60 Minutes - 01/22/2023: Carnegie Heroes, Ballet in Exile, Flying Blind

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

In 1904. Andrew Carnegie donated millions of dollars to recognize heroes in the U.S. and Canada. Scott Pelley meets some of the recipients of the Carnegie Hero medal and finds out what neuroscience is revealing about their brains. Russia's attack on Ukraine is affecting every industry, including ballet companies in both countries. Jon Wertheim speaks with dance exiles and hears the difficulties they have faced. Freeride skiing is no easy feat. Instead of following runs that avoid obstacles, you ski towards obstacles. 15-year-old Jacob Smith is a freerider and is legally blind. Sharyn Alfonsi meets Smith to learn how he completes these treacherous runs. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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How do you define hero? We define it as, at least in terms of our metal awarding requirement, is a man or a woman that willingly and knowingly risked their life to an extraordinary degree to save or attempt to save the life of another human being. Thousands have been awarded the Carnegie Hero Medal, along with a $5,500 prize. We wondered why some people are heroic. So we went to Georgetown University to see the neuroscience for ourselves. Olga Smirnova is a Russian prima ballerina, one of the world's leading dancers. But days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Smirnova pirouetted and stepped off her stage at the renowned Bolshoi Theater with dramatic flourish.

I was so ashamed of Russia. This is the truth. I'm not ashamed that I'm Russian, but I'm ashamed because Russia started this action. Three, two, one. Jacob Smith drops into the Big Cool R, a narrow, rock-walled 1,400-foot chute. That dot is him, making his way turn by turn. A wrong move can be catastrophic. The run has a 50-degree slope, which means if you slip down the couloir, there's little chance you can stop yourself.

We thought you should see this, because he cannot. Jacob is legally blind. Good evening, I'm John Wertheim. Welcome to 60 Minutes Presents. Tonight, stories that inspire. We'll meet Ukrainian dancers pursuing their art while in exile, and a teenage skier who flies downhill without the aid of eyesight. But we begin with a tale of certified heroes. In 1904, 180 Americans were trapped by fire in a Pennsylvania coal mine. Two heroes went in to save them, but the rescuers and all but one of the miners perished. Still, that act of heroism touched one of the richest Americans,

a man whose steel mills were fired by coal. Andrew Carnegie donated more than $100 million in today's money to recognize heroes in the U.S. and Canada. As Scott Pelley first reported in 2021, a good deal has changed in 118 years. Thousands have been awarded the Carnegie Hero Medal, and advances in neuroscience are revealing why some of us may be heroic. We'll get to the science, but first meet some of the Carnegie heroes, including Terry Ann Thomas. I remember thinking just almost instantly, I am not going to let somebody die.

Terri Ann Thomas was a civilian overseeing confiscated property at the headquarters of the Topeka Police Department. In 2015, an agitated man came into the basement property room to demand his bicycle. Thomas turned to find it. As soon as I turned around and started to walk off, I heard a scream. The scream came from Officer Tammy Walter. For reasons we don't know, she'd been attacked by the man in the property room waiting area. Thomas hit a panic alarm and charged out of her locked room. And so as I ran out there, I saw there was blood on the wall, and she was down, and she was not moving.

And I went over there, and I pulled him off of her. He looked at me, and he punched me in the face. He turned around, and he started back on her. He's kicking her while she's on the ground and constantly punching her. So I went and grabbed him again and I pulled him off. Help was slow in coming. It seems no one had triggered the panic alarm before, so the cops upstairs weren't sure what it meant. He grabbed something off her gun belt.

And I thought, okay grabbed something off her gun belt, and I thought, okay, he has her gun. This whole thing has just changed. He hit the elevator button, and he looked at me, and he said, you're coming with me. Later, it turned out it was the officer's radio the man had, not her gun. But Thomas didn't know that in the fight. What happened then? And so I put my foot in the door. It opened up. And with everything I had,

I grabbed him and I pulled him out of the elevator. And just as soon as we got out, I ran to the door, I opened it, and I just started screaming. And that's when all the officers came in and took him down. A Topeka cop reported that story to the Pittsburgh headquarters of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission. Eric Zarin is president of the commission. He's a former Secret Service agent. Well, we look at up to a thousand cases a year, and we award about just a little over 10 percent of that. So in recent years, that equates to about 80 cases a year. How do you define hero?

And we define it as, at least in terms of our medal awarding requirement, is a man or a woman that willingly and knowingly risked their life to an extraordinary degree to save or attempt to save the life of another human being. What are some of the things that your investigators go through when they're investigating a case? We write to or contact police departments, fire departments, the victim in the case who was the rescued party, and other eyewitnesses to the act.

And we start to build an understanding of each case. And this is the medal. The Carnegie Medal, molded in bronze, comes with $5,500 and other financial support. We also pay for funeral costs fully for a hero that is killed in the act. We pay any medical costs for any injury that they incur, to include psychological after effects, PTSD. We don't medical costs for any injury that they incur, to include psychological after effects, PTSD. We don't present a medal and walk away. We stay there. We stay there for the hero's lifetime and sometimes, you know, far beyond. I mean, we were recently looking at a case

that, you know, a gentleman was killed in his heroic act and we supported his wife and then one of his daughters for a total of 72 years until his daughter died. On the beach on that day, I just reacted. Pete Ponser fit the Carnegie definition of hero. He was on a North Carolina beach in 2015 when someone pointed to a boy swept away by a rip current. Ponser and another man swam about 150 yards. And we found a young teenager, a 13-year-old boy, and water was starting to wash over his face. This is the boy after they swam him back to shore. As we get to the beach, a church youth group leader comes out and meets with us. He says, thank you. There's another one.

A second boy was drowning. Ponser ran, broke his foot, ignored it, and swam out. He eventually lost sight of the boy, but the child was pulled from the water by others and flown to a hospital. So why you? I didn't think about it. It's kind of like if you put your hand on a hot stove and pull it back right away without thinking.

That's kind of what it was like for me. It just needed to be done, and I did it. It was the same reaction for David McCartney when fate arrived on a two-lane road in Indiana. I was heading south, and there was a vehicle that seemed like it was going a little bit left, a little bit right, and then all of a sudden it went right, and it hit a culvert. What happened next? Well, you could start seeing smoke that was starting to bellow out,

and you could actually start hearing Miss Testerman, who I come to find out was starting to scream because the vehicle was actually starting to catch on fire. Elizabeth Testerman was trapped. Yeah, she's sitting there screaming underneath the dashes on fire. The smoke's just going through your nose, and you're trying to figure out, well, what to do now. McCartney and another man kicked in her windshield and cut her seat belt with a knife. We pull her feet out, and then we kind of wiggle her up

through that windshield that was kicked out, and then we pull her over to the grass and lay her down. A minute later, he told us, the car exploded. That fear of dying in a car is well known to Abigail Marsh. She's not a hero, but she was saved by one. At age 19, she was on an interstate at night and swerved to miss a dog. She went into a spin, which left her facing lanes of high-speed traffic in a car she couldn't restart. And I spent some amount of time, 100% certain I was about to die. I mean, I was, you know, any one of these cars hadn't swerved in time and I definitely would have been dead. What happened? I hear a rap on the passenger side window and I see a man's face staring into my car. And he said, you look like you could use

some help. The stranger got her car started and drove her to safety. His act of heroism led her to become Dr. Abigail Marsh, a neuroscientist who studies what gets into the heads of heroes. At Georgetown University, she has published studies on the brains of two kinds of people, psychopaths who have no compassion for others and people who have so much compassion that they donated a kidney to a stranger. She found a striking difference in a pair of tiny structures near the bottom of the brain called the amygdalae. They subconsciously recognize danger and react faster than conscious thought. One of the big things that we know they do is they're responsible for generating the experience of fear. What's interesting about that is that not only is the amygdala

essential for giving you the experience of fear, it seems to allow you to empathize with other people's fear. As her subjects were scanned, Marsh showed them emotional faces. And whereas people who are psychopathic show very minimal responses in the amygdala when they see a frightened face, people who have given kidneys to strangers have an exaggerated response in the amygdala, which we think means that they are more sensitive than most people to others' distress, better at interpreting when other people are in distress, more likely to pick up on them.

Perhaps like the man who saved her on the freeway. No telling how many psychopaths drove past you that night. Just try to relax and stay as still as possible during the scan. We wondered whether our Carnegie heroes were born heroic. All right, are you comfortable and ready? Was there a difference in their brains? All three volunteered for Dr. Marsh's scans. To my, I'm not going to lie, I was really pleased and gratified by what we found in the heroic rescuers, which is that just like the altruistic kidney donors, their amygdala were larger than average

and significantly more responsive to the sight of somebody else in distress, which makes so much sense. I mean, you know, these are the people who, when they saw somebody terrified because they thought they were about to die, they didn't just sit there. You know, they have all told us that they sprang into action, as you say, without thinking. You don't think, you just, you're strictly acting. I didn't think about it. I didn't even think about it.

It really makes sense when you think about how ancient and deep in our brains structures like the amygdala are. And I wouldn't want to say that the amygdala is where altruism is in the brain. It's one link in a very long chain of events that's happening that takes us from seeing that somebody's in danger

to actually acting to help them. But we know that it's definitely an us from seeing that somebody's in danger to actually acting to help them. But we know that it's definitely an essential link in that chain, whether you're a mouse or a rat or a dog or a human. It's performing these same functions at a really deep, fast subconscious level. If the act of heroism is a sprint, the consequences are a marathon. For David McCartney, it was for the better. He's the first to admit he wasn't a good man. In the past, he'd pleaded guilty to battery. But he promised the woman he pulled from the burning car that he would do good. And in 2019, he donated a kidney.

Who did the kidney go to? I have no clue. On the other hand, for Terry Ann Thomas, heroism has been troubling. She wasn't able to go back to work in the police property room. I had a hard time. I still have a hard time. And it's been a hard time for Pete Ponser, who was left with regret. That second boy he could not reach was flown to a hospital but did not survive.

A hero would have gotten the second one as well. And that's a challenge that I always live with. I just couldn't get the second kid. His regret was coupled with curiosity about the boy he saved seven years ago, the boy whose name he never knew. The young man that you saved is named Sebastian Prokop. Okay. And we found him.

Okay. And he had something that he wanted to say to you. So let me introduce you. I'm Sebastian Prokop. I'm 18. I recently graduated from high school and I'm working towards going to college, getting a car, all that good stuff. Thank you to the one who pulled me out and let me be able to achieve all the milestones that I've got and that I plan to get. Thank you, Scott. What is it like to see him today? It kind of takes my breath away, Scott,

because that helps to bring some closure and some help. Help for Heroes has been the mission of the Carnegie Fund for 118 years. It has bestowed 10,000 medals and awarded $40 million. Back in 1904, Andrew Carnegie sensed what science has now confirmed. Heroes, he said, cannot be created. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or

wherever you get your podcasts. For decades now, Russians have known the drill. When there's bad news brewing, such as the death of a leader, or a convulsive event, such as the Chernobyl disaster, state TV switches its programming and begins airing Tchaikovsky's ballet, Swan Lake. Nothing to see here, folks. But also note the choice of distraction. Ballet is centrally important to Russian society and to Russian image. Dancers slicing through the air and challenging laws of physics and gravity represent civility and grace. But last February, when Russian military

troops invaded Ukraine, Russian ballet troops had their Western tours canceled, and Moscow's Bolshoi Theater has shuttered shows by directors critical of Putin's war. As we first reported last year, this brutal war plays out on the most delicate of fronts, leaving ballet in exile. When ballet dancers are described as God's athletes, well, you could offer up Olga Smirnova as supporting evidence. She treads on air, coming in on little cat feet. She's a Russian prima ballerina, one of the world's leading dancers. But days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Smirnova pirouetted and stepped off her stage at the renowned Bolshoi Theater with dramatic flourish.

She took to social media to express her outrage and then fled the country, the modern-day version of Nureyev or Baryshnikov defecting. When you sat down to write that social media post, what did you want to communicate? What did you want to say? I just couldn't keep it inside. I was so ashamed of Russia. This is the truth. I'm not ashamed that I'm Russian, but I'm ashamed because of Russia started this action. I want to read what you wrote. You said you were against this war with every fiber of your being, but I now feel that a line has been drawn that separates the before and the after.

It's how I felt. 24th of February, this was the line, because it's all changed, all changed. The reputation of Russia and Russian people, even if you are not a soldier, you're just Russian, it still makes a shadow on you. Being Russian. Being Russian. And it's really painful.

Predictably, Smirnova's post went viral. She was, after all, a leading light at Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet. From the Russian word for big, Bolshoi is the world's largest ballet company and the most prestigious. The theater is physically close to the Kremlin, a short walk away, and also aligned inextricably with the Russian government. Tsars loved the Bolshoi. For decades, communist leaders used the Bolshoi theater for political stagecraft, holding rallies and giving national addresses there. This is something that celebrates Russia.

Every important guest who would visit the Soviet Union would be invited to the Bolshoi to see the performance. And there was a pride of Russia at any time. Alexei Radmansky trained at the Bolshoi school and was for a time its artistic director. He was born in Russia, but grew up in Kiev, where his parents still live. At the time of the invasion, he was in Russia choreographing two ballets. He left the country immediately, unwilling to continue working in a world so tied to the Putin regime. As I was going in a taxi to the airport, I felt these two sandcastles falling apart behind my back. Those sandcastles were the work you had done?

Yes, yes, yes. It was an agony. It was a very hard day. And, of course, a catastrophic day for Ukraine. Indiscriminate bombings and missile strikes raining down upon the country, crushing lives and dreams. Not least, those of an ascendant ballerina from Kiev, Polina Chepik, age 17. You wanted to be a ballerina for years and years. What was it like when suddenly you couldn't go to school, couldn't dance? I was shocked and I was like, oh my God.

And first, about what I'm thinking, that I left my pointe shoes in college. That was your first thought? Yes. You left your pointe shoes at school? I left everything, actually. Ward didn't stop her in her footsteps. She resumed dancing at home, using whatever she could as a bar. But after a few days, her parents, both former dancers, focused on getting Paulina out. They called on a famously well-connected figure in the tight-knit ballet community,

New Jersey-based Larissa Savlyev. You're getting this barrage of emails from parents and from dancers. What are they telling you? What are they telling you? What are they asking you? Please help. That was get us out of here. They're willing to give up everything else, but they have to dance.

And the parents were, you know, it doesn't matter what we do, they have to dance. This was their lifeline almost. This is it. They just, they could not imagine not dance. This was their lifeline. This is it. They just, they could not imagine not dance. In the 1990s, she founded Youth America Grand Prix, a ballet competition and scholarship program, pairing aspiring dancers with ballet schools worldwide. Well, no, they want to see her for full year, but you have to come for the summer first.

Now, in a humanitarian crisis, she and the international ballet community scramble to action. Savlyev tapped her vast network, relocating more than 100 young Ukrainian dancers to new schools and host families. We give each child a number just to move faster. And we say, OK, number 55 is like just get a spot in Stuttgart. OK, number 54, just get a spot in Dresden. Cross it off the list. Cross it off the list. When a slot opened for Paulina, she stuffed leotards and tutus into a suitcase, along with a bottle of her mom's perfume, a reminder of home. And then she headed to Keith's train station. And my parents are in the window of the train.

They said, goodbye, we love you, everything will be fine. And I was crying, and we were all crying. I was thinking maybe I need to take my suitcase and go back to my family because my heart was broken, really. How did you overcome that? What made you not get off that train? Because it's open door for me. It's a door for my dream. 17-year-old that she is, Paulina documented the lonely odyssey on TikTok. Trains and buses, five days and 1,200 miles, Kiev to Lviv, Poland to Berlin, finally to Amsterdam, where she landed at the Dutch National Ballet Academy, one of the leading schools in the world.

When you got to the new school and started dancing again, how did that feel? Oh, I was very happy, yes. My mind changed because I was thinking about my parents all the time, for my family, for my sister. And when I go to ballet class, this world changed for me. I have another world of ballet. Her adjustment was made easier when she found other Ukrainian dance students who, thanks to Larissa Savlyev, also found safe harbor in Amsterdam. Paulina fell into a routine immediately. On the cusp of a professional career, she prepared for final exams.

She was jittery beforehand. She emerged relieved, triumphant, and eager to report back to mom. What did you tell her? That I was nervous, but when I start, I do everything right. If the war has made refugees out of some Ukrainian dancers, it's made soldiers out of others. When the war began, Alexei Podiumkin, a principal dancer with Ukraine's National Ballet, turned in his tights for military fatigues. Here he is in downtown Lviv, having just returned

from duty as a medic. What was your life like before the war? Before war, I must, I preparing new premier in ballet, Ukrainian ballet. You know, like real normal life. And just one moment it's like changes. But I need to do something. I can't sit just at home in shelter and watch TV, how my friends die and everyone do something. What have you seen these last few months? Every day it's really scary. They crashed everything, destroyed houses of civilian people,

its brothers, sons, fathers, sisters. While he says he's shaken by what he's seen unfold on the battlefield, he's also appalled by a war taking place on another front, at the Bolshoi. The Bolshoi now, it's a toxic feature. Nobody wants to work with you. You said toxic. Toxic, yes. In Russia, art, it's politics.

It's Russian government use it barely. It's like weapon. The weapon was deployed at the Bolshoi as recently as this past April, when the theater revived a production of Spartacus in support of the Russian military a military operation to save Ukraine from the fascists, which is a totally ridiculous concept, of course. This allegory, Spartacus, about the slave revolt is somehow being co-opted by the aggressive superpower. Absolutely, no, it's not for nothing

that this became one of the signature ballets of the Soviet time. Abroad, the ballet community has staged benefit concerts to raise funds for Ukraine, while Russia's famed companies, the Bolshoi and St. Petersburg's Marinsky, have had their touring dates cancelled. I think you need to be a little bit more exit with your arms. With the Iron Curtain down, artists have to pick a side. Alexei Radmonsky left Moscow for American Ballet Theater in New York, where he is artist-in-residence and where we spoke with him remotely this past April.

Sounds like you don't buy this idea that, look, individuals shouldn't bear the responsibility for the acts of the state, that artists should just be artists. No, I don't think the artists are separate from politics. And besides, for me, it's not politics. It's about humanity. It's about responding to war crimes, responding to the crimes of your government, of your president. It just made things clear which things are important and which aren't. And you make a choice. You decide where you want to belong.

For Olga Smirnova, that choice came together in a matter of days after she condemned the war. She left Russia and landed on her feet at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, just around the corner from Paulina's school. It must have been incredibly difficult to leave the Bolshoi. If you make a choice, you have consequences. But this is how it works. I had to leave everything. Like my home, my theater,

my repertoire, my partners, my parents, sister, brother, everything. But I don't have regrets. No regrets? No. Because at least I can be honest with myself.

American philanthropist Howard Buffett, son of Warren Buffett, watched our story when it was first broadcast last year. His foundation granted more than a million dollars to help support the exiled Ukrainian dancers. In the world of skiing, there are two kinds of skiers. Those who like to stay on the groomed runs and be guided gently around obstacles, and those who like to ski the whole mountain and ski towards the obstacles. That is called free riding. Man-made jumps, rails, and half pipes are rejected in favor of the drops, jagged cliffs, and deep chutes created by Mother Nature.

The sport of freeriding took off in the 1990s and is now one of the fastest growing disciplines in skiing. Given the risks inherent with the terrain, it attracts some of the bravest and most adventurous skiers in the world. But as Sharon Alfonsi first reported last March, even among that group, 15-year-old Jacob Smith stands out. most adventurous skiers in the world. But as Sharon Alfonsi first reported last March, even among that group, 15-year-old Jacob Smith stands out. We thought you should see what he does, because he cannot.

This is Big Sky, Montana, home to some of the steepest and most challenging ski slopes in the country. And that is Jacob Smith, who is blind. Three years ago, he was just 12 years old as he made his way to the top of the 11,000-foot-high Lone Peak to ski down it. Watch this. Dropping in 3, 2, 1. Jacob drops into the Big Cool R, a narrow, rock-walled 1,400-foot chute. That dot is him, making his way turn by turn.

A wrong move can be catastrophic. The run has a 50-degree slope, which means if you slip down the couloir, there's little chance you can stop yourself. When you're standing at the top, you feel like if you move, you're going to die. And that's the moment most people would say, you know what, maybe not a good idea. Yeah, but I'm kind of just like, well, I'm already up here, so I've got to make it down somehow. He did, and became the only legally blind athlete to ski the legendary run. You did it!

That was awesome. History just has been made. Forever. How'd you feel when you made it to the bottom? Excited that I did it. I didn't crash. I thought it was awesome. I guess we made it four more times, so I just wanted to do it again. You were testing your luck that day. We got Jacob Smith on course. Jacob is still testing his luck and good sense. We met him in January at a junior regional free ride tournament in Big Sky. That's him, now 15 years old, competing against 40 other teenage daredevils, all of whom can see perfectly well. Coming right off the top of that, finding pretty good landing. This time, the background for all the competitors' spectacular experiment with gravity was another triple diamond shoot, appropriately named DTM.

DTM stands for? Don't tell Mama. It is an insane run, like a 45-degree slope. Yeah. Did the judges give you any slack for being blind? No, zero. Do you think they should? No, I don't.

I want to be treated normal so I compete with other sighted skiers. It's not an insignificant difference. We worked with his doctors and our graphic artist to show roughly what Jacob can see on a run. He has extreme tunnel vision and no depth perception on top of that. It's blurry. His visual acuity is rated 2800, four times the level of legal blindness. Think of the big E on the eye chart. He would need it to be blown up four times in order to see it from 20 feet away.

Fantastic ski technique. You wouldn't be able to tell he's visually impaired. So how does Jacob ski like this? His family keeps him on course. Go up with your right feet really far. On competition days, his little brother Preston patiently helps him hike to the top of the venue. It's so high, the lifts won't take you there.

First down, down, perfect, perfect, keep going. Then his father Nathan helps him get down. Nice turns, nice turns. Jacob has a two-way radio turned up high in his pocket. His dad is on the other end at the base, somehow, calmly guiding him down. Okay, right, right, right. It's on me to make sure I somehow calmly guiding him down. It's on me to make sure I don't let him down, that I get him in trouble. I have to guide him through narrower chutes or not go off a cliff. You have to be his eyes.

Yeah. And there can't be a delay. He can't say, are you sure, dad? Nope. Have you ever missed it? Have you ever said, oh gosh, I forgot to tell him about that or I didn't see that? Oh, yeah, all the time. But his adaptation is pretty amazing. How much do you trust him?

I mean, enough to turn right when he tells me. Jacob's just putting his all into my dad's voice. It's crazy skiing, just listening to someone turn there, turn there. Could you ski like that? It's like closing your eyes, basically. It would be so hard. Jacob's siblings are all competitive skiers. That's Andrew, who's 17, doing a 360. Preston is 14, and Julia is 12. Do the other competitors know that he's blind? Some do, but they always, like, announce it over the intercom that, like, blind skier Jacob coming down the hill.

He is the only ever, I have to say, blind skier. That's when everyone turns and looks. Oh, it's a miracle. Look at him. Would you know if you didn't know? He's such a good skier for legally blind. They just get mad at him if he's in the way. If we tell anybody that he's legally blind, then nobody believes us.

They just give us a bad look. Jacob was born with vision. Soon after he learned to walk, he was on skis. Family vacations were spent bombing down the trails in Big Sky with his family. But it was back home at their ranch in North Dakota that an unexpected obstacle changed Jacob's life. He started getting headaches and began bumping into things. He was eight years old. I like ran into a wall or something that my mom saw and then it was like two days after I went to the eye doctor and he took one look at my eyes, looked at my mom, and then just asked, like, which hospital he wanted,

because my octave nerve was swelling and bleeding. Did you have any sense that things were going wrong up until that point? No. That day, Jacob was flown here to the Masonic Children's Hospital in Minneapolis, where he underwent an emergency 12-hour surgery after an MRI revealed a cancerous brain tumor the size of a softball that was crushing his optic nerve. It's the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life. It looked like half his brain was a tumor.

So at that point, you're not thinking, I'm worried he's going to lose his vision. You're thinking, I'm worried he's not. I'm losing my child. You're going to lose your child. I'm going to bury his vision. You're thinking, I'm going to lose my child. You're going to lose your child. I'm going to bury a kid. In that first surgery, doctors removed enough of the tumor to relieve the pressure on Jacob's optic nerve to stop his vision from continuing to deteriorate. Here he is leaving a message for his siblings a few days later. I miss you all a lot. I really, really do. My situation is getting better.

I'm coming home and I'm really excited. But Jacob would need three more major brain surgeries over the next three years, all before he was 12 years old. My head feels okay. Each time with an extensive rehabilitation. Did you ever get down about it? Like I did, but at the same time, I just prayed a lot. When you were praying about it, were you praying, this will be over?

Were you praying, I want to get my vision back? Or were you praying I'll stay alive? That I'll stay alive and that'll get through it. And that's what happened. Finally, in 2017, a course of radiation eradicated the cancer and Jacob got a clean scan. But his doctor said the radiation increased his lifetime risk of another brain tumor by up to 30%. Right now, the tumor that we originally targeted is gone. You know, so far so good. It doesn't sound like you've exhaled. I don't think you ever exhale. Because?

Because there's always the what if. You know, when you get put into that situation that you never felt you ever should have been or expected, I don't think you're ever going to exhale and go, we're done. Whose idea was it to return to skiing? Well, my dad's. Turn and go straight through it. So we came out here and we kind of just tried it out. Everywhere I went skiing for probably the first year or two was with either my dad or a coach. You've taught your kids to ski, but you've never taught a blind child to ski. No. So you did not know what you were doing? No. So tell me about those early days. Well, at first everyone said, get a rope and a sign, and he's going to be a blind skier and you're going to guide him. Like, I'm like, nope, that's not an option. We're not going to do it that way.

Because why? Because I'm not going to let that define him. Father and son admit they're trying to carve their own path, sort of figuring it out as they go. Jacob says he's learned to listen for danger, other skiers, the churning of a lift, or icy conditions under foot. Andy says he remembers many of the runs from when he could see. Can you feel your way down a run you didn't go on before you lost your vision? I mean, yeah, I can, and I've done it. And how does it work out? It's pretty scary and sometimes takes me a little minute. That's got to be terrifying. You get used to it. How many crashes were there in those early days?

I don't even think I can count that high. When Jacob was 10, he shattered his femur in 60 places when he skied into a tree. Are you not nervous that there's going to be a catastrophic accident, that he could die doing this? It's not the way I like vision life. I don't look for the reasons not to do things. I'm not going to put him in something that I'm not going through first, that the consequences of falling are not going to be life-threatening. What are you fearful of? The only big fear I have is not succeeding.

You're more afraid of not succeeding than you are of getting hurt? Yes. Why is that? Because I've already lost my vision, so a couple broken bones and a couple more mishaps, I guess isn't a big deal to me at all. Clearly he's fearless. As a parent, are you not fearful? He's not reckless. He knows his limitations. I think he has the ability to ski anything on the mountain, but he's not going to go try to do it by himself. Like he wants to be with somebody he wants to trust. He won't ski with people he doesn't trust. Nathan said Jacob is cautious about skiing and competing on low visibility days when he can see even less than usual. Still, he finds a way of keeping up with his siblings. They are an enviable pack on the mountain. Do you see him being like super plugged

into everything else, right, to the sounds? He was saying he like, here's the lift, the mountain. Do you see him being like super plugged into everything else, right? To the sounds he was saying, he like, here's the lift, the snow. What do you see? His hearing is very like, he chooses what he wants to hear. So what do you mean? There's times at home where he'll be like, you could say his name a thousand times and he'll pretend like he didn't hear one word, but then skiing, it's like, you could like flick and he'll like just he didn't hear one word. But then skiing, it's like you could flick and he'll just turn, you know. On competition day, Jacob suits up and sends it. Dad, drop in. Three, two, one. Finishing 19th out of 41 competitors.

For Jacob, success isn't about the trophy. It's about freedom, showing others how to negotiate obstacles, even when you can't see them coming. Coming to the finish line. Honestly, no matter what gets thrown in front of you, what kind of comes out of nowhere and strikes you, takes you off guard a little bit, there is always a way to conquer it, to adapt, to make it happen, and still do what you want to do. One downside of a career in journalism is how fast it can transform an eternal optimist into a chronic

cynic. So much energy and airtime is expended reporting about criminals, charlatans, disasters, and idols with feet of clay that there's little room left for stories of inspiration. Finding and sharing stories, such as the three we reported tonight, is one rewarding aspect of working here at 60 Minutes. Stories of renewal, of hope, and of virtue are to be had among the many tales of crime, corruption, and global doom. Tales of inspiration are stories, too, and it doesn't hurt to report them. Not only can they inspire the viewer,

but they also help keep the cynic and the reporter at bay. At least for a while. I'm John Wertheim. We'll be back in two weeks with a brand new edition of 60 Minutes.