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Olympic Medalist Finds Something Greater Than Gold by Amanda Southall Shredding down a mountain, taking gravity hostage while taming blankets of snow is Kelly Clark’s expertise. The snowy landscape blurs in her periphery as she leaves the lip of the half-pipe, rotates 720 degrees in mid-air and then skillfully returns her snowboard back to the half-pipe. More impressive, she makes it look easy. At the end of her run, the crowd roars. They know if it were easy, everyone would do it just as well, but no one does. Clark has headphones tucked under her helmet, and through them, drowning out the cheering crowd, shouting reporters and blaring loudspeakers, she can hear Christian worship leader David Crowder singing, “How infinite and sweet, this love so rescuing. Oh, how infinitely sweet, this great love that has redeemed ... ” Clark was born in Newport, RI and started snowboarding when she was just eight years old. Now 24, she has dominated women’s snowboarding and has over two dozen international victories, including a gold medal for women’s half-pipe at the 2002 Winter Olympics. She is a two-time X Games champion and recently earned first place honours at the U.S. Open, Chevy Grand Prix and New Zealand Open. “Snowboarding is what I really love to do,” she tells Living Light News. Clark was 17-years-old, the youngest member of the U.S. team, when an Olympic gold medal was placed around her neck at the Salt Lake Games. “After my first Olympics my life changed completely. My name even changed — I am known as ‘Kelly Clark Olympic gold medalist,’ ” she says. “It was really fun for a while; I just kind of rode the hype, but then I found myself with not much to aspire to as I had reached all my goals.” “[Success] was great When Clark won Olympic gold, she had everything she wanted: fame, money, prestige. So she went looking for more. “I strived to drink the most. I strived to be the rowdiest ... all this silly stuff. At the time that was what I thought was going to make me cool. I wanted people to like me,” Clark said in an interview with Dare 2 Share Ministries. Clark quickly learned that gold medalists aren’t ‘supposed to’ finish second. She started to resent the sport, exhausted from questions about her placement. The following season a knee injury kept her off the snow for eight months. While Clark healed, she struggled with depression and her early success. “I had made it as a professional snowboarder, won the U.S. Open, the X-Games and the Olympics. It was great but I found myself wondering if this was it.” Then, between runs at a competition, “I spent the morning writing about how I didn’t want to live anymore and how it wouldn’t even matter ... I’m living the dream — but on the inside I’m dying. I’m standing at the bottom of the pipe,” Clark told The 700 Club. The bottom of the pipe was exactly where she needed to be. Clark overheard a simple conversation that changed her life. “I overheard someone at an event saying, ‘it’s all right, God still loves you’ to a friend to cheer them up,” she says. “Something about that stirred something in me that I could not ignore.” The comment rang in Clark’s ears and resonated in her heart. “I found out that person was staying in my hotel and I went to their door, knocked and said, ‘My name is Kelly, I think you might be a Christian and I think you need to tell me about God,’ and she invited me in,” Clark says. “I had this idea that being a Christian was about being good all the time and going to church,” explains Clark. “She told me being a Christian was about relationship not about religion, that God loved me and I was created to have a relationship with Him.” A gold medal seemed so trite. “A few months later I gave my heart to Jesus and my life has never been the same,” she says. Rejuvenated
by her relationship with God, Clark now lives life and competes with
a new confidence. Her coach suggested she add a 720 spin to her final run to secure second place — but Clark’s goal was first place. She dropped into the half-pipe, and after a strong run with successive 540 spins, she attempted a 900 but caught the edge of her board and fell. Her valiant effort bumped her to fourth place, a point shy from a U.S. women’s sweep of the competition. As her teammates Hannah Teter and Gretchen Bleiler took the podium, Clark smeared tears off her cheek. “That was one of the best and also one of the hardest decisions I have ever made,” she says. “Before I dropped in, I knew what tricks I was going to do, regardless of what place I was in. I did not want to be thinking back on the Olympics wondering what would have happened if I had just gone for it. “I walked away from the Olympics not regretting anything. And I also walked away with my heart broken; my dream was lost for the time being. It was really hard getting fourth and missing out on a medal, one of the hardest things I have ever gone through.” She concludes, “In order to really go after your dreams, your heart has to be in it, and when you come up short your heart gets hurt too.” After the ceremony Clark was smiling — she understood true joy and lasting satisfaction comes from a relationship with Christ. “Before I met Jesus, and found out how much He loved me, my whole identity was in snowboarding. Now my self-worth does not come from what I do but from knowing I am loved and accepted just as I am,” Clark says. “I don’t have to perform or prove who I am or how great I am any more. “My life would have been ruined if I did not have God with me during the 2006 Olympics. Being a Christian doesn’t get you out of tough times, you just don’t have to be alone during them. You have something to hope in besides yourself.” Outside, Clark is the same snowboarder she’s always been: strong, bold and innovative. Inside, she is completely changed. Clark’s reminded of that as she drops into the half-pipe and glances at the front of her snowboard — and sees where the name Jesus is scrawled. photos © 2007 courtesy Burton Snowboards
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Faith Turns Fast Life Upside Down
by Shannon Cherry Picture this: Take a surf board and strap it to your feet so that
you can fly down frozen waves of ice and snow while performing skateboarding-style
tricks on giant half-pipes and sometimes even table tops and rails. That’s the way it was for Luke Wynen, professional snowboarder from Mammoth Lakes, California. The
31-year-old has been hooked on the sport since early childhood growing
up in Pennsylvania, and has been one of the top half-pipe riders for
over a dozen years, competing around the globe. Google Wynen’s
name, and immediately you will find several pages of links to biographies,
competition results, and interviews from both television and print
media. But the real tale is told in the photos and video clips of Wynen
in action. “I just thought, I’m gonna do everything I can possibly do,” Wynen described in an interview for CBN. “I want to be the best snowboarder I can be, I want to date as many girls as I possibly can, I want to have the nicest car.” And he quickly set out to make it all happen. In fact, for the first couple of years, he was known in the snowboarding world as ‘Wynen and Dinin’. “When you’re on the road, you’re
anonymous — there’s
no accountability,” Wynen tells Living Light News. “You can basically
do anything you want. And it was fun [for a while], but I was starting to feel
the cost of it.” Wynen realized he was using the adrenaline rush of snowboarding
and the trappings of success to try to fill a great emptiness in his life. “Even
when I finally got my Porsche, it seemed that all anyone wanted to
talk about was the car,” says Wynen. At this point in his career, Wynen took a trip out to Mammoth Lakes and moved in with a friend and his family, the only people he knew there. It just so happened his friend’s father was a pastor, and they invited him to a meeting that was about to change his life forever. “From the moment the speaker started until he stopped,” describes Wynen, “it felt like I was the only person in the room, and he was only talking to me.” The next night Wynen believes God spoke to him and asked him to make a decision right then, choose either to live for Christ or not. “I made the decision and invited Jesus Christ into my life, and I have to say that every day since then, I have fallen in love with the Lord more and more and more.” From that point on, Wynen’s priorities have been turned upside down. He no longer lives to please others and to gain their approval. “Snowboarding is the type of sport where you can go through nine or 10 events with no success,” he explains. “And when your self-worth is tied up in winning, it can really cause you to become bitter when you’re not doing well.” “I had everything I thought I
had wanted, Professional success no longer drives Wynen. He has set his sights on a higher goal. “I know that the attitude of my heart is what can bring the Lord pleasure,” he says. “That’s all that really matters.” Wynen is still very much a part of the snowboarding scene. In fact, he was recently in Calgary competing in the World Cup Half-Pipe competition at Canada Olympic Park. He’s
not sure how much longer he’ll compete and describes
his life and career as being in a long-term transition. Of course, he has two very good reasons for wanting
to stay at home — his
wife Denise, and their almost two-year-old son Enoch. “I believe
that my relationship with my wife and son is a gift from God that is
greater than my snowboarding career,” says Wynen. “I’ll
continue to compete for now, as long as there is sponsorship and opportunity,
but I know that God is getting me ready to move on, probably in the
next year or two.” As for what comes next, Wynen feels that it
will definitely involve working with young people, something he has
always enjoyed. For now, he is loving life, loving his family
and loving his relationship with God. “My church is fun,” Wynen
says. “It’s
full of passionate people who are passionate about God. I believe that
it’s important to be with people of godly character.” It’s
a different world for Luke Wynen, now that he has the peace and confidence
of knowing he is unconditionally loved and accepted by God. “Don’t
allow yourself to be brokenhearted or bitter and angry because of your
circumstances,” he says. “Keep pursuing God — He’s
not finished yet. You don’t know the whole story.” “Look around and see what’s out there. Spend time and check [Jesus Christ] out,” says Wynen. “It will be the most important decision that you will ever make.” photos by Sean Latsky
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