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Best of the Week - First Winner Aug. 25, 2023

AP recounts final mental health struggles of Olympics champ Tori Bowie

On the eve of the first world track championships since Bowie’s passing, AP sportswriters Eddie Pells and Pat Graham teamed up to report exclusively on the mental health struggles of Tori Bowie that led up to the star athlete’s death April 23 from complications during childbirth at the age of 32.

The two had covered Bowie, who won three medals at the 2016 Rio De Janeiro Games, for many years and had heard whispers of her difficulties. A few weeks after her death, the autopsy listed the cause as “complications in childbirth.”

While other outlets pursued the angle that Black women suffer disproportionately from pregnancy complications, Pells opted to explore another dimension of her story, her struggles with mental health.

He sought out people at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and within track and field, to find out how a world-famous champion, who was eight months into what would be considered an at-risk pregnancy, came to die alone at home without medical care or anyone to look after her.

For sensitively telling the story of a great athlete who became isolated from her peers and died tragically alone in part because of neglect of her mental health difficulties, Pells and Graham are Best of the Week — First Winner.

Best of the Week - Second Winner Aug. 25, 2023

AP team scores exclusive access to operating room for pig-to-human transplant

AP video journalist Shelby Lum and AP medical writer Lauran Neergaard got an exclusive behind-the-curtain look at the challenges of experiments with the dead that may help the more than 100,000 people on the national organ transplant waiting list. Lum was the only journalist in the operating room when a team of doctors at NYU Langone Health recently transplanted a pig kidney into a brain-dead man to see if the organ would work.

The access was the result of more than a year of source building and planning by Lum and Neergaard, who has covered xenotransplantation for several years. Besides witnessing the operation, Lum also documented follow-up by doctors, who took biopsies of the transplanted pig kidney, and was present when doctors celebrated what would have been the donor’s birthday. Lum and Neergaard also traveled to the man’s family north of New York City to get a deeper look at why the family decided to donate the body for research.

Altogether, the operating room videos were downloaded by customers at least 144 times including by broadcasters in Taiwan, Greece, Hungary, India and elsewhere. The spot story appeared on 502 news websites and had 62,000 total page views on the AP News website and the app.

For a rare look at advances in potentially life-saving medicine, the team of Lum and Neergaard is AP’s Best of Week — Second Winner.