Ryan Cochran-Siegle | Beijing 2022 Olympic Profile

Team USA Alpine Skier Ryan Cochran-Siegle speaks about his devastating crash in January 2020, and explains how important getting comfortable in the correct equiptment is for Olympic skiiers.

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

RYAN COCHRAN-SIEGLE: Hello, everyone. I'm Ryan Cochran-Siegle, Alpine skier. First, the injury. I crashed in the World Cup downhill in Kitzbuhel in-- end of January, fractured my C7 in my neck, and had surgery on it. I had the C6 and C7 fused in February. And, I mean, it was just a whole lot of doing nothing for two months.

But got back on snow in May. And then I was fully back up to speed, training hard, training speed in our summer camp in, like, beginning of August in [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE]. So that's been going well. And I feel like my level of skiing that I had prior, I can still attain right now. And that's, kind of, my goal this season, is to get back to that-- that competitiveness.

I mean, between [INAUDIBLE] downhill, there's multiple variations, multiple different constructions. Bindings are totally different, boots. All the setups can be-- kind of, you can play around with it. So it's just about getting something that you feel comfortable and you know how it will react on race day.

So this whole last two weeks, I've been skiing more or less on one or two pairs of skis, and then a good few differences of bindings and boots. And I think getting dialed and just getting-- you know, getting that comfort level to where, you know, you can push, and-- and, you know, the limitations, and-- and how to just generate power in the-- in the equipment that you have.