Vonetta Flowers takes family on the road

The first black athlete to win a Winter Games gold medal returned to bobsled - and Italy, for a reason.
By NANCY ARMOUR
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Traveling with a 3-year-old can be quite an adventure -- all that extra packing, getting settled for long rides or flights, working in naps and meals on the road and answering endless questions.
Now, try it while training for the Olympics. On an itinerary that crisscrosses the globe. Oh, and make it 3-year-old twins, one of whom is deaf and awaiting surgery next week in hopes of hearing for the first time.
That's life for Vonetta Flowers, whose "retirement" after the Salt Lake City Games has turned into a far greater challenge than she ever could have imagined.
"My family's coming with me. Leaving them at home is not an option," said Flowers, who became the first black athlete to win a Winter Games gold medal when she and Jill Bakken drove USA-2 to victory in Salt Lake City, ending the United States' 46-year medal drought in bobsled.
"We get it done," Flowers said. "I don't know how we do it, but we do."
The family
Flowers planned to retire after Salt Lake City and focus on having a family. She and her husband, Johnny, wanted six kids, and she learned she was pregnant with twins not long after the Olympics ended.
The boys were due Nov. 28, 2002. Five months into her pregnancy, Flowers went into pre-term labor. She was hospitalized, and doctors gave her drugs in hopes of buying her babies more time before they were born.
But Jaden and Jorden arrived Aug. 30, 2002, three months premature. Jaden, older by two minutes, weighed 3 pounds, 8 ounces, and spent six weeks in the hospital. Jorden weighed a pound less and was hospitalized for seven weeks.
"They were very long and thin. It's so funny to look at their little arm bands right now. They fit on my finger," Flowers said. "That was a difficult time. It was tough leaving the hospital, leaving them there. And then bringing Jaden home, I cried because he was leaving his brother."
Nerve didn't develop
Complicating matters was that Jorden was born deaf. The nerve that connects his ears to the hearing part of his brain didn't develop fully.
The couple took classes in sign language after Jorden was born, and Jaden has learned it right along with his brother. The family travels with a sign-language dictionary, and they pull it out whenever Jorden comes across something he doesn't know.
The Flowers initially were told to wait until their son was 5 or 6, and see if maybe the nerve would develop. But that wasn't good enough.
"If he's 5 or 6 years old, he's lost so much of an opportunity to learn. This is when a lot of the learning takes place," Johnny Flowers said. "We felt we had to do everything in our power to search and find if there was any type of way to get hearing right now."
The couple found an operation they thought would help. Electrodes are implanted in the hearing area of the brain, allowing sound to travel directly from the ear to the brain.
But there was a catch: The surgery isn't done on children in the United States. There is a doctor who does the surgery on children Jorden's age. And he is in, of all places, Italy.
"I think that her being in bobsled and her having the Olympics being here in a few months and her having raced in Italy is not an accident," Johnny Flowers said. "I believe God brought us back to the sport for a reason. I think it's in our quest to help Jorden."