His last ski race put him in the hospital ... his next was in the Olympics

YANQING, China — There are chunks of Jan. 9, 2021, that Tommy Ford cannot remember. Chunks of his last race before the 2022 Olympics that are, in his mind, gone. Video could remind him, but for 11 months, he couldn’t bear to watch it — because on that day in Adelboden, Switzerland, 67 seconds after he charged out of an Alpine start gate, skiing ripped apart his body and changed his life.

He was, in one second, a top-10 giant slalom skier in the world, and in the next unconscious. He’d stumbled, and careened across a racecourse, into red protective netting. He lay motionless on snow, his knee torn, his brain off, as a helicopter came to carry him away.

He tore his meniscus, PCL, MCL and a ligament in his wrist. He broke his tibial plateau and sustained a concussion. And 13 months later, he has not fully recovered. His leg, he says, “hurts every day.” He has some hardware in it, and wears a brace on it, and relearning to use his hamstring, he says, “has been tricky.”

But on Sunday, for the first time in 400 days, he climbed back into a start gate. He slalomed down a snowy mountain and finished 12th at the Olympics. There’s a part of him that remembers the skier he was before the crash, and “knows I can win a medal here,” and rues that he never really had a chance. But he tries not to let his mind float into what-ifs. That, he says, was “a different time.”

Here, in the present, at Yanqing’s National Alpine Ski Center, and at the sport’s pinnacle, he smiled underneath a mask.

“I'm just happy to be alive,” he said — “and skiing.”

Retraining his body

Tommy Ford was born and raised in Bend, Oregon, and by his early 30s, he’d bred himself into one of the best technical skiers on the planet. He won his first World Cup race in December 2019, and finished second in another one 12 months later, and 12 months after that?

“My mind feels like it can win races,” he wrote on Instagram. “My body says ‘.....’

“I remember the feeling of skiing really fast and I feel like I could be in a race and do well,” he told The Bend Bulletin. “But I simply can’t do that.”

For months, this disconnect dragged him in and out of depression. The dual recoveries, from the concussion and torn-up knee, left him in “a world of hurt.” For a month or two after returning to the U.S., he struggled to sleep and find comfort. There were memory problems. “Fogginess in the head,” he said. “I was just trying to get through days and nights.”

It wasn’t his first injury, but it was “unsettling,” he said. The pace of recovery stimulated doubts. He craved progress, and when it was slow, he’d worry. “A lot of unknowns have been hard to accept,” he said in October.

At the time, nine months later, he still hadn’t been back on skis. He’d started with muscle activation, “just flexing my quad.” He couldn’t even “use” his hamstring for four months, because of complexities of the injury. He gradually regained strength and stability, but all along, the mere idea of repairing ligaments to withstand ski racing was “pretty freaky” to him.

So were the fluctuations of his brain. The concussion recovery, he said, was “slow, and weird.” Normalcy would return, seemingly, but then there’d be mood swings, or “weird symptoms, with eyes and stuff,” he said. And he’d think to himself: “Oh, wait, maybe I’m not normal.”

And perhaps the most abnormal part of everything was being estranged from the slopes that brought him so much happiness.

He finally clicked into skis again in November. Not to race, of course, but to reconnect his body and mind. “It feels good to feel the pull of gravity again,” he wrote in December, but his mind was still ahead. “Each day is an exploration into the vast unknown,” he said.

He attended World Cup events, but only to support teammates. He skied, but never competitively. Over the 13 months before the 2022 Olympics, what was the closest he’d come to actually racing?

“Ah,” he said, and then he laughed. “Training the day before [Sunday’s race].”

'Jedi tricks'

Around 10:40 a.m. on Sunday, Ford stared out into a blustery abyss, preparing to attack a course he couldn’t see and feel feelings he could hardly remember.

There was confidence, but also insecurity.

There was joy, but also fear — especially as he dove blind into that first run. Without visual cues due to snowfall, he relied on “Jedi tricks.” Midway through, he started skiing defensively.

But in the afternoon, he climbed the hill again, and this time, he charged down it. Whereas the first run felt like “just going for a ride,” this one felt like “racing.” It put him, ever so briefly, into the leader’s chair, with five Olympic rings on his back, and millions watching around the world.

The ones that mattered most were the family and friends back home in the U.S. They’re the ones who Ford thought about two months ago when he finally pulled up a video of the crash and clicked play. The hardest part of watching it, he said, was knowing that loved ones had watched it live and worried.

Now they were watching again as he stared into a camera, momentarily atop a leaderboard. He appreciated what a special feeling that was. For him, but also for them.

He was, of course, bumped out of the leader’s chair. He hasn’t recovered his speed of 14 months ago. He might never recover it. He appeared to limp away from the finish area, and acknowledged that he still has “some deficits,” and “a lot of work to do.” He doesn’t know what the future holds.

But he had this moment, this moment that for so long felt so far away, and he was “really grateful.”

His body didn’t feel perfect, “but skiing itself,” he said, “is the best feeling I have.”