Injuries

A long way down (Clavicle)
When I was a little tike, (two years old I think) I fell off my parents bed and broke my collar bone.

Curly Slide (Ribs)
When I was a little kid we used to go to Lions Park to play on the curly slide. I thought it was funny to hang over the edge at the top and scream for help. When my parents came running, I'd laugh and climb back. One time I was hanging over the edge and really started to slip, I screamed for help but my parents ignored me and I fell down to the next level, catching my ribs on the edge of the slide. I think I broke two ribs.

Blood, Dirt, Gravel & Grass (Left Arm)
When I was about 10, around 1980, we lived on the hill behind K-mart, up 23rd. It was a steep winding paved road about 2-miles long. One day I was following my older brother Todd down 23rd on my ten speed to get fireworks for the 4th of July. All I had on was a pair of cutoffs and shoes. He would always go way faster than me and I could never keep up but this day I decided I was going to stay with him even though he was almost 4 years older than me. About halfway down, one car heading my direction, a car coming the opposite way and me on my bike were going to meet where a mailbox seemed to make the road narrower. I could barely reach my back break handle with my fingertips but my front break handle was nice and close to the handle bar. I panicked, squeezed that front brake, was catapulted through the air, bounced off the mailbox, hit the pavement and slid to a stop.

Todd was waiting for me at the bottom when the ambulance drove by. He assumed it was for me and road back up the hill. My mom happened to be coming home and saw them loading me into the ambulance. She said I was unconscious, my arm was broken, the whole front of my body and in my mouth was blood, dirt, gravel and grass.

I had to move in super-slo-mo for a week or more after that and my left shoulder has never been the same but I got a lot of attention from the cast on my arm and on my birthday, my dad and I split the cost of a new $300 Univega Sport Tour 12-speed and I was back on 23rd going faster than ever.
 

Shin Bang
In the Fall of 1989 when I was 19, KPAX, local Missoula, MT TV came out to my parents house to interview my two younger brothers and I because I had just been named to the World Cup team and they were hoping to follow in my footsteps. They were shooting us bouncing on our round black-bed trampoline so I had Danny and Arlan double-bounce me so I could get enough height to do a double back flip. I was unstable on my go-bounce but the cameras were rolling so I went for it anyway. I traveled too far back and the first thing to hit, after just short of 2 flips, was my left shin on the un-padded metal frame. It sounded like a crowbar hitting a flag pole and cut my shin from my ankle to my knee with a good...(hang on, I'll measure the scar)...2-inches split open to the white bone.

Luckily, I had sweats on so the TV crew couldn't see it. I did the rest of the interview acting like it didn't hurt but when they wanted to get one more shot of us walking out to the tramp, I had to have Danny and Arlan walk in front so they couldn't see me wincing in pain. I still have the video. The sound of my shin bone pinging off the frame and the look on Arlan's face are priceless. After all the stitches I got when I was younger, I didn't want any more so I hid the gash from my parents for a few days until I knew it was too late to get stitches. My lower leg swelled up bigger than my upper leg and it looked like my leg was on upside down. I kept it elevated a lot of the time but when I'd bring it down again, it was way more painful than any other injury I've had. I should have gone straight to the hospital. I'm lucky they didn't have to cut it off.

ACL (Right Knee)
In December of 1992, I tore the ACL in my right knee. I spent that winter in my hometown rehabilitating, relaxing and making home videos with my three brothers. I was back to 100% by that spring. It put me behind schedule preparing for the 1994 Olympics where I finished 7th but it was a fun break from training and competing.
 

Visualize (Back)
In August of 1994, I strained my lower back by doing too many big jumps in a seven day period off a big ramp into a bay in Stockholm, Sweden with no bubbles in the water to soften the impact. I should have taken time off but I ignored the pain and kept training and competing into the winter season. My results suffered because of the injury and my coaches suggested that I take the rest of the winter off and earn my spot back on to the team next year. I talked them into letting me compete in the next World Cup to be held in Lake Placid, NY. If I got on the podium, I would retain my spot on the team, if not, I was off. They agreed, I jumped with a lot of pain, crashed and was off the team. I stayed there in Lake Placid to rehab my back at the Olympic Training Center. I bleached my hair and dyed it blue. It was fun hanging out with Todd Ossian and Joe Pack there. We saw Pulp Fiction four times in the theater and tried to dream the same dream, that we would meet outside at 3:00am, if we all dreamt that we were going to the same place at the same time, maybe we could connect. It didn't work.

After an X-ray showed a fracture in one of my vertebras, I had radioactive dye injected into my spine for a bone scan to see if the fracture was new or something I had done years ago. The fracture showed up as a "hot spot" and doctors determined that it was probably new so there was a chance that it may heal (fuse together with calcium) if I didn't move it for five months. So... a quarter-inch thick plastic brace was molded around my entire mid section from my pubic bone to my nipples and I wore it 24 hours a day (excluding showers) for  four months. During that time, I did 90 minutes of aerobic exercise, religiously, five days a week to increase blood flow to my bones, 30 minutes rowing, 30 minutes on a stair master and 30 minutes on a bike. Over those four months, I did enough aerobic exercise to last me a life time and haven't done much since.

In the Spring of '95 I got another X-ray and it showed that there had been no change. Wearing the brace had been a waste of time and I bitterly decided that the doctors probably thought it wouldn't work in the first place but were just experimenting with me to find out. We concluded that I probably did it when I was about 14 "cliff jumping" at Lost Trail Ski Area when I landed on a rock ledge where the snow had been cleared away from my previous jump. I had laid there for about ten minutes not moving because I thought I might have broken my back but no one came by so I got up and skied away sore but not paralyzed.

The top half of one of my vertebras is separated from the bottom half by about a millimeter. It's called "L-5, S-1 Spondyolysthesis." The Doctors said that it's actually not too uncommon among gymnasts and athletes in other high-impact sports and that if I strengthened my stomach and back enough, I may be able to keep jumping.

I seriously considered retiring from competition and began talking to the Australians about coaching for them through the '98 Olympics. I spent 2-weeks in Australia where I met with the head honcho, discussed the history and current status of each athlete on their team and began prioritizing their strengths and weakness'. I went back and forth for a while deciding to take the job and then changing my mind before contacting them to say that I was going to try to make it to the '98 Olympics as a competitor because there would be plenty of time to coach later.

After wearing that brace for 4-months, my stomach & back muscles had all but disappeared and whatever was left had atrophied to mush so I had to start small, sitting on a bench, pushing my back against a wall and holding it for a few seconds at time. I worked very hard and by the following winter, I was doing 3 sets of 15 back extensions with a 45 pound weight on my back daily.

My teammates (I think Donna Weinbrecht instigated) talked the coaches into giving me my spot back and I won the first World Cup of the year.

Later in the year I landed stiff legged, on my heals with my back slightly arched and the pain was back. After a shot of cortisone didn't help, I decided to skip a World Cup in Quebec to rest before the next competition in Austria. I was dating a girl named Kathy at the time who lived near NYC so I decided to drop in for a surprise visit. A cab dropped me at her door but she wasn't home, I spent the next few hours walking very slowly in the cold a few blocks at a time hunched over in a lot of pain back and forth between a pay phone and her house. That was one of the worst experiences of my life. I eventually got a hold of her. She was leaving town but said I could stay there as long as I needed to. I spent the next week laying on what is, to this day, the most comfortable couch I've ever been on and because the days leading up to that break were so miserable, it was one of the best weeks of my life. I didn't do anything but eat, watch TV and visualize doing perfect jumps.

When I got to Kirchberg, Austria the day before the competition, my back was still hurting so I just pretending I was training. I go to the top of the course, wait in line until it was my turn, ski into the starting position, visualize my jump, ski down the in-run, stop just before going off, ski around the jump, visualize my jump, look at the landing hill, visualize landing, ski down the hill and back to the top. I did that for each jump I would normally do in a training session and went back to the hotel.

The next night was the first ever night-time World Cup Aerial event and with only a few warm-up jumps, after laying on a couch for a week picturing myself doing perfect jumps, I won the event with the higher score than had ever been awarded before, 247.51.

2nd at Worlds Leads to Olympic Gold (Clavicle)
In January of '97 I shattered my right collar bone into six pieces in Steamboat Springs, CO five weeks before my first World Championships which would be held on the site of the '98 Olympics.

I had crashed hard earlier that day on my right shoulder and broken my skis so I quit jumping for the day. After training, we were working on smoothing out the in-run for the next day's competition. I borrowed teammate Trace Worthington's skis to grab a landscaping rake from the bottom of the landing hill. I used to dull my edges to reduce the chances of catching an edge on the jump but Trace's edges were sharp and nothing like what I was used to. I took a lift back up to the top of the air site and planned to get as much speed as possible before side-slipping through the bottom of the in-run to smooth out the washboard type bumps that had formed in front of the jump.

I signaled to my teammates to make room for me to come through and started from above the triple start. As I skied in, I twirled the rake so the end was parallel with my skis and wouldn't hit my teammates when I went by. I was going at least 50 m.p.h. thinking about not taking anyone out with the rake when I turned Traces skis sideways. I caught the outside edge and instantly fly-swatted to the ground onto my right shoulder which I must have weakened or fractured earlier that day. I had broken my arm before so I knew what it felt like and was pretty sure my clavicle was broken. I didn't want to go through the hassle of getting loaded into a ski patrol sled and bounced down the mountain so I acted like it didn't hurt and skied to the lodge where patrols confirmed that it was broken.

That night, after convincing doctors that I had someone to drive me, I drove 100 miles from Steamboat to Vail on what I remember as very poorly maintained roads. But that was probably because I didn't take any pain medication because I didn't want to fall asleep at the wheel.

The next morning I went to the Steadman, Hawkins clinic and told them to do whatever they had to to get me ready to begin training for World Championships in a bout 4 weeks. They installed a plate and 8 screws to hold the bones together and bone graphs from a cadaver to speed the healing process. I then went to The Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, NY for rehab and had the aerial team's personal trainer, Kim Nelson, there with me. The OTC cut the recommended rehab time in half but I still would not be ready in time for Worlds so Kim and I cut the OTC's rehab schedule in half again. When the schedule said “Begin lifting your arm to 45 degrees after two weeks”, Kim and I would lift it to 90 degrees after one week.

Usually the idea is to let the bones at least partially heal before you start waving your arms around but we knew the hardware would hold the bones in place and rehabing the muscles and ligaments before the bones healed would work, as long as I could handle the pain. 

To do my tricks, I only needed to rehab two arm movements in just two specific planes (lifting my arm straight in front and dropping it straight down to the side.) Every day, we went through those movements building strength and flexibility. I remember laying in bed at night feeling like my right arm wasn't even part of my own body. (That could have been the cadaver fragments talking) I would fall asleep while my traumatized arm would lay next to me twitching. The plan was to work my arm into the ground for almost four weeks then let it rest and recover for three days before testing it on the jump site.

My coach, Wayne Hilterbrand (Head coach of The U.S. Aerial Ski Team at the time) stayed behind me 100%. He thought it was important for me to train on the site where the Olympics would be held one year later so he made sure I was there to at least give it a shot even though we didn't know if I could even jump when I was flying to Japan to compete.

After resting my arm for three days, it felt surprisingly good so I began with single flips and within a few days, just four and half weeks after the injury, I was doing quad twisting triple back flips, even though it was too painful to wear a back pack or sleep on my right side. I ended up finishing 2nd. Everyone was saying how great it was that I was even there to compete and that I got 2nd in my first Worlds but all I could think was "I could have been first." I was being careful when I jumped because I wasn't at 100% but I wished I would have gone for it.

One year later, on the same site in Nagano, during training just before Olympic finals, I had one of the worst crashes of my career. I landed on my chest and thought I might have broken my ribs. When I came to rest at the bottom of the hill, I couldn't breath but all I cared about was weather or not I had broken my ribs. I reached under my shirt to feel my chest thinking "As long as they're not broken, I can keep jumping no matter how bad it hurts." I was very relieved to feel that they were in tacked. I caught my breath and went over to Kim, the same trainer who had helped me rehab my collar bone a year earlier. I told him I couldn't breath very well. He also checked to see if my ribs were broken but neither of us wanted to know more. We agreed that if I could deal with the pain, we would figure out what damage I had done later. So I headed back up and took a few more training jumps.

When it came time for my first competition jump, I was still beat up from the crash and could only take half breaths, filling my lungs half way then exhaling. As I stood on the in-run waiting to jump, I was instantly reminded of standing in that same spot one year earlier feeling a little beat up at Worlds and being conservative.  I decided then that I wasn't going to get 2nd place again. So I took a couple steps up, hit an aggressive takeoff and did the best jump of my life. The jump was right on the edge of being too big and impossible to land but it ended up being the best jump of my life. I was so far ahead after the first round of jumps, that all I needed to do for the win was land my second jump so I made sure I did and got the gold.

I had the plate and screws taken out and keep the plate on my key chain.

January 2002 bruised hip & tore cartilage in shoulder
I went down on a speed check in Mt. Tremblant, Quebec about a month before the 2002 Olympics injuring my left hip and shoulder. These injuries limited the number of training jumps I could do for the rest of the season and my shoulder affected me for the following year until I got surgery in April of 2003 to repair a tear in the labrum with 4 stitches. Spent most of summer 2003 rehabilitating shoulder to 100% by November.

December 12, 2003 bruised right heal, sprained left knee
I landed in hole on the landing hill at a UOP night event in Park City severely bruising my right heal and spraining my left knee. "Landed in a hole" means that I landed in a spot where several other jumpers before me had blown the soft snow out of that spot when they landed and no snow was shoveled into that spot to protect me from landing on the ice at the bottom of the small crater. My knee healed quickly but my heel took until May 2004 to recover.

April 29, 2004 broken rib
I broke a rib training with the Navy Seals in San Diego, CA. This injury has had no significant impact on my off-season training and should be 100% when our team camps resume on June 2, 2004.

August, 2005 broken thumb
I hit my thumb on my ski landing on water but it did not effect my 2nd place performance in a World Cup three weeks later. See 2005 Australia