When the former Olympian was diagnosed with a debilitating disease, it rocked him to his core.
The swimmer stands calmly on the bottom of the pool, dressed in Speedos. Behind the goggles, his face is as impassive as a Greek sculpture, his torso cast in heavy shadows that fail to obscure the rippling might of the shoulders and arms that taper into clenched fists. Black tile lines and lane dividers appear to shoot out of his body like laser beams, the composition forging an optical effect that makes the lanes stretch on forever.
“I’ve literally got no muscle, really, from my knee down,” says Klim. “All this has just disappeared.”Over the years, I’ve met Klim several times on the media roundabout, but had not seen him since his diagnosis. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect, particularly given reports he could no longer walk unassisted. Yet first impressions are reassuring.
Clive James was another to comment on the sense of power Klim embodied. In his 2001 collection of essays,, James notes how the swimmer’s “mere appearance – shaven head, vulpine smile, the eyes of a cashiered SMERSH officer pledged to wreak vengeance with a stolen atomic bomb – can usually be relied on to drain the opposition’s will to live”.Becoming one half of a celebrity It-couple amplified Klim’s visibility.
Klim’s mobility was badly affected. He could no longer get around without crutches or a walking stick. He stopped cycling because he didn’t trust his legs or his balance. “I’d always put so much focus on my physicality and, when you remove that and start searching for validation, well, you’ve kind of lost everything. My self-worth just hit rock bottom.”
The turning point came in Easter 2022, when Klim’s parents visited the couple in Bali. Having not seen their son for months due to COVID-19-related travel restrictions, they were shocked by his condition. “His mental state was very bad,” says his father, Wojtek. “We were very, very scared something bad may happen, he was suicidal in my opinion. We never mentioned this to him and he never mentioned this to us. But I was scared.
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