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ODD L AL T S IN A G E A V I AL M REA D HIS G IN P E KE By TORI PHELPS When elite runner Chaz Davis went blind almost overnight, his new vision included the world’s biggest athletic stage.
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Opposite: Olympic runner Chaz Davis Photo © Robert Houser 2020. All rights reserved. 88 | AUGUST 2020
t was something he’d done hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Climbing into the driver’s seat on a hot July day, nineteen-year-old Chaz Davis backed out of his driveway and into what should have been a familiar landscape. Except he couldn’t see what he’d always seen. Even seven years later, he vividly recalls pulling back into the driveway with a heavy heart. “That was the last time I drove a car,” he says. By any measure, Chaz had been living a charmed life. Growing up with a younger brother and both parents in the small town of Grafton, Massachusetts, he was a gifted distance runner who, by his junior year of high school, was divisional state champion
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