February 6, 2010
An aspiring Olympian is behind a new drive to register thousands of bone-marrow donors - and his great motivation: It could save his life. Seun Adebiyi, 26, has rare forms of lymphoma and leukemia, and his best shot at survival is a bone marrow transplant. The recent Yale Law grad has no full siblings. African-American donors are hard to find in the U.S., and his home country, Nigeria, has no registry.So he's decided to help create a larger pool of matches for himself and others. His goal is to collect 10,000 new donors in the U.S. and Africa. The next drive will be Sunday at the Yale Club in midtown.
Adebiyi, who lives in Manhattan with friends, came to the U.S. from Lagos, Nigeria, as a child, and grew up poor in Huntsville, Ala., where his Olympic aspirations began.
Adebiyi started swimming competitively at age 6, and went to a Florida high school that trains Olympic hopefuls.
He missed the 2000 Olympics with a stress-fracture in his back. While at the University of Pittsburgh, he missed making Nigeria's 2004 team by a 10th of a second. As he moved on to Yale to pursue law, his Olympic dream didn't die.
"I've been obsessed with the Olympics always," Adebiyi said. "I just feel like it's my destiny."
Adebiyi thinks his best ticket is to compete in a snow sport on behalf of Nigeria, a country with no winter - creating his own version of "Cool Runnings."
Cross-country skiing was deemed "too hard" and downhill skiing "too dangerous," so Adebiyi chose skeleton, which entails racing 80 mph down a bobsled track, "head first, no brakes," Adebiyi said. "And the nice thing is, it requires relatively little training."
Since then, despite his cancer, Adebiyi has been training for the 2014 Olympics. But in order to get there, he needs a bone marrow transplant.
"It's been a blessing," said Adebiyi, who's on leave from Goldman Sachs. "It really sharpened my focus on what's important. To be 26 and contemplating your own mortality."
"Most of my fellow law school graduates are laying the foundations for long-term careers, whereas my focus is on living every day to the fullest," he added.
That kind of upbeat attitude isn't a facade, according to Harold Hongju Koh, who got to know Adebiyi while dean of Yale's law school.
"Many people, if told they had a life-threatening illness," Koh said, "would focus simply on getting the best cure ... not see it as a broader social issue."
"The thing is, he refuses to be a victim in all of this," Koh said. "He sees it as a challenge. He's being called to a test sort of early in his life. He seems to have utter confidence that he can overcome it."
You can register to be a bone marrow donor between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. Sunday at the Yale Club, 50 Vanderbilt Ave. between 44th and 45th Sts. Learn more at dkmsamericas.org or e-mail Alina Suprunova at [email protected].
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Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/01/09/2010-01-09_in_the_race_of_his_life_putting_everything_into_oly_dream_and_fighting_cancer.html#ixzz0esfnTglZ
Seun Adebiyi, who has rare forms of leukemia and lymphoma, launches a drive to find a bone marrow donor to save his life. Adebiyi hopes to compete in the 2014 Olympics.
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