Amy Chow. A simple name. But the person who it belongs to has only chosen highly challenging tasks in her life.
At three, Chow started gymnastics training in the US, where her parents had migrated from China and Hong Kong. By 11, she was a certified talent. At 18, she was performing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Chow was a part of America’s ‘Magnificent Seven’, who won the US’ first-ever Olympic team gold. She added a bronze four years later in Sydney.
Chow not only won medals, but she also performed difficult routines, almost each of those capable of debilitating her if something went wrong.
With the stature of an Olympic gold medallist, Chow could have simply ridden her fame for the next few years. She could have reached for the retired athlete’s low-hanging fruit – commentary. She could have given speeches for six-figure sums or appeared on billboards. She could have further nursed her other childhood pursuit – the piano.
But no. Amy Chow went to Stanford Medical School and became a doctor. A pediatric physician and surgeon.
“It [doing something difficult] was my identity for so long, and I think it really set me up for whatever has come in my life,” Chow told teamusa.org last year. “It taught me patience. Not everything comes all at once. You have to work slowly, slowly, slowly, to get where you want to go.”
Health and sport are hot topics currently, especially in India, where the IPL is being held even as the coronavirus is taking thousands of lives. At such a time, it is uplifting to take note of those who straddled both worlds – athletes who became doctors, who you could trust to somersault and land on the feet in the Olympic final as well as cut a precise burr in the skull during brain surgery.
Amy Chow, cricketers WG Grace and Daniel Harris and Super Bowl winner Laurent Duvarney Tardif are some such examples. Australia’s Harris, an aggressive opener, even played the IPL for Sunrisers Hyderabad, then called the Deccan Chargers.
"I came out of cricket and straight back to the bottom of the hierarchy [as a junior in the medical profession],” Harris said in an interview with Cricbuzz. “I had to work really hard and start my training to be an emergency physician and pass a couple of sets of exams and work quite hard to get where I'm at currently, which is an emergency consultant. It was hard work at times but very rewarding and enjoyable.”
An MBBS and FACEM (Fellow of the Academy of Emergency Management) qualified doctor at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, Harris said, "There are a lot of things I've learnt in cricket that have worked in medicine. Like in emergency, we work in a team just like we do in cricket, and get a result in the end.”
Cricket forged an early association with medicine. WG Grace, one of the game’s first superstars, followed in the footsteps of his father and brothers and became a doctor.
In 1979, the British Medical Journal wrote, “One hundred years ago William Gilbert Grace, already established as the world's greatest cricketer, travelled to Edinburgh to obtain the LRCP diploma which, when added to his MRCS (Eng), enabled him to qualify as a doctor. So much is known and so much has been written about this man's extraordinary achievements on the cricket field that it is not surprising that relatively little is known of his medical career, which provided a stability to his family life in Gloucestershire from 1879 until the end of the century. There in Bristol, this giant of a man, perhaps more instantly recognised by the Victorian public than any other personage except [prime minister] Mr Gladstone, modestly went about his business as a family doctor in one of the city's poorer areas.”
NFL footballer Laurent Duvarney-Tardif, 30, is another multi-faceted high achiever. He is a Super Bowl winner with the Kansas City Chiefs and an MD. And as a French-origin Canadian from Montreal he bakes as well.
There have been days when Duvarney-Tardif has driven 24 hours from his football base to his medical school and gone straight into his studies or internship. And vice-versa.
“Laurent, what can’t you do?” his trainer once asked him.
Both Harris and Duvarney-Tardif worked on COVID cases. The latter sat out of this year’s NFL season, including the Super Bowl, to be on pandemic duty full-time.
When Time.com asked Duvarney-Tardif if he wished he was at the Super Bowl, he answered in the affirmative, but said he was at peace with the decision. As for regrets, he said, “No regrets is different than being at peace. We saw it with the right-to-vote movement and racial equality, so many athletes took the microphone and promoted a cause they believe in. My cause is health, is medicine. So I felt it made sense to make that decision, in order to look back at 2020—five, 10 years from now—and be proud of myself. I’ve said no to money and the NFL season in order to care for patients.”
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