Hey right wingers-Rio ended the career of a beautiful American swimmer-how does that make you feel?

Kalyn Keller, a former U.S. Olympic Swimmer


Kalyn Keller, a former U.S. Olympic swimmer, believes her diagnosis of Crohn's disease is connected to her swimming in the waters off the coast of Brazil. The International Olympic Committee just awarded the 2016 Olympic Games to Rio de Janeiro where athletes will compete in those same waters.

(CNSNews.com) – Medical experts cannot confirm Kalyn Keller’s belief that her diagnosis of Crohn’s disease is connected to her swimming in the waters off the coast of Brazil in the 2007 Pan American Games. But when the International Olympic Committee announced it had picked Rio de Janeiro as the host city for the 2016 summer Olympic Games, Keller said she was devastated.

“It was kind of just like everything happening again,” Keller, 24, told CNSNews.com as she fought back tears. “I don’t want this to happen to anyone else...”

Keller, meanwhile, was forced to retire from a world-class swimming career that began at age 14 and included competing in the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens and earning a silver medal in the women’s 25k open water race at the 2007 world championship competition in Melbourne, Australia.

She was on the fast track to the 2008 Beijing Olympics where the open-swim event would make its Olympic debut when she took part in the Pan American Games in 2007 in Brazil. Not long after competing in the open-swim competition off of Copacabana Beach, Keller developed flu-like symptoms and failed to make the cut in the Olympic trials in Florida later that year.

Keller said her diagnosis as having Crohn’s disease not only ended her career, but changed her life. She lost the insurance she had as a U.S. athlete and could not get coverage elsewhere.

“It completely ripped my life out from under my feet,” Keller said. “I had a big plan of going to the Olympics and all of a sudden I went from athlete to invalid.”

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/55115