CHICAGO -- Smiling broadly, Melissa Klotz pumped her right fist as she biked across the finish line Thursday, the winner of the women's open upright bicycle race at the Warrior Games. Forty-five minutes later, a gold medal dangling from her neck, Klotz -- an operations specialist second class in the Navy -- was still beaming, posing for photos with family, friends and colleagues, hugging everybody. Two small children even asked for her autograph.
Everyone in the finish line area south of Soldier Field seemed to know the outgoing Klotz. Congratulations came from all over, and she soaked up the moment like a first-time Oscar winner.
"It was amazing," Klotz, 38, said with the familiar rasp and cadence of her home state of New Jersey. The gold was part of her nine-medal haul, eight golds and a silver. Earlier, she won four golds in track and field for athletes with reduced lower-joint strength -- the 100- and 200-meter dashes, and the standing shot put and the discus. Saturday, swimming in a similar classification on the final day of the Games, she added three more golds and the silver.
Sixteen months after undergoing left hip replacement surgery after a gruesome shipboard injury, the hyperactive Klotz almost feels like herself again. An avid hiker and physical fitness fanatic, Klotz's life nearly fell apart when she couldn't indulge her athletic passions. Through the Navy's Wounded Warrior Safe Harbor Program, she gained many of them back, and discovered some new ones.
"I would say now she's doing a lot better," her older sister Eileen Klotz, who came in from Nova Scotia to watch her compete, said. Eileen brought her husband Warren Burbine and their 2-year-old twin boys, Conor and Dakota.
"In the beginning it was kind of hard for her to say, `Hey, I've got to get a hip replacement,' because she's always been super athletic and loves to run, all that stuff," Eileen said. "She kind of at first was like, 'man, can I still have the same athletic life that I had before?' For her, hiking and running and sports were a huge part of her life.
"As you can see in these games, she definitely can. This is a great thing to bring her back to where she was before, make her realize it is possible, and she can accomplish anything she really puts her mind to."
Growing up in Kearny, near Newark, Klotz threw herself into all kinds of sports. She player soccer and softball in elementary school and junior high, then ran cross country and rowed crew at Kearny High School.
Rowing brought her to the University of Wisconsin for one season before she returned home. Then she got into power lifting, boxing and triathlons. Klotz earned a criminal justice degree from John Jay College in New York City in 2006; four years later she enlisted in the Navy.
Klotz's go-go-go lifestyle dramatically changed in September 2013. The USS Harpers Ferry, the ship on which she served, was involved in joint exercises with the Indian navy. Klotz was working out -- what else? -- in the ship's gym when an announcement called everyone to their watches. The ship began evasive maneuvers while Klotz, en route to her station, climbed a ladder. The sudden change of direction threw Klotz off the ladder to the deck, a fall of about one story.
"My head and my left leg got jerked behind me," she said. "It was like a slingshot of my leg going behind me quickly. I heard like a pop-pop, and I was like, that's not good."
Intent on toughing it out, Klotz kept quiet about it until the next day. "They thought I just pulled a muscle," Klotz said. She finished her deployment, which lasted a year. But the hip kept giving out. She suffered a concussion when she fell in a squall, blacking out for 20 minutes. Another time she fell walking up stairs and broke her arm.
"I had a really rough couple of years," she said. "During that deployment, I was in a lot of pain. What helped was, I had to go on the elliptical and the bike. I was the command fitness leader for the operations department. Every day I would write the workout of the day, and every day I'd be like, 'This is my time with my jacked-up hip. What can you get?' Ha, ha, ha. Mentally, I need to physically do stuff almost to keep me right."
Finally, in November 2014, X-rays and a magnetic resonance imaging test revealed the damage -- moderate to severe osteoarthritis, bone spurs on the head of the femur, pieces of bone in the joint. Transferred to the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, Klotz had hip replacement surgery in March 2015.
"It was only after this injury that I realized how I dealt with a lot of things in life was through physical activity," she said. "If I had too much energy, I'd go work out. If I was tired, I'd go work out. If I was angry, I'd go work out. So if I had a problem that was burdening me, I'd get my mind off it by going for a hike or a bike. I would be doing some kind of exercise to help me work through it.
"I didn't realize how much of my life surroundings was involved around physical activity. So when this happened, and my catchall fix to everything I couldn't do. ... Not only could I not do anything that I loved, I couldn't do any of the things that I did to fix everything. So it was rough." Urged on by personnel at the medical center, Klotz signed up for the Wounded Warrior program in January 2016. Almost instantly she found kindred spirits. She bonded with fellow athletes, many trying to overcome even worse obstacles.
"It was great," she said. "Because every time I tried to anything on my own, everything would highlight the pain. I was really frustrated. It would make me more angry than I was, and it was that vicious circle."
Invited to a Wounded Warrior sports training camp, Klotz -- 40 pounds heavier than before her injury -- threw herself into training. "I can't go there looking like garbage," she said. "That's what motivated me to start believing."
Last year, in her Warrior Games debut at West Point, Klotz won eight medals -- four individual golds in swimming, and silvers in cycling, shot, discus and a swim relay. Klotz still can't run as far or as long as she wants, but she's much closer to being her unstoppable athletic self than before the fall. And that brings back her smile.
"Getting there," she said.