Baby boomers are more likely to recognize her as a sports icon – a tenacious yet shy all-American-girl – who brought pride to her country after winning a gold medal at the 1968 Winter Olympics.

It was the very same year that Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Color television and coming of age opened the window, enabling Americans to be voyeurs to the seething violence that became part of the culture. In the summer of ‘68, as dissenting heads were based in the streets of Chicago at the Democratic Convention, Olympic medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists in protest after their victories on the track. Another slice was carved from the American-image pie, this one juxtaposed to Peggy Fleming’s.

She is a very private person, despite her public persona. For the past eighteen years, she has worked for ABC Sports as a color commentator. Her inherent shyness, discussed in her recently published book, The Long Program, has apparently not hindered her career. She pictures herself as a wife and a mom with a high-profile job. Despite her fame, she has little if any interest in the limelight. It was after the interview that I realized why the light follows her. Despite her gentle delivery, there is a force that would make Darth Vader sit up and notice. Rather than edit her words, we opted to allow our readers to “hear” them as they were delivered, to generate the message as she intended.

ABCG: Was your lifestyle helpful during the course of your treatment?

MS. FLEMING: We’re all told to exercise regularly and eat a balanced diet. I was doing that all along. When it came to my diagnosis of breast cancer, it’s a message to everyone that it can happen to any one of us, no matter what we’re doing. So when I was going through the treatments, I really tried to carry on with my life as normally as I could. When my 10-year-old little boy saw that he still had his Mom there, I tried to have as much energy as I normally had. It was good for me (to exercise); I tried to maintain a normal life.

ABCG: I read in your book, The Long Program, that you went through some dark periods. I understand and it’s fascinating to me, as an athlete, that you used exercise to keep you anchored during this time.

MS. FLEMING: That was the tool I always used throughout my life, testing myself physically, to see how I was dealing with it, and it proved to me that I was still pretty strong. Once I finished the treatments, the side effects kind of got to me. I did go in phases of being strong when I had to be strong – going through the treatments – but then it was over and I had a let-down. Okay, now I don’t have to push myself any more. I’m going to be okay, but then it goes into a different phase. It took me a year to feel like myself again.

ABCG: There’s a parallel line here that runs through this – don’t let me put words in your mouth – that you feel in a certain way that you’re a spokesperson now for other people?

MS. FLEMING: If we can get the message out to people in all different backgrounds – my background being an athlete and the lifestyle we are all told is supposed to make us healthy and help us avoid diseases like this – I think the message that I can bring to people, even though you’re doing everything right, is that it can happen to you. Early detection is part of the cure. If you catch most breast cancers early enough, it’s very treatable. It’s not the death sentence it was years ago.

ABCG: The message that runs through most people’s stories is dealing with fear, which you say in your book, dealing with it head on. Is this the message you’re trying to convey?

MS. FLEMING: Yes, I think so. If you have a fear of something, understand it more, get more information, deal with it, don’t procrastinate and do something about it.

ABCG: There’s a mixed message about fear, about procrastination, that women must deal with: “If I feel for a lump, maybe I’ll find one?”

MS. FLEMING: Younger and younger women are developing this disease. We all have to pay attention.

ABCG: So your message is early detection. If you detect something, don’t sit on it – go to a doctor.

MS. FLEMING: Absolutely. Get a professional opinion. Follow your instincts and your common sense. In the case of breast cancer detection, your instincts are usually right. You have a lot of power within yourself.

ABCG: And the fear factor?

MS. FLEMING: Dealing with it (gives you) peace of mind...get it over with...get it behind you. For me, I feel like, “Wow, it’s behind me now!” I mean I’m always looking over my shoulder, thinking it can still happen. But that experience is behind me now. If I can help any other woman along the way, bringing awareness to this disease, I’d like to participate in that respect.

Peggy Fleming is fortunate to be doing well after her lumpectomy and radiation treatments. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband and two sons.

"We Stopped"
The following excerpt is from Chapter 8 of Ms. Fleming’s book, The Long Program. It epitomizes the “Don’t put it off” attitude in allegorical form. Peggy and her friend Jean were on vacation, in the far reaches of the Galapagos Islands:

“We dropped our backpacks in the sand and took a stroll down the beach. We must have gone around two hundred yards when I turned around to take in the beautiful view and there was this guy running into the trees...with our two backpacks.

Jean and I took off after him, yelling and screaming as we went. The sight of two banshees in bikinis must have been too much for this Galapagos purse-snatcher. He dropped our bags and hightailed into the woods.

“Good thing we decided against skinny-dipping,” I said to Jean. If we didn’t catch him it would have been awfully embarrassing to walk into the nearest village trying to preserve our dignity with some leaves from a rubber plant.

Having rescued our bags, we began to walk back to the village...we didn’t give much thought to our brush with the pack-snatcher until we turned around and there he was again, about a hundred yards behind us.

We stopped. He stopped.

“Peggy,” said Jean, “I think our boyfriend is after us again.” We ran as fast as we could. When we got to the top of a little rise we looked back, and there he was, running flat out. There was no question about it. He was pursuing us.

Jean said, “We’re not going to outrun this guy. I think it’s better to face him now, while we are fresh, than an hour from now when we are deep in the woods.” I agreed.

We knew, or at least we were pretty sure, that he didn’t have a gun. If anything, he had a knife. We turned our knapsacks around so that we were wearing them in front; that way, if he slashed out at us, we had a little protection. Next we needed weapons and when you are in the middle of the forest, you do like the caveman did: you pick up something that’s lying around. I grabbed a big spiky piece of cactus, and Jean grabbed a couple of soft-ball sized lava rocks.

We headed a little farther down the path, around a blind curve, and we waited. A couple of minutes later our attacker came loping around the curve, and when he saw us, he stopped dead in his tracks and tried to act nonchalant. We walked very fast straight toward him. I’m sure he thought we were nuts.

Jean knocked her stones together, and I did my best to look dangerous with my cactus war club. Neither of us speaks Spanish, but we communicated pretty well that we wanted him to keep on walking, ahead of us. There was no way we were going to let him sneak up on us from behind.

He said a lot of things in very fast Spanish but the only word I picked out was LOCO which he kept muttering all the way to town. When we reached it...we went our way and he went his...

I don’t tell this story to encourage you to pick up a stick the next time you think someone is following you. I have always thought it is better to walk away from trouble. But sometimes trouble seeks you out and you can’t walk away. It is much better to confront it immediately, before it wears you down.

Breast cancer was that kind of trouble.