The call finally came on the afternoon of July 27, 2000, but Chris Klug, sitting in the Aspen Club locker room, felt nothing like the snowboard racing champ that he was. He was struggling with weights he once lifted easily, back when his body wasn't ravaged by a rare liver disease, primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). His eyes were jaundiced, his body weak and his mind clouded by fear.

Forget racing -- without a new liver, he could die.

Klug used to think he was indestructible. Never mind that he was born with pneumonia and is still severely asthmatic. When his PSC was diagnosed in 1994, Klug, then 21, scoffed. Hadn't he been an all-state high school QB in Bend, Ore.? He didn't even feel sick.

Even so, Klug went on a waiting list for transplants, which he dismissed: "Won't need that for 25 years." Meanwhile, he took sixth in the giant slalom at the '98 Olympics.

But his cockiness left Klug the moment he clicked on his car radio on Nov. 2, 1999, and heard that Walter Payton had died a day earlier of PSC. Klug pulled over and wept. "Until then, I didn't think it could kill me," he says.

As his liver swelled up and scarred over, Klug kept deteriorating, until one morning in May 2000, when his bile ducts almost completely shut down. He flew to Denver, where doctors gave him a pager and orders to stay close.

So after nearly three long months of waiting, Klug pressed the phone to his ear and wept at the news that a liver was available. "I thought I'd be excited," he told his girlfriend, Missy April, "but I'm so nervous."

The surgery the next day at University of Colorado Hospital left him in surprisingly little pain, and after just four days he was discharged. Three months later, Klug was racing again. Says Dr. Igal Kam, his surgeon, "Chris' recovery has been exceptional."

But Klug couldn't move on until he wrote to the family of the 13-year-old boy, a gunshot victim in a Denver trailer park, whose liver saved his life. "How do you thank someone for that?" he asks. "I said I was humbled and grateful." The following day, on Jan. 17, 2001, Klug won his first post-op gold medal at a World Cup in Olang, Italy.

Now Klug hopes to become the only transplant recipient ever to compete in the Olympics.

But with only two World Cup races left to qualify for Salt Lake, he's got another fight ahead of him.

This article appears in the January 21 issue of ESPN The Magazine.