Doyel: Chloe Salsbury didn't win at sectional but won over crowd swimming with spina bifida
Chloe Salsbury can hear them up there, somewhere above the water line. They’re shouting her name, sounds like. It’s muffled down there at the Lawrence North pool, but this much noise finds a way through the water, and when her face pops above the surface she can see them. They are standing on the pool deck, chanting her name, willing her to the finish line.
Chloe is swimming the 100-yard breaststroke for Heritage Christian at the Sectional 14 meet, and she’s not going to win her preliminary heat, and it doesn’t matter. Her victory has already happened, and happens each day she rolls her wheelchair to the pool deck, lowers herself to the water’s edge and then, well, here’s how Chloe puts it.
“I kind of plop into pool,” she says.
Go ahead, giggle. This is how Chloe faces the world, with humor, positive energy and a spirit you’ve got to see, or in my case hear, to believe. Chloe’s in the car when I find her two days after sectionals at Lawrence North, heading to Atlanta with her family for a wheelchair basketball tournament. She plays for the RHI Racers – RHI is short for Rehabilitation Hospital of Indianapolis – and the event is the Big Peach Slam Jam, and Chloe’s been playing basketball for eight years. Grill her some more on her athletic career, as I may have done as she was heading South, and she’ll do that thing she does:
Act like this is no big deal.
“Oh,” she says, “that’s about it.”
She’s forgetting about the discus. She’s forgetting about the shot put. And she doesn’t know, until I tell her what her Heritage Christian coach has told me, that she swims close to 60 miles over the course of the season.
But she’s aware of everything when she’s in the pool – the underwater turns she’ll make, the strokes, the breathing. And the cheering. She’s aware of the cheering, if not the magnitude. Because as she cuts through the water, swimming the breaststroke without the use of her legs, competitors on other teams and fans of other schools realize what’s happening and join Chloe’s teammates. The entire place is cheering for Chloe, chanting her name, because they know what they’re seeing:
The toughest swimmer in the pool. And the fastest 100-yard breaststroke they’ll ever see by a girl with spina bifida.
'You’re Chloe, first'
Chloe doesn’t want accommodations. She doesn’t want fuss. Not sure she’s going to like this story, but hey, deal with it. You hear me, Chloe?
Deal with it.
Chloe has a smile that can warm a swimming pool, and she’s not afraid to use it – “She puts herself out there, and does it with the biggest smile on her face,” says Heritage Christian coach Paul Gates – but Chloe draws the line at letting her spina bifida affect those around her. Here’s an example: A few years ago, her eighth-grade class at Heritage Christian was taking a field trip to Washington D.C. Chloe was going until she heard about the extra steps, the extra stops, her presence on the trip would mean for the whole group.
Don’t get me wrong: Heritage Christian was happy to do it. Kids in her class? They’d rather have Chloe around. But she stayed home, because this is how she thinks:
“I didn’t want them to have to figure everything out just for me,” she says.
That explains why Heritage Christian kept quiet its plans for Chloe a few years earlier, the summer between her fifth and sixth grade. The school knows how she feels about those around her conforming to her spina bifida. Chloe would rather do the conforming, and has been that way since she was tiny and learning how to use a wheelchair. They were living in Florida back then, and Renee and Tom Salsbury always told their youngest of four children:
“You’re not going to be defined as the little girl in the wheelchair. You’re Chloe, first.”
One night Chloe and her mom were having one of those chats they have when Chloe said: “Mom, I would like to be like other kids but I know I’m not. God made me this way and it’s OK – I’m just going to be the best I can.”
“And that,” Renee says, “is Chloe in a nutshell.”
So is this: When it came time for swim lessons, Chloe was in the pool. When it came time for after-school activities, Chloe joined the Paralympics Sports Tampa Bay. When it came time for school, sure, some kids stared but Chloe never minded. She knew who she was – and she wasn’t the little girl in the wheelchair. She was Chloe, first.
“She didn’t think about it,” says Renee. “She’s just Chloe.”
Eventually the family moves to Central Indiana and makes Heritage Christian their home school. Chloe spent that fifth grade year with a nagging concern – “I was really nervous,” she says – about the following year. Sixth-grade classes, you see, are on the second floor, and there’s no elevator.
“I just didn’t know how it was going to go,” she says. “It takes me a lot longer than normal, and I didn’t know how the kids would treat me, being so slow.”
Chloe shows up for the first day of sixth grade, and here’s what she discovered: Heritage Christian had relocated two entire grades. Fifth grade classrooms were now upstairs. Chloe and the rest of the sixth-graders were on the ground floor.
I’m not crying.
You are.
Give her a goal, get ready for hug
The swimmers at Heritage Christian swim a lot. Some background for you, in case you’re unaware: Swimming is one of the most brutal sports in high school, right up there with wrestling. They go for miles every day, typically at the IUPUI Natatorium but some days at the pool at Fishers or North Central. Everyone has their pace and their target goals, and Chloe’s no different.
At meets Chloe won’t take the spot of a swimmer she feels would have a better chance at placing, so she races only when there’s a lane for her. That means working on three strokes – back, breast and freestyle – and while she’s been swimming competitively since middle school, this was her first year on the backstroke, and in her first meet she finished a 100-yard race in 3 minutes, 5 seconds.
“As a coach I get to say, ‘OK, let’s give you a goal,’” Gates says. “I thought she could work on those turns – she was turning against her body; I could tell it was a little slow – and told her: ‘I think we can get it below three (minutes).’ She worked on it all season.”
Gates was tapping into a tenacity that Chloe comes by naturally. Her dad, Tom, swam at Minnesota for a year, then transferred to Air Force and played fullback. He spent nine years on active duty, with two deployments to Iraq and one to Haiti, and went to med school. Today, Dr. Thomas Salsbury is an orthopedic surgeon.
On the bus ride to their last regular-season meet at IUPUI, Gates was checking in on her swimmers when she got to Chloe.
“I think you can go 2:58,” Gates told her.
“I don’t know, Coach,” Chloe said.
A few hours later Chloe hit the wall, found the clock, climbed out of the water and shouted into Gates’ ear as they hugged:
“I did it – 2:58!”
'I’m just like, it’s what I do!'
The Salsbury family is driving to Atlanta, and they’ve put us on speaker phone, but don’t worry about carrying on our part of the conversation. For now, we’re just here to listen.
“The common word I’ve heard from teammates and coaches,” says Tom, “is amazing. ‘You’re amazing.’ I hear the amazing thing all the time. But she’s fairly humble. This is who she is and what she’s done with it.”
Chloe: “I’m just like, it’s what I do!”
Renee: “A lot of senior girls are always saying that about you – amazing.”
Chloe: “I don’t know how to—
Renee: “She doesn’t like attention. She’s going to gather looks wherever she goes, and she’s been very well adjusted in that sense. It doesn’t prevent her from going out. She doesn’t get worried about people looking and staring.”
Chloe: “I’m used to people coming up and asking questions.”
Tom: “It’s usually little kids.”
Chloe: “Ever since I’ve known what I have and how I can explain, it’s been fine.”
She was born with the most serious form of spina bifida, called Myelomeningocele or open spina bifida, where the baby’s backbone doesn’t fully form, exposing tissues and nerves. The first hours of Chloe’s life were spent in neurosurgery and plastic surgery. After that, it’s not such a big deal – well, that’s what Chloe says – to roll her wheelchair to the pool deck at Sectional 14, lower herself to the water’s edge and then kind of plop into pool.
Chloe finished the 100-yard breaststroke in 3:05, but she can do better. Her coach knows it, and Chloe knows it. They’re going to work on her turns – an underwater pulldown, it’s called – and Gates has already given her a goal.
“Next year I think we can get you under three minutes in that,” Gates told Chloe. And how did Chloe react?
“That great Chloe smile,” Gates says. “You see her on deck, and that’s the thing I love: She looks up and smiles that sweet little smile.”
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Spina bifida can't keep Heritage Christian swimmer out of sectionals
