It’s not every day that a physician gets to hang out with Olympic athletes. But during the Beijing Summer Olympics, that’s just what Dr. Mark Chassay did.
As a volunteer physician for Team USA, Dr. Chassay was assigned to help care for members of the United States Equestrian Team, treating everything from head trauma to minor aches and pains. The highlight of his five weeks in Hong Kong (where the equestrian events took place) was when the United States won the gold medal in Team Jumping. “We got to go out there on the field and we heard the national anthem. That will give anyone goose bumps!” Dr. Chassay says.
Combining a love for sports, medicine, and business
Dr. Chassay knew he wanted to be a doctor from the age of 12, when his grandfather, a banker in Louisiana, was diagnosed with lymphoma. To get treatment for the cancer, his grandfather traveled to Houston, where Dr. Chassay’s family lived. Dr. Chassay accompanied his grandfather to many of his cancer treatments and saw physicians in action. “I knew then that I wanted to be a doctor,” Dr. Chassay says.
Sadly, Dr. Chassay’s grandfather later succumbed to the disease, but his influence on his grandson is apparent. It was because of his grandfather’s illness that Dr. Chassay became a physician. And it was because of his grandfather’s career as a banker that Dr. Chassay decided to study finance in college. He earned his BA in finance at the University of Texas at Austin, and then went on to the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. Recently, Dr. Chassay also completed an MBA in Executive Healthcare at the University of Texas, Dallas.
During his second year of medical school, Dr. Chassay decided to add sports to the mix. In high school, he had played baseball, basketball, and football, and thought that as a physician he would find sports medicine fulfilling.
Artfully, Dr. Chassay has managed to combine his love for and knowledge of sports, medicine, and business into a cohesive career. His degree in finance helped him, along with two other physicians, to start his own practice, Texas Sports and Family Medicine, PLLC. He has also been a team physician for the University of Texas, Austin, since 1996. He was promoted to Head Team Physician for Intercollegiate Athletics for the University of Texas in 2005.
An Olympic tryout for physicians
Soon after he finished medical school, Dr. Chassay decided to apply to become a volunteer physician for Team USA as a way to give back to his country. Applicants needed five years of experience in sports medicine to qualify, but the waiting list was five years long, so Dr. Chassay figured he would have plenty of experience by the time his name got to the top of the list. Sure enough, seven years later, in 2003, he received an invitation to go to the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California.
He spent two weeks at the center, taking care of the athletes living there. Officials observe the physicians to make sure they have a good knowledge of medicine and the orthopedic injuries that are common in the sports-medicine population. “They also want to know if you can work in a team, that you’re approachable, and that the athletes feel like they’re getting their needs met when they’re seen by you,” Dr. Chassay says.
Apparently, Dr. Chassay passed with flying colors, because he was assigned to serve as Chief Medical Officer at the VISA Paralympic World Cup, which was held in Manchester, England, in May 2005. Then he was assigned as Medical Officer of the USA Baseball and USA Karate teams at the 2007 Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and to the United States Equestrian Team at the XXIX Summer Olympics.
As he just served at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Dr. Chassay will not be serving at the Winter Olympics this year. “It’s usually pretty stressful when you do these Olympics, so they try to rotate the physicians to give them time to recover,” he says.
Right now, he enjoys spending time with his new wife, Kimberly (he proposed when she came to visit him in Hong Kong during the Olympics, and they were married this past April). Professionally, he continues to juggle his practice, his job at the University of Texas, and his hobbies of jogging and traveling. But Dr. Chassay is looking forward to continuing his service to the Olympic athletes at future events. “When the athletes realize what you sacrifice to be at the Olympic Games — time away from your family and your career — they tell you how much they appreciate that because they know what it’s like. That’s the most rewarding thing.”