Being a nationally recognized athletic trainer can mean you end up in some interesting places (if your administration will give you the opportunity to chase opportunities).
   
And, that's how PSU athletic trainer Jim Wallis ended up in late March spending nine days in Russia, six in Moscow and two in Yekaterinburg, where Czar Nikolas II was assassinated at the beginning of the Bolshevik revolution in the early part of the 20th century.
    
Wallis was tabbed as a trainer to the US Saber Team during the three-day Moscow Saber Cup, one of six international fencing tournaments and probably the most prestigious in that it's been in the same city for more than 25 years.
     
He was working with the men's American fencing team, which is nearly a full-time activity for the six team members and two or three alternates because they work at their sport six hours a day.  Most are from the New York area because the US Men's Saber Team coach is at St. Johns University there.
     
Mostly, Wallis said, “it's soft tissue work…massages, chronic conditions” focusing on getting them through the three-day event. “I don't know these athletes very well (although he worked with some when he was called to substitute at the Pan American Games), so it's mostly just doing what they ask me to do.  I'm just a hired gun.”
     
He did have to handle one potentially serious situation when a member of the American team sprained his ankle one point shy of the score necessary to keep the US team in the tournament.
     
Injuries in fencing are handled differently. There are no substitutions. Medical teams have 10 minutes to patch up the injured athlete, who must complete the round or lose all his accumulated points (and that would have been enough to send the Americans packing).
    
“The Russians had a medical team which ran onto the floor and began spraying cold on the ankle as I was trying to get my hands around it…they were even spraying my hands,” said Wallis.  He was able to take command and get the ankle taped, allowing the fencer to finish.  Since he couldn't go forward and attack, the American fencer was able to get the point he needed while defending against his opponent's attack.
     
Wallis began working with US fencers about 10 years ago when he was asked, as a favor to another Oregon athletic trainer who was in Salem, to look at Beaverton's Mariel Zagunis when she was a junior fencer.  Today, Zagunis is a two-time Olympic gold medalist.
      
“He told me that if I wanted more fencing work to let him know, but my wife was ill so I had other issues I had to deal with at the time,” Wallis said. After his wife died four years ago, Wallis began accepting other assignments and jumped at the chance when asked to substitute for a colleague with a family emergency during a recent Pan American Game tournament (“even though I still don't know a lot about fencing”).
       
Along the way, Wallis has become an international expert in the Kinesio taping technique and that led to his two-day trip to Yekaterinburg for a clinic on behalf of the Russian distributor of Kinesio tape.
    
On a tour of the city, which he guessed is about the size of Portland, he visited the assassination spot, which now has a church built over it. Then, it was back to Moscow for a couple more days of site seeing.
      
His overall impression?  Well, first off, it was cold (down to -15 c) and wet and cloudy, which probably didn't help.
     
“Everything is really dilapidated. It was somewhat oppressive, there were rows and rows and block and blocks of apartments that all looked the same. There was no landscaping and everything was dirty.  The roads and infrastructure look as if nothing has been done for a long time…and I was surprised at how expensive everything was (Moscow is listed as one of the world's most expensive cities),” Wallis said.
    
Having grown up during the Cold War between the old Soviet Union and the West, it was an emotional experience to find himself “standing in Red Square, which I never though I'd see.  My view was always of stiff Russian leaders there watching rows and rows of military equipment parading by.”
    
And that led to another observation, and might be one of the reasons foreign travel can be so important to the way people view the world.
    
“Here I was in Red Square watching the crowd and they were people just like me. They worked at their jobs, they cared about their families and their vacations. That was a real eye opener,” he said.
      
As often happens when people travel, he said it also heightened his appreciation of living in the United States.
    
“I didn't go with any expectations, but it makes you really appreciate living here.  I'm so appreciative of the education I've had and the opportunities I've had working at PSU.  They've encouraged me to do these trips.  I'm really appreciative of how we live,” he said.