The Bilodeaus: Elusive truths from an unforgettable family

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This article was published after the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vacouver, B.C.

The night Alexandre Bilodeau won his gold medal, his sister, Béatrice, was beside herself as only a 16-year-old girl can be beside herself. One moment he was Béatrice's brother and the next he was Alexandre Bilodeau, winner of the gold medal for freestyle skiing, Canada's first on Canadian soil - glory of our glory, the first of our triumphs.

"He went on the media, and he was just gone," Béatrice remembers. She gave him a hug at the foot of the hill, but then he was swallowed by the adoring, proud masses.

Afterward, back alone in the hotel with her father, Serge, and mother, Sylvie, Béatrice did what she always does when she feels sad or bad: She talked to Frédéric, her eldest brother. He could always hear her.

Fred had been all over the TV himself, hugging his brother at the bottom of the hill - the brother with cerebral palsy who had launched himself out of his wheelchair, into his brother's arms and a nation's awareness. Alex was a hero. But Fred was where he always was at the end of the day - in his wheelchair.

"Well, why don't you come and sleep with me?" Fred said to his distraught sister. This is something families like theirs do: There, in bed, together, the differences between the disabled one and everyone else disappear.

"And so I came, and we slept together, and we talked and had a great moment, and I felt way better. Because of him."

Fred could do that.

POTENTIAL, UNLIMITED

By now everyone has heard Alex Bilodeau talk about Frédéric, has heard the Olympic champion explain how his broken brother inspires him and has heard him say at public gatherings or press conferences or on TV or in interviews, "Even though his abilities are getting lower, he's trying to improve every time. So where's my limit? If he's still skiing, where's my limit?" (Or words to that effect. Alex is almost as skilled at talking as he is on the mogul field.)

There has been so much coverage that one could be forgiven for thinking the media are exploiting Fred for the sake of an easily moving story. The family has noticed that. There are even people who say Fred's become a hero because these Olympics need some good news and Canada needs proof that it hasn't become a medal-grasping hard-ass. The family has noticed that too.

Fred disagrees. He likes being famous. His parents refused to wear TV microphones during Alex's race, but he wanted to and did. "Because of the performance of Alex," he said to me the other day in the lobby of his hotel, "I'm part of history." Fred loves history. His hero is Napoleon - "he created a new kind of liberty in Europe."

He has this way of pausing after he says something, and then adding another thought. "My brother is" - a long pause - "the Napoleon of Canada."

A radical thought: Fred says there's no need to apologize. For anything - not for winning, not for being Canadian, not for being disabled. It seems to be a popular message. So many people recognized Fred last Tuesday in downtown Vancouver that his father said, "You are almost as popular as Tom Cruise."

Fred looked up. "Who is Tom Cruise?"

SCATTERED BODIES

Fred has cerebral palsy, like 50,000 other Canadians. There are different strains, but the consequences are distressingly similar - damage to the brain, most often in utero; a subsequent inability to control or co-ordinate movement of the limbs, face, mouth, body. Incurable. Fred was fine until he was 2. Then he fell sick and couldn't move. He was admitted to hospital and stayed so long, his mother quit her job.

His feet point in one direction and his shins go another and his thighs go a third, even sitting in his wheelchair, while his trunk pokes off somewhere else again. When he speaks - low and slow and gutturally and with feeling, trying to form words that are clearly there in his head but that he can't seem to persuade his brain and mouth to say - he sometimes tries to push the air in front of him into big squares with his hands.

Unlike his physically brilliant brother, whose body has a gymnast's centred calm, Fred's torso seems to be permanently on the verge of scattering in all directions. It's not frightening, but it can be grave.

If a question is challenging, he makes the air squares bigger; if he is thoughtful, his voice is calmer. The most serious questions give him the least difficulty. Sometimes his father wipes his chin as he speaks. Mostly they laugh.

His parents met when they were 15. She was a figure skater training for the national team in Boucherville, Que. He was from Anjou, a good hockey player but too small to go pro. He thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

They were 23 when Fred was born, and didn't have another child for seven years. "He is the reason," Serge says, gesturing toward Fred. Grey-haired, fit, dressed in a neat, navy-blue-checked shirt, Serge is sitting in the hotel lobby talking to yet another reporter.

"I am 52 years old. Same for my wife. We were a very young couple when Fred was born. After he was born, we decided we couldn't have any more kids." He was too disabled.

"It was disappointing for her," Serge remembers; his wife was from a family of nine. "But you learn to live with situations. We tried to be happy campers. But we can never accept his sickness. No. Never, never, never, never." He pauses. "We were very happy to have him," but there was no way they could handle more.

Except that at 6, when his father asked Fred what Santa Claus could bring him, Fred said, "A brother."

"I know your Mum well, I will organize that," Serge replied at the time. Alex was born a year later; Béatrice arrived six years after that, after Serge and Sylvie had adjusted to the challenge of a larger family. Fred turned 28 on Feb. 8. The first thing Alex said after his win, when they embraced at the bottom of the hill, was, "Happy birthday."

For a while, they tried to raise Fred like any other child. He went to normal schools. "At first, because my Mom was like, 'No, you're not handicapped,' " his sister Béatrice remembers, "she didn't want my brother to be different, you know? And my mother is that kind of mum. She wanted him to be a normal guy. When she figured out that it was too hard for my brother, then she put him somewhere else." Maybe that, too, accounts for the seven-year gap.

"He is the bone of the family," Serge says. "And we built the family around him. And for the family as a whole, I would not change him at all. Because I don't know what kind of family we would have without Frédéric. Because we all learned from Frédéric.

"But for Fred himself - yes, I would change him in a second. Because I would like him to have the same talent, live exactly the same experience that Alex and Béatrice live."

WHOSE HERO?

We all know that Fred inspires Alex. What no one seems to ask, what we're nervous about asking, is: Does Alex inspire Fred?

In the lobby, Fred thinks about the question. He makes an interesting sight for passersby, with his low, moaning voice, his wheelchair, his affliction, his celebrity. They're in the Olympic Family Hotel, the spot on Vancouver's west side where athletes' relatives stay.

"It's a very difficult sport," Fred says, very slowly, in French, to his father's translation. "It's an extreme sport. You need a lot of talent, a lot of guts, to perform on the hill. The first jump of Alex's, the double full - that pushed me. Because if Alex can perform this kind of jump, this means here is no limit in life."

It takes a long time, minutes on end, for him to say it. You can see the ideas behind his eyes, but you have to wait, as he has to wait, for his body to obey him. Alex goes fast; time is his enemy. Fred is slow; time is his true medium, like a pool around him.

The spectacle of Alex's physical control against Fred's lack of it is what keeps us riveted - nearly the full range of human physical capability, in two brothers, on display.

"I'm the body, and he's the mind. He's part of me, and I'm part of him," Alex says.

In Torino during the 2006 Winter Games, where Alex was disappointed in his performance, Sylvie noticed Fred smiling while Alex skied. She asked him why.

"Mum," he said, "if I were fine, would I be here, at the Olympics?"

His mother was astonished. "Fred! You would have been in Salt Lake. You would be here." She was keen to assuage him.

But he didn't want assuaging. "I know," he said. "I was just asking."

He was just asking.

Maybe Alex became a skier because Fred couldn't, the same way John Ralston Saul once said he realized he became a writer because he had a brother who couldn't speak: He tried to find a voice for him, tried to make the conversation they could never have.

It's a question Alex Bilodeau has never been asked before. The world of sport doesn't like think much about the unconscious. You can't train it.

Still, Alex says, "I think it's probably true. I mean, I look at my brother, and look at what he can't have and would like to have. And he would for sure succeed at this, if he could. Because he's got so much discipline, and he goes for it. I mean, you see his fingers, they are like this" - he makes his fingers into funnels - "but he paints. You see he's in a wheelchair, but he skis.

"If I gave him the chance for a year to be a champion, it would be amazing what that guy could do in a year. He would train every day. He would just explode everything in front of him. But I actually have that chance. And so when I look at my brother, it puts everything back in perspective." He once fell 50 times trying to ski a patch of moguls Alex had competed on the same day. He just fell and got up, and fell again, and got up, and fell again.

For Fred, that is progress, life, gold, what have you. Everyone says he seems incapable of getting angry at himself. Maybe there should be a medal for that.

Ask Fred what he can do that his siblings can't,, and he says, "Paint." He works from photographs, and he paints what he likes to watch - his brother and sister skiing, their teammate Jennifer Heil skiing.

"They don't have the patience to do that," Fred says.

LOOK AHEAD, OR AWAY

Another conversation with Fred goes like this: "What one thing would you like to do that you can't do now, because of your illness?

"Fireman."

"Why?"

"To save some lives."

"Do you yearn to be out of your body? Do you ever dream you might escape its trap?"

"Yes. Yes. A big yes."

"Would you be an athlete if you could?"

"Yes."

"A good one?"

Laughing. "Yes. Oh, yes."

His brother and sister don't like to think about the day when their parents are no longer around for Fred, even though Serge, a chartered accountant at KPMG, has put aside what Alex refers to as "a lot of money." They especially don't like to contemplate a time when Fred isn't here. His doctors have predicted his life expectancy; Alex doesn't want to hear the numbers.

Anyway, the doctors have been wrong about Fred before. They said he wouldn't walk after 12, and he skied and golfed instead. It's just the past two years that have been harder; his energy has waned. He spends 80 per cent of his time in a wheelchair now.

"I can't see us as a normal family any more, as a family, without my brother Fred, without his handicap," Béatrice says one evening, waiting for her more famous brother to attend yet another event in his honour. "He's a part of my life. He's a part of me. And he has a part of me in him."

COMING HOME

It wasn't until Tuesday night, two nights after Alex's big win, that Serge insisted the Bilodeaus had to have dinner as a family again. Their dad was adamant: He wasn't going to let the media "steal Alex from us." It was "important to have a principle as a family." He didn't want "the best 23 seconds to become the worst 23 seconds as well."

He hangs onto this idea even as the world prepares to scoop Alex into its coffers.

So Alex arranged a private room at the Pan Pacific Hotel, and picked his mother and father and sister and brother up at the Family Hotel on his way over from the Olympic Village, where the athletes stay.

The only hitch was that when they arrived, hundreds and hundreds of people wanted Alex's autograph. He signed and signed before finally joining his family. That was the night Fred realized his brother was "an icon." He was amazed.

But Fred doesn't buy Serge's fear. He isn't afraid Alex would disappear. "No," he says, emphatically. "Alex will always come home."

Much later, he made his way back to the hotel and found Béatrice upset again. At 16, Béatrice is already touted by some - Fred included - as a better skier than Alex was at her age. She came 28th in her one World Cup appearance - an event she was dropped into with a day's notice, without having trained, because Jenn Heil decided not to race.

Béatrice loves Alex, but she hates having to be the next Alex; she wants to do "my own thing, go on my own path" to skiing greatness. When Fred found her, she was nervous all over again that the pressure to perform like Alex would be too much, that she would never measure up.

"But you are not Alex Bilodeau," Frédéric Bilodeau said to his little sister. "You are Béatrice."

Globe and Mail feature writer Ian Brown has won the Charles Taylor Prize and British Columbia's National Award for his book, The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son.