Why I wrote Hero Redefined
Author Doug Levy
I’ve been asked many times why I wrote Hero Redefined and how I arrived at the subject matter examined in the book.
The book builds off a few key themes: my passion for all things sports, my love of the Olympic Games, and crisscrossing those two things into a deeper examination of what it means to be a hero.
As kids, those of us who are sports fans often deem star athletes as heroes. They are our idols and role models. For me, growing up on New York’s Long Island, it was Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Joe Namath, Tom Seaver, Cleon Jones, and Willie Mays. But as I grew older, I realized crowning sports stars “heroes” or “role models” was missing the point.
Charles Barkley put that in perfect perspective in an ad he did for Nike, saying, “I am not a role model. I’m not paid to be a role model. Parents should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.”
Barkley’s point hit home with me then, and again as I watched each version of the Olympics. It thrilled me that the Summer and Winter Games brought elite athletes together on one world stage to compete at the highest levels, to represent their countries, and to do their very best. That’s why, in my mind, the Olympics—warts and controversies and all—remain one of the pinnacles of sport.
Yet the more I watched the Olympics, the more I felt like we as sports fans were only viewing part of the landscape. The coverage focused almost exclusively on medal winners, all of them richly deserving of the adulation they received. Still, it struck me that the Olympic ideal and the Olympic spirit stood for so much more.
In that spirit, I distinctly remember watching, transfixed as a Swiss marathoner named Gabriela Andersen-Schiess staggered and practically crawled her way to the finish line at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Decades later, I shook my head in awe as I read a short article—buried on the inside page of the sports section—about an American runner named Manteo Mitchell who had completed the back half of a 4×400-meter relay on a broken leg.
“What those people are doing is heroic,” I thought to myself, but at the time, I just filed those aha moments in the back of my brain. I was cup-overflowing busy with a career in politics and government, running my own lobbying business, working eighty plus hours a week, spending all the time I could with my wife and two sons, and coaching youth sports.
As I got older, and closer to retiring from my business, I began to think more about Gabriela Andersen-Schiess and Manteo Mitchell, reasoning that they were only the tip of an iceberg. And so they were, as my research illustrated for me. A book idea was born, one that took on real life in 2022, gained steam in 2023, and ascended to reality in 2024.
Hero Redefined: Profiles of Olympic Athletes Under the Radar will be officially birthed on January 28, 2025, when it is published and goes on sale. I just hope people will find the topic as interesting as I did, the athletes as worthy of the spotlight as I thought they were, and the book as entertaining to read as it was to compile and write.
