Ski Racer Nina O’Brien’s Crazy Fast Comeback From an Olympic Crash

Before she could think about walking normally, she had to practice using the small muscles in her calf to rotate her foot once again. The idea of pointing her foot and jamming it into a ski boot — a miserable experience for recreational skiers who wear relatively soft and flexible boots but a whole other level of awful for elite ski racers — seemed preposterous.

She returned to Dartmouth, where she attends college in the off-season. She limped around campus, went to physical therapy nearly every day and tried to follow the seven-and-a-half-month “return to snow” timeline that the coaches and physiotherapists with the U.S. ski team had mapped out. First she had to walk without pain, then jog, then jump, and on and on, meeting certain criteria at each step before taking the next one.

O’Brien tried to view the timeline as a series of rough goals and not deadlines. A journey more important than the destination.

“She’s always been tough, and can handle more pain than the normal person, even the normal skier,” said Magnus Andersson, the head technical coach for the U.S. women’s ski team. That made it more vital for him and his colleagues to make sure she rested.

“She won’t rest if she has the choice,” he said.

In mid-September, it was time.

She and Andersson traveled to an indoor ski complex in Belgium with the gentlest of slopes, where she didn’t have to worry about sudden slick or soft patches of snow and a technician was just a few steps away to make equipment adjustments. Within a few runs, she felt like she was skiing again.

“I didn’t cry,” she said. “I just felt stupidly giddy.”

Within a few days, O’Brien was linking quick turns again. By the end of the week, Andersson thought she was skiing better than she had before the crash. In October, she traveled to Austria to rejoin her teammates. Before long, she was chasing speed again, just like they were. She would have raced at the season-opening competition in Sölden, Austria, last month, but it was canceled.