News Coverage

Jay Winans

Two years ago, Sandra Keith, the twenty-five-year-old Olympic biathlete from Canmore, Alberta, elected to have laser surgery at the Gimbel Eye Centre in Calgary to correct her astigmatism and myopia. "When you are competing on a world-class level, you can't be blinking while you need to be shooting," says Keith. She explains that her sport requires her to fire off five shots in 20 seconds, a feat that until her surgery her competitors were able to do a split second faster than she could, as she would have to blink to keep her contact lenses lubricated.

Unable to see the chalkboard in school from the age of 12 - just about the time she began competing in biathlon as a junior athlete - Keith did not start wearing contact lenses until she was 15 years old. As she progressed in her sport, she and her father, also a biathlete, competing at the Masters level while wearing glasses, would kid around about both of them needing laser surgery.

Eventually, after laser eye surgery had become more common and the technology had improved, Keith contacted the Gimbel Eye Centre. Keith and Gimbel hit it off immediately. "We were impressed with Sandra not only as a dedicated athlete, but she also endeared herself to us as a person. We were comfortable that Sandra would represent our organization well," says Suzanne Perreault, Director of Operations at Gimbel. They agreed to become Keith's sponsor, performing the LASIK procedure on both of Keith's eyes in exchange for Keith's representation and promotion at her sporting events.
Dr. Jacinthe Kassab advised Keith that, although she was a good candidate for LASIK surgery with Wavefront technology, her post-operative vision might not be as pristine as her vision was with contact lenses. In other words, Dr. Kassab was confident but could not offer any guarantees. Keith was willing to take the risk.

"I was a little nervous. My eyesight was so important - I really didn't want anything to go wrong," remembers Keith. She described the strange sensation of wearing clear protective eye covers - "like looking through swimming goggles" - over her eyes, following the August 2004 surgery. "When I woke up the next morning and I was struck by how sharp everything was," a story that Perreault hears frequently from other patients.
Keith returned to weight training two days after her surgery, and the day after she was back at the firing rate. " The targets were crisp, and there was no need to blink!"

Keith's shooting time improved and her accuracy has improved as well. At the 2005 World Cup, held in December in Hochflizen, Austria, Keith hit 20 for 20 targets, a rate of accuracy she had not met in competition since well before her surgery. In fact, Keith earned 26th place in the 15-kilometers, or "individual," at the 2005 World Cup, breaking into the top 30 for the first time at the World Cup in her lead-up to the 2006 Olympic Games in Torino.

In addition to qualifying for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games, in both the individual and relay competitions, Keith was the gold medalist at the 2003 European Cup, Canada's first international gold medal in biathlon since Myriam Bedard's Olympic gold medals in 1994. Keith placed 10th at the 2003 FISU World Games, 33rd at the 2003 World Championships, and was awarded the 2003 Biathlon Canada Female Athlete of the Year.

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