The potential for a bad fall or a serious injury is always present in winter sports, even for elite athletes. Photo / Chang W. Lee, The New York Times
Injury is a constant threat in their death-defying feats. The New York Times sat down with three dozen athletes who opened up about their fears.
The Winter Olympics are a carnival of danger, a crash reel of carnage. Compared with the Summer Games, they are a spectacle of speed and slick surfaces, powered mostly by the undefeated force of gravity.
Skiers hurtle themselves down the mountains faster than cars on the highway. Sliders ride high-speed sleds down a twisting chute of ice. Ski jumpers soar great distances through the air, and snowboarders and freestyles skiers flip and spin in the sky and hope for a safe landing.
The next wipeout always feels moments away.
The athletes who perform these daring feats are not crazy. They are not reckless. But they do have one thing in common that might surprise those of us who watch.
They are scared. Every one of them.
"When you're going as fast as we are," American downhill ski racer Breezy Johnson said, "anywhere on the course can turn into an injury trap, if not a death trap, really quick."
In January, Johnson, a gold medal favourite, was injured in a crash. A week later, she announced that she was out of the Olympics.
The New York Times interviewed dozens of Winter Olympians and others with ties to the most extreme sports at the Games. We wanted to dive deep on the mental side of danger.
The first question: Does fear play a role in your sport?
"There's a ton of risk, and there's a ton of fear in what we do," said Faye Gulini, an American making her fourth trip to the Olympics in snowboard cross.
Downhill skier Jacqueline Wiles of the United States echoed the sentiments of several athletes.
"Fear plays a huge role in our sport," she said. "If someone tells you otherwise, I think they're lying."
Snowboarder Shaun White might look immune to fear, having won three gold medals in the halfpipe. That's not true.
"I definitely would not consider myself fearless," he said. "I just manage the fear."
Fear is a complex and personal topic. Ask athletes what scares them, specifically, and the answers cover a broad spectrum — the fear of missing the Olympics, of regret; of disappointing family and friends; of not being able to control their story; or the ending of their career, of losing control.
But the No. 1 answer is a fear that is visceral, tangible and common in these sports.
It is the fear of getting hurt.
"This sport kills people," Johnson said of downhill skiing. "It injures everyone."
This subset of Winter Olympic athletes tends to fall into two categories: Those who have sustained serious injuries. And those who will.
There is no good time to get hurt. But there is a worst time. Alice Merryweather knows. Only one thing could keep Merryweather, one of the top American ski racers, out of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. And on a quiet September morning in the Swiss Alps, it did.
It was nothing but a bobble, not unlike all the others that ski racers encounter and recover from at high speeds. Merryweather frantically tried to regain her balance.
In a moment, she pitched forward, then flung back, her backside on her skis, still pointing downhill until one caught on the ice. Two bones snapped in her left leg. Ligaments ripped in her knee. She spun forward as her face scraped the coarse ice. Gravity dragged her downhill until she slid to a heaping stop.
"It happened so quickly, I can't remember the feeling of my leg breaking," she said in December, showing the video to her boyfriend, Sam DuPratt, a ski racer recovering from two broken legs.
Merryweather's bloodied face had healed in the ensuing months, but her leg — and perhaps her psyche — has a long way to go.
The ski season moved on without her. Skiers have won races that might have been hers. As with the other athletes interviewed, Merryweather said she never feared the pain of injury. It was about heartbreak. It was the fear of missed opportunity.
The culmination of four years of work — the Olympics — will happen without Merryweather, as she heals on the other side of the globe.
"I'm in kind of a limbo phase of my recovery right now," she said. "I've had two surgeries already, and now I'm waiting for my tibia to heal enough that they can take the rod out of it. Anywhere from five to 11 months from now I'll be able to get that done. Then it'll be another six to nine months, and I'll be able to get back on snow, start sliding around."
For Merryweather and other athletes, the fear is not of the pain that injury causes. It is of the questions it raises.
"It definitely brings a bunch of new fears into the equation," Merryweather said. "I'm afraid of all the uncertainty at this point. I don't know how my body is going to heal. I don't know how this leg is going to feel when I try to challenge it again."
Instead of the Olympics, the one tiny moment — a sudden crash — means that it will be two years before she is on skis again. Merryweather is determined to get there.
"The joy that comes from going really fast, and arcing a really beautiful turn, is like nothing I've ever felt, in any other aspect of my life," she said. "And I'm determined to get that back and feel that again. That outweighs the fear, 10 times to one."
The fear of injury is not unique to Winter Olympians, of course. It is the one thing that worries every athlete across the spectrum of sports.
But it is different with the Winter Olympics, given the concentration of dangerous sports on unforgiving surfaces. Athletes must push themselves to the brink to even have a chance at the Olympics. But the brink is an unforgiving place.
The risks are not theoretical. World-class snowboarders have been traumatically injured and have died from accidents in the halfpipe. Top skiers have died in bad crashes, including at the Olympics. On the sliding track, the raceway of luge, skeleton and bobsled, a luge athlete was killed in a training crash on the eve of the 2010 Vancouver Games.
"Rest his soul, but I assure you, every skeleton, luge and bobsled athlete had a massive fear instilled in him when that situation happened," said Bill Schuffenhauer, who won a silver medal in four-man bobsled in 2002 and competed at those Vancouver Games. "Because if we wanted to compete, we still had to go down that same exact track that this guy just lost his life on."
Danger ratchets up each Olympic cycle. The tricks are bigger, the speeds are faster, the competition is better.
At some point, though, it is too much. There are limits to the Olympic motto of faster, higher, stronger. The halfpipe grew to 6.7 metres and stopped, with no discussion of anything bigger. Ski courses and sliding tracks seem to have established plateaus for top speeds. The size of ski jumps are standard — and women are still not permitted to compete on the largest ones.
No sport, though, has capped the danger quite like aerials. Performed on a 4-metre jump called a kicker, competitors launch themselves nearly straight up, about 15 metres into the air, to perform a kaleidoscope of twists and somersaults. They land so hard that they sometimes cough up blood.
The sport has capped the number of flips to three. And aerialists, both as daring and as fearful as any other Winter Olympians, are relieved by that.
"Honestly, I'm really glad there is this rule," said Nicolas Gygax of Switzerland, who is making his second trip to the Olympics. "I don't want to do four flips."
Other top aerialists agreed.
"I don't think there is anybody out there who's really desperate at the moment to add an extra flip," said Laura Peel, a two-time world champion from Australia.
Across many of the events, fear of injury is the invisible weight on athletes, a what-if dread that they cannot fully escape. It causes sleepless nights. It fuels hours of nervous preparation. It stirs an I-might-throw-up panic in the start gate. (And some of them do just that.) Athletes admit to shaking legs, sweaty palms and pounding hearts that feel as if they might leap out their throats.
"There have been times that races have been cancelled, and I've been relieved, 100 per cent," American ski racer Erik Arvidsson said. "Because I was scared as hell and I needed another day to gather myself."
Even the world's top men's skier this season, Aleksander Aamodt Kilde of Norway, feels it.
"You get kind of an ache in your legs, your knees, and you feel like you lose control over your body," he said. "You can feel it right away when you're pushing out at the start. You want to push 100 per cent, but then your mind kind of holds you back and you can only push out, like, 85 per cent, 90 per cent. And then you know something is wrong."
Michael Dammert, Germany's freestyle snowboard coach, holds a master's degree in sports psychology. He called fear "your best friend and your biggest enemy."
Dammert considers fear a basic survival instinct.
"It goes into the old areas of the brain — really in the amygdala, in the deepest layers of the brain," he said. "That's also why it's so hard to control."
He explained that fear causes the fight-or-flight response — or it freezes people.
All of those reactions are good signs, in a way. Fear might limit the potential and performance of top athletes, but it might also save them.
"It's too fast for you not to have that voice in your head saying, 'We're going too fast, and if we hit a tree, we're going to die,'" said Johnson, the American skier. "That fear is instinctive. It's put in your brain for a reason."
To reach the Olympics means not only having more talent than most others in the world but also more daring. It is taking risks, thoughtfully.
Fear, the athletes said, is a balance. Too much can be debilitating. Too little can be worse.
"Fear," halfpipe snowboarder André Höflich said, "is what keeps us alive in the end."
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: John Branch
Photographs by: Chang W. Lee
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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