On the morning of Oct. 6, the Crystal Ballroom at Chicago’s Hyatt Regency filled with physicians, sports executives and athletes for the 10th Annual Chicago Sports Summit, an anniversary milestone for an event that has raised an estimated $750,000 for youth sports organizations and orthopedic research at Rush University Medical Center since its founding in 2016.
This year’s proceeds go directly toward musculoskeletal research at Rush University Medical Center. To support that work or learn more about the Summit, visit chicagosportssummit.com.
Brian J. Cole, MD, acting chair of the department of orthopedics and managing partner of Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush and head team physician for the Chicago Bulls, founded the Summit to bridge the worlds of sports business and sports science. This year’s proceeds support musculoskeletal research at Rush, and Dr. Cole opened the morning by noting that some of the Summit’s most meaningful work happens off the stage.
The marquee session of this year’s gathering was a fireside chat between Dr. Cole and Derrick Rose, the former NBA player who spent the beginning of his career with the Chicago Bulls. Mr. Rose, who grew up in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago, became the youngest MVP in NBA history in 2011 and played professionally through 17 seasons despite a string of major injuries. He spoke about the thread connecting his childhood, his recoveries and the philosophy he now passes to his sons.
The conversation traced the arc from Mr. Rose’s early years in Englewood through the April 2012 game against Philadelphia in which he tore his ACL during a playoff game. Dr. Cole, who performed the surgery, recalled Mr. Rose’s first words in the examination room after the MRI.
“My life is over,” Mr. Rose said. The injury forced him to find out who he was apart from basketball.
“Basketball was all that I had,” he said. “Until I got hurt, and I felt like even with me getting hurt, I had to look at that as like a helper, because I found out who I truly was.”
That reckoning played out across years and teams, watching peers sign contracts worth hundreds of millions while he signed for less. The hardest part, he said, wasn’t the physical work.
“I had to kill my ego multiple times throughout that process,” he said.
When an audience member asked what he would tell young athletes about sustaining that drive, Mr. Rose drew a distinction between believing and knowing.
“I had to know that I was going to make it. It wasn’t no belief, I had to know,” he said.
The morning’s second panel brought four Illinois athletes who competed in the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics: speed skaters Ethan Cepuran and Emery Lehman, who won silver medals in the team pursuit together; pairs figure skater Danny O’Shea, whose gold medal with partner Ellie Kam came after four Olympic cycles and a competition on a broken foot; and long-track speed skater Sarah Warren, who qualified for Milan-Cortina after 10 orthopedic surgeries, nine of them on her knee, and is now pursuing medical school with a goal of becoming an orthopedic surgeon.
Ms. Warren described what it meant to qualify for the Olympics after years of setbacks in terms that resonated with the physicians in the room.
“I said, I have won if I step on that Olympic Trials line and I can compete after everything I’ve gone through,” she said. “Dr. Cole always says that you treat the patient, not the scan. You look at the scan and you’re like, ‘You shouldn’t be walking.’ But if you really take care of your body, there’s a million excuses why it can’t work, but there’s one reason it can.”
Mr. O’Shea, who stepped away from competitive skating before returning for what became his first Games at 35 years old, said the shift that unlocked his success was learning to compete for the pleasure of competing.
“When you love what you do and when you do it for the joy of the moment, it’s actually a lot easier to achieve the goals,” he said. “The intensity feels good a lot of the time, but this [gold medal] comes from enjoying the moment, too.”
Mr. Cepuran and Mr. Lehman, who have skated together since childhood, spoke about the discipline required to sustain performance across two Olympic cycles. Mr. Cepuran put the definition of greatness in terms that echoed Mr. Rose’s from earlier in the morning.
“Greatness isn’t just a one-time thing,” he said. “It’s consistently showing up and showing up for the people around you.”
Another panel examined the rapid ascent of HYROX, a fitness racing series that combines eight one-kilometer runs with functional strength stations: ski erg, sled push, sled pull, farmer’s carry, wall balls and others. It has drawn roughly 250,000 athletes across 17 North American events last season. Alyssa Olenick, who won the 2026 HYROX World Championship nine months after discovering the sport, joined Bijan Heravi, president of Ripple Sports, and Kelly Jameson, head of sales for the Americas at HYROX.
Ms. Olenick, who had qualified for the 2028 US Olympic Marathon Trials before pivoting to HYROX, described the draw of a sport where elite competitors and first-timers share the same floor.
“You see elite athletes out there competing, and you also see a 70-year-old woman pushing a sled with her best friend from high school,” she said. “It’s just a wide variety of humans, and I think that’s what really grabbed me from the get-go.”
Ms. Jameson pointed to the sport’s accessibility as the engine behind its growth.
“There is no time cap,” she said. “We have people that are banging it out, but then you have folks that are also walking it, and it’s taking them five hours to do it, but we’re not going to pull anybody off the course.”
HYROX is working toward Olympic recognition for the 2032 Sydney Games.
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