'What about getting to tomorrow': Danny Casper overcame a mystery illness to land in Italy looking for curling gold in Olympics

Julian Finney via Getty Images

MILAN — Danny Casper didn’t understand why his body was failing him. 

A mysterious illness had stripped the 22-year-old of the ability to perform even the most basic tasks. Almost overnight, he went from skippering one of America’s top-ranked curling teams to struggling to climb out of bed or walk downstairs without assistance.

At first, Casper brushed it off when his neck and back ached near the end of a February 2024 mixed doubles tournament. He attributed the soreness to his clumsy technique sweeping to try to influence the path of the curling stone. As skipper and primary tactician for his men’s team, Casper typically left sweeping duty to his teammates. In mixed doubles, that was not an option.

The discomfort became all Casper could think about soon after he returned to his home in the Minneapolis suburbs. Sharp pain shot down his arms and legs. His hands and feet endlessly tingled as if he had slept on them funny. He relied on his roommates for meals and laundry. He barely had enough feeling in his fingers to crudely pound out text messages on his phone. 

When Casper first underwent a battery of diagnostic tests, medical experts came away as perplexed as he was. One doctor suggested to Casper that he might be suffering from Vitamin B deficiency. Casper shot him a withering look, later telling friends, “I’m no doctor and I’m sure Vitamin B is important, but I think this is worse than that.” 

As weeks passed without a diagnosis or viable treatment plan, Casper’s mental state darkened. He no longer worried about recovering in time for the upcoming curling season. In his most hopeless moments, as he stared at the ceiling above his bed, his thoughts would drift to “the worst possible stuff.”

“I would try to watch shows and stuff to pass the time, but it was pretty terrible,” Casper told Yahoo Sports. “For awhile, it was like, forget curling. What about getting to tomorrow?”

Well, tomorrow has come and it’s landed Casper in Cortina, Italy, where on Wednesday he led Team USA to victory over Czechia in their opening match of these Olympic Games.

Though Casper arrives not 100 percent, his goal is still the same: gold.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Curling or soccer?

For Casper, of all people, to utter the words “forget curling,” is a window into how much he was suffering. This was a kid from the New York suburbs who moved halfway across the country at 18 to pursue his dream of curling in the Olympics.

Casper first became familiar with the sport by attending his parents’ curling matches at the Ardsley Curling Club along the east bank of the Hudson River. When Casper turned 11, his dad signed him up to start curling at the club.

In an unlikely but fortuitous coincidence, Casper grew up in the same small New York town as an older teen whose dad was a former national champion curler. Andrew Stopera had a decorated junior career, leading his team to three straight national junior championships from 2017-2019. Throwing stones with Stopera and trying in vain to stay competitive fueled Casper in those early days.

When Casper was finishing his sophomore year in high school, the multi-sport athlete realized he needed to pick a path. Did he want to pursue soccer in hopes of securing a scholarship offer from a top-tier college? Or did he want to focus on curling and see how far he could go if he made it his priority?

Watching John Shuster’s American quartet win Olympic gold in 2018 helped nudge Casper toward curling. So did some timely praise from Stopera’s father, who told Casper he was “pretty good at this” and might be able to compete at the national and international level one day.

“What did I know then?” Casper said. “I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds fun.’ Soccer was my main focus at the time, but it was like, OK, maybe play soccer in college and then what? Curling was pretty interesting and unique and in theory something I could do a little longer. That’s kind of what drew me to it.”

Rather than staying in the New York area after high school, Casper moved to the curling hub of Minneapolis in 2019 and continued his studies at the University of Minnesota. It was there that he linked up with former world junior silver medalists Luc Violette and Ben Richardson, as well as fellow up-and-comer Chase Sinnett. 

That quartet took silver at the 2023 World University Games and finished second behind Shuster’s powerhouse team at the 2023 National Championships. Team Casper’s winning ways appeared poised to continue even after Sinnett departed after the 2023-24 season and Aidan Oldenburg replaced him. 

Then Casper fell ill without warning.

The body that had served him for 22 years began to malfunction and nobody could figure out why.

Andrew Milligan - PA Images via Getty Images

Finding an answer

In June 2024, four months after Casper began experiencing unexplained symptoms, the United States Olympic and Paralympic committee flew him to Florida to undergo additional testing. Only then did Casper at last receive the explanation that he had been seeking. 

Doctors diagnosed Casper with Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare condition in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks its nerves. There’s no cure for GBS, doctors told Casper, but with treatment and physical therapy, he could expect to fully recover in as little as eight months to a year.

“Once they told me this should be something that should go away, something that we can test out different medicines with, that was a big relief,” Casper said. “That made me more optimistic for everything curling-wise and life-wise.”

While Casper desperately wanted to rejoin his team for the start of the 2024-25 curling season, he didn’t yet feel up to sliding a 44-pound granite stone down a narrow sheet of ice. He sat out the first two months of the season and played only when his health allowed it thereafter, forcing his teammates to cycle through a series of short-term replacement skippers.

Casper has returned to lead his team this season, grateful to have the opportunity to compete against the top teams in the world again and eager to prove that he and his teammates belong among them. They validated their status as America’s top-ranked men’s team entering Olympic Trials by scraping their way to the final and dethroning Shuster’s decorated, experienced squad in a tense best-of-three showdown.

There was still one more hurdle left for Team Casper to represent the U.S. at the Milan Cortina Games, but Casper and his teammates cleared it with ease. They claimed one of two remaining Olympic berths with a dominant showing at a last-chance global qualification tournament in early December.

The fairytale story would be a healthy Casper triumphantly skippering the U.S. to a gold medal, but in reality, his road to recovery hasn’t been as smooth or as speedy as doctors hoped. Even now, two years removed from his first symptoms, there are still telltale warning signs that he still doesn’t have the same strength or dexterity in his hands that he once did. 

On bad days, he might show up to the ice with his shoe laces untied because he was unable to tie a tight knot. Or he might ask his teammates for help opening a bottle of water or flipping over his rock to clean it.

“For him to be able to go out there and play like he’s playing with this condition, it’s incredible,” said Rich Ruohonen, who frequently filled in for Casper last season and now serves as the team’s alternate. “He’s healthier now than he has been, but he still has a lot of problems, a lot of pain. Most people would probably give up. He doesn’t let anything affect him.”

Casper’s condition didn’t allow him to throw as often as he’d have liked leading up to the Olympics. He compares himself to NFL veterans who practice in a limited fashion a couple times a week to save their legs or their bodies for game day. 

And yet even at less than 100%, Casper’s goals for these Olympics are no different than any other tournament he has ever entered. The guy who was confined to his bed less than two years ago expects to be standing atop the medal podium in Italy.

“I always struggle wrapping my head around people who say their goal is to make the playoffs or to get bronze,” Casper said. “No, the goal is always to win. I don’t know why it ever would be anything else.”