic love of the activity, so the unwanted attention was enough to push him to retire from ski racing following the 1968 Olympics, at the age of thirty.
At the behest of a Finnish celebrity magazine, he made a brief comeback before the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan. He had not skied a stride, or exercised at all, for three years, and he was well above his racing weight. The magazine promised to pay Eero’s training expenses so that he could take a break from work so long as he gave the publication access to document his comeback. Eero returned to the trails just six months prior to the Olympics but made the team and finished nineteenth in the 30K race in Japan before going back into retirement, this time for good.
Toward the end of my visit, we all take spots on couches and chairs in the living room, flanked by paintings of winter landscapes. Eero points out a series of sepia photographs hanging on the wall. They are of his ancestors. There is swarthy-skinned Isak, in a vest and newsboy cap, reclining on the ground of a forest clearing and enjoying a meal with Johanna, her head wrapped in a light-colored scarf. And above that is a picture of Eero’s parents, Juho and Tynne, sitting on wooden chairs in a patch of cleared land with several of their children.
Isak and Juho died before de la Chapelle ever started probing the family genome, but enough Mäntyrantas were tested that he was able to create a genetic family tree and deduce that they had the EPOR mutation. Juho’s two brothers, Leevi and Eemil, also carried the mutation.
But it will soon come to an end down Eero’s line. His son Harri had it and showed promise as a youth cross-country skier, but Harri died as a young man of an illness that had no relation to the EPOR mutation. Iiris does not have it, and of Eero’s remaining two children, fraternal twins Minna and Vesa, only Minna has it, but her only son does not.
When I ask Eero whether he was relieved that the University of Helsinki doctors lifted the suspicion of blood doping from his victories, he says yes, but that he disagrees with the suggestion that the mutation gave him an advantage. Eero’s feeling is that the increased viscosity of his red-cell-loaded blood would have hampered his blood circulation, thus balancing any performance benefits. De la Chapelle disagrees staunchly. “It’s an advantage, there’s no question,” he told me, noting that Eero’s hemoglobin levels were the highest he has ever seen. “If the blood didn’t circulate well, that would be a pretty serious situation and you would know.”
In recent years, Eero has had several bouts of pneumonia that his doctors think could be related to his thick blood, so he is now on blood-thinning medication. Iiris adds that the redness of his skin is also a recent development. During his competitive days, Eero showed no ill effects of his EPOR mutation, and other Mäntyrantas with the mutation have remained healthy into old age.
While the extensive scientific documentation of the Mäntyranta family’s mutation is unique in sports, there have certainly been other successful athletes with preternaturally high hemoglobin levels. Endurance sports like cross-country skiing and cycling have set up systems whereby an athlete with abnormally high hemoglobin or red blood cell levels can earn a medical exemption to compete if that athlete can prove that his hemoglobin is naturally elevated. A number of athletes have been given such exemptions, and have gone on to great success.
Italian cyclist Damiano Cunego was granted a medical exemption by the International Cycling Union and at twenty-three years of age became the youngest road cyclist ever to be ranked number one in the world. Frode Estil, a Norwegian cross-country skier who was given an exemption by the International Ski Federation, won two golds and one silver medal at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Neither of these men had hemoglobin levels as high as Eero’s—the normal range for men is 14 to 17 grams of hemoglobin per deciliter of blood, and Eero was high even compared with his own family members, consistently over 20 and as high as 23—but Cunego and Estil nonetheless had elevated levels that they could prove were natural and that were higher than those of their teammates and competitors who trained in similar manners.
Like the naturally fit six from the York University study, there was just something innately different about them.
•
With the three-hour drive back to Luleå in mind, Iiris tells Eero and Rakel that she will see them soon for Christmas, and tells me that we should hit the road.
As we are getting ready to leave, I suddenly chide myself for nearly forgetting to ask an obvious question. When I was told that the EPOR mutation will not continue down Eero’s direct line of descendants, I was disappointed that there would be no way to see whether it might push younger Mäntyrantas to athletic success. But from de la Chapelle’s family tree I know that there are extended family members who have the mutation.
“Do Eero’s siblings have the mutation?” I ask Iiris.
One of them does, she tells me. His sister Aune, and two of Aune’s children have the mutation, her son Pertti and her daughter Elli.
And did they ski? I ask.
They did, she tells me.
And were they any good?
Elli was twice a world junior champion in the 3×5K relay in 1970 and ’71. And Pertti, competing at the site of his uncle’s most famous triumphs, won an Olympic gold medal in the 4×10K relay in 1976 at the Innsbruck Winter Games. In 1980 he added a bronze at the Lake Placid Games.
No one else in the family races.
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