Karissa Whitsell follows the white line on the side of the road. It’s about all the legally-blind cyclist can see as she pedals her racing bike into a steep and winding descent. She can’t see the eighteen-wheeler grumbling through downshifts just inches from her shoulder or the dump truck in the oncoming lane or even the jogger pushing a doublewide stroller a hundred feet in front of her.

Just a few inches off her back tire, on his own bike, rides Bob Westman – Whitsell’s eyes. He doesn’t like what he sees. To their right, pavement peels away into a forested ravine. To their left, the eighteen-wheeler can’t slide over because the oncoming dump truck refuses to slow. And the damn jogger is still coming.

Indecision freezes Westman. If he says something, there’s no guarantee she’d hear it, not when she’s got AC/DC on her iPod. Worse yet, he might distract her. She might slide a few inches off her line, into the truck or down the ravine. If he says nothing, and she rides her line, the truck still might hit her or she might ride smack into the jogger.

It’s a split second decision.

Westman says nothing.  

He winces as Whitsell, the jogger and the truck converge like three cherries on a slot machine. The cyclist slices through a narrow gap between the stroller and the truck.

 Whitsell endures such close calls so she can keep her place atop a world-class group of cyclists. In Athens at the 2004 Paralympics – held for disabled athletes just after the summer Olympics  – Whitsell and sighted-rider Katie Compton raced on a tandem bicycle to two gold medals, a silver and a bronze. There, the duo broke the world record in the three kilometer pursuit. Whitsell’s been competing since 1996, making her Paralympic debut in Sydney, Australia in 2000, when she was just 19. Now, the U.S. Paralympic Cycling Team and a handful of sponsors pay Whitsell’s way to races all over the world. This season, she and Compton will compete in Montreal and Switzerland. In 2005, Whitsell was nominated for the Best Athlete With a Disability at ESPN’s Espy Awards. She was named the 2004 Athlete of the Year by the U.S. Association of Blind Athletes.

Not that Whitsell thinks much about past accomplishments.  She’s focused on dominating the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing. If risking her life dodging trucks, potholes and roadkill is what it takes, then that’s  what the blind cyclist will do, even if her family loses sleep and her training partner rarely stops worrying.

Such stubbornness first served Whitsell as a little girl, when at nine, macular dystrophy, a rare eye disease, began robbing her of sight. Now, at 24, she still has some peripheral vision, which allows her to read with a magnifier and sometimes to make out shapes on TV if she sits inches from the screen and tilts her head at just the right angle. For the most part, however, she can make out only some edges, shadows, and blurs of light and color.  

A few days after her close call with the eighteen-wheeler, Whitsell sips from a bottle of water in a coffee shop. She is wearing skillfully applied makeup, and her nails are manicured. She doesn’t look like a world-class athlete until you notice her quads and calves bulging through a layer of denim.

With Westman there to guide her, there’s really not that much danger, she says. They’ve have been riding together safely four years. Westman, a cycling nut who works for one of Whitsell’s sponsors, was the first to volunteer when word went out that she needed a partner to train with on a tandem. He, was riding a lot on his own anyway. He figured why not ride with a world class athlete? Now however, the duo rarely trains on a tandem. Instead, they each ride their own bikes, with Westman pedaling a few inches behind Whitsell, warning her of hazards she can’t see. Whitsell has memorized most of her fifty- to seventy-five-mile training rides. She knows when to lean into a curve or downshift for a climb. 

It’s just that you can’t memorize a truck.

At the mention of the eighteen-wheeler, the invincible champion slumps in her chair. Her blue eyes widen, and her skin turns pale.

“Thank God I didn’t know what all was happening,” she whispers, shaking her head. “I didn’t know how much danger I was in. I’m so glad Bob didn’t say anything.”

Kim Whitsell, Karissa’s mother, sits at a kitchen table, hooks her blond hair behind an ear and talk about what it was like to watch her nine-year-old daughter go blind.

“At first, I just thought she was slow,” Kim explains. “I’d tell Karissa to go get a spoon out of the silverware drawer, and it would take her so much longer than other kids. I knew she wasn’t dumb. Something was wrong.”

She got glasses, then a different pair, then started going  to specialists.  That’s when doctors discovered that her retinas were battling a rare disease. Nobody knew how long the child’s sight would last. From the time Whitsell was nine until she was fifteen, her vision deteriorated. She took Braille classes and prepared to go totally blind.

Meanwhile, Whitsell’s parents refused to hold their daughter back from anything. The young girl was always fearless, even before her eyesight started to go. She jogged with her father from the time she was three. When she was six, she ran a demanding ten kilometer race. Even after she started losing her vision, she played basketball and, according to her mother, still scored more points than the other kids. With her eyesight failing, Whitsell sprinted around her extended family’s fifty-five mostly forested acres, doing her best to keep up with her four older siblings.  In high school, she was on the swim team and ran cross-country. Her parents and coach agreed to pull her out of one race, on a dirt path strewn with rocks and logs.

 “There were just too many ways she could trip,” Kim recalls. “Karissa hated that.”