A Story That's A Must-Read

In case you missed it, Matt Calkins had an extraordinary story last week about Craig Blanchette, a world-class athlete who lives in Battle Ground and nearly lost his family because of his sex addiction.

As the subhead says, Blanchette “changed his sport, then he changed himself.” He was the first wheelchair racer to garner some level of national attention, dominating the sport in the 1980s and 1990s with his talent and his flamboyance.

I knew he lived in the area, but we had never done a profile of him, at least since I had been at The Columbian. So I assigned the story to Matt, simply thinking it was worth doing a profile of a former world-class athlete who lived in our area. But it turned into so much more.

After doing some background research and interviewing Blanchette for about an hour, Matt was hit with a bombshell: Blanchette has spent the past 20 years battling an addiction to porn. Talk about changing the angle of a story. In all my years in this business, I have never heard of that happening in such a dramatic way.

Anyway, it turned into a really remarkable story, and Matt did a great job with it. It’s worth the read.