Even an Olympic gold medalist can run into hard times.
Chattanooga’s Venus Lacy, 54, can attest to that.
The 6-foot-4 Lacy led her Brainerd High School basketball team to the 1983-84 state championship. She went on to win a national championship at Louisiana Tech University and was named the nation’s top player her senior year. In 1996, she and her U.S. basketball teammates won Olympic gold in Atlanta.
But in 1997, Lacy said, everything changed. She said she suffered a traumatic brain injury in an automobile accident and was plagued for years afterwards by memory loss and depression.
In April of this year, her monthly Social Security disability payments were cut nearly in half when her son, Alex, turned 18. Soon she couldn’t pay her car insurance and was more than two months behind on her rent.