Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [102]
We immediately began working together. I told Salazar that I had been in touch with the Soviet consulate in San Francisco and that I had met with Alexander Terehkin. Salazar suggested that I write to him as well as Mr. Potemkin, the cultural attaché at the Soviet embassy, with updates on my progress and news about my contacts with Bob Walsh and the Goodwill Games.
What we were working toward at that point was simply a response from the Soviets. Would they permit the swim to happen? We waited. On a daily basis I began talking with Salazar, Kassander, Evans, and Bob Walsh’s assistant, Gene Fisher, discussing what to do next. I also kept writing more letters and making more phone calls. Eventually, they began talking to one another, and they came back with suggestions for me. This team knew how the world worked and how the Soviets worked, and they gave me insights into how our government and the Soviet government worked. With their help, I started getting calls back from the Soviets.
Then a call came from Congressman Dan Lungren’s office. Lungren said that his office had sent letters to the Soviet embassy as well, and they would let me know when they heard anything. Meanwhile, Bob Walsh met with Mr. Gramov of the Soviet Sports Committee in Moscow. Gramov was thrilled with the idea, and he put his best man, Alexander Kozlovsky in charge of the project. Kozlovsky began contacting the Soviet Foreign Ministry, the KGB, military officials, the governor of Siberia, various diplomats, and people within the Soviet Sports Committee. His job was to secure Soviet permission; if he managed to get it, he would be in charge of organizing the swim from the Soviet side.
Kozlovsky was given carte blanche by Mr. Gramov to do and to spend whatever he needed to on this project. At that point, I didn’t know all of this, only that Mr. Kozlovsky was our guy on the inside trying to get Soviet support.
One of the largest considerations on the Bering Strait swim was the cold and how it would affect me. I had been writing to Dr. William Keatinge at the University of London, William McCafferty’s friend who was the world’s foremost expert on hypothermia. Dr. Keatinge wrote to me and said that yes, he would like to come on the swim and provide medical backup. He could also use the swim as an opportunity to take my core temperature readings during the crossing, information that would be very useful in his research on hypothermia.
I also received a call from Dr. Jan Nyboer. Nyboer was a physician and long-distance runner in Anchorage, who read about me in a local newspaper. He was calling to say he would like to offer his help, to join the swim crew as a medical support person. He also offered to open his home, so that my crew and I would have a place to stay if we needed one when we stopped over on our trip from Anchorage to Nome. And he offered to bring his father along. His father was a world-renowned cardiologist from the Detroit area who had done research on physiological responses to the cold and was very interested in the way blood flow was altered. I thought it was a good idea; my only worry was that his father was eighty years old, and I wasn’t sure how well he would do in the difficult conditions. Dr. Nyboer said that his father would be fine. Dr. Nyboer was so energized over the swim that he made me even more excited.
One of my largest concerns was what kind of boat we would use for the swim. When my brother Dave had flown to Wales in 1976, he’d reported that the only boat support on Little Diomede were umiaks, walrus-skin boats. While the distance from Little Diomede to Big Diomede in a straight