LIVIGNO, Italy (AP) — Getting ready for his third Olympics spread across a lifetime of snowboarding, 37-year-old halfpipe rider Louie Vito recounts his injuries — only the worst of the worst — like he’s checking items off a grocery list.
“I snapped my femur in half when I was 14,” he said. “Rode with my L-5 (vertebra) almost torn all the way through. I broke my back and rode with that until the cortisone wore off.”
As Vito knows, there is a direct correlation between an athlete’s love of a sport and the pain that athlete is willing to suffer to play it. In so-called extreme sports, like the snowboarding and freeskiing contests going on at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics this month, the pain is virtually guaranteed.
A rash of injuries in the lead-up to the Games, including two involving defending halfpipe champions Chloe Kim and Ayumu Hirano and another involving one of the sport’s greats, Mark McMorris, has brought into sharp focus the risks these athletes take by flipping and twisting above rock-hard slabs of snow for a living.
“You’re in an action sport, or in an extreme sport,” said 19-year-old American halfpipe rider Bea Kim, “so it comes with the territory.”
It is rough territory.
A Washington Post analysis of IOC studies conducted after the past four Winter Olympics found the most injury prone sport in the Games is big air skiing (28.1%). Five of the six most injury-riddled sports are in the snowpark, where snowboarding and freeskiing take place.
A history of injuries, comebacks and careers that never recovered
In 2018, defending halfpipe champion Iouri Podladtchikov — the iPod — suffered a concussion and broke his nose after slamming against the bottom of the pipe and skidding limply to the bottom in a terrifying scene at the Winter X Games. He didn’t make it to the Olympics and has rarely been seen again in a high-stakes contest.
That same year, Shaun White suffered a gruesome slam into a halfpipe wall during training in New Zealand and had to be airlifted off the mountain to have 62 stitches across his face.
For more than a decade, nobody pushed this sport harder than White, upping the ante on the difficulty of the tricks, which went along with the expansion, circa 2010, of the halfpipe from an 18-foot to a 22-foot wall.
The injury “took me from a trajectory of where, I’m like, ‘I know I’m going to win,’ to a place where I had people in my corner, people whose opinion I really respect, saying, ”Why are you still doing this? It’s time to retire,'” White said.
White did go on to win that year, and the road from the helicopter to his third gold medal turned into one of the most inspiring tales from those Olympics and his entire career.
Injuries hit this year’s Olympic stars
Hirano, who upped the ante by adding the triple-cork — three flips — to the halfpipe lexicon, could produce a similarly inspiring comeback, but the timing was dire. At a key tuneup contest in Laax, Switzerland, a mere three weeks ago, the Japanese champion crashed. His face was bleeding as he staggered off the halfpipe.
“My heart aches for you. You will come back stronger with me. I’m glad you’re alive,” his brother said on social media shortly after the fall.
Reports are that Hirano broke his nose and pelvis. He plans on defending his title, but has revealed little about the injury.
“I just have to trust what I’ve built up to this point so far and ride the way I’m capable of riding,” he said.
As does Kim, who battled shoulder problems all season that eventually resulted in a torn labrum suffered on the same halfpipe in Laax. Like Hirano, she has resumed training and will be in Livigno. Her prospects for a third straight gold medal have gone from near-lock to something less than that.
McMorris turned out to be OK after a scary crash during big air training Wednesday. He’ll be back on the slopestyle course next week.
This latest mishap will barely register on his list of most gruesome accidents: broken ribs in slopestyle, a shattered femur in big air, and the worst of all from a backcountry ride when he slammed into a tree, broke 17 bones and was placed in a medically induced coma.
“If an athlete gets hurt, and gets a chance to get close to 100% again and do what you love, then why wouldn’t you try?” he explained in an interview four years ago.
Sarah Burke’s sacrifice and the growing sport she left behind
Freestyle skier Eileen Gu’s mere presence at the Olympics can, at least in part, be credited to the late Sarah Burke.
Burke was the Canadian freestyle skier who lobbied fiercely to get women’s halfpipe skiing onto the Olympic program. She succeeded but, shortly after, suffered a fatal crash during training, some two years before the sport debuted on the Olympic stage.
One of Gu’s two Olympic gold medals came in halfpipe four years ago. Since then, she has broken her collarbone and her tibia (that one caused by what she called “interference” on a slope in New Zealand). She said she was most profoundly affected by a concussion last year “because I define so much of who I am by my brain.”
So, why does a 22-year-old with a Stanford diploma in her future, some 10 million followers on social media and a promising modeling career, if she wants it, keep flinging herself across halfpipes, rails and jumps that can do so much harm?
“I love this. I really love this,” Gu explained. “Part of the thing I love is the risk. It’s overcoming it and being smart about it and finding a way through. If everybody was immortal and nobody could do anything wrong, there would be no fun in this sport.”
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Associated Press writer Jennifer McDermott contributed to this report.
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