In fact, it’s the same kind of fracture that people get when their feet slip out from under them on an icy sidewalk and crash down on their back. Breaking bones in the spine sounds pretty scary, but Kingsbury’s injury was not a complicated one, Livingston says. If you prepare yourself in an appropriate way, where you check all the boxes, you end up having a lot of car lengths,” he says. It’s the same thing in your physical performance. “We learned to have a certain number of car lengths between us and the car in front of us so that we don’t bang into the bumper. “The way he goes about training sets him up to be a very robust athlete to begin with,” says Livingston who has trained Kingsbury for 12 years. If there’s a lesson in all this for other athletes, or mere mortals trying to overcome challenges of their own, according to Kingsbury’s team, it comes in all the work that happens years ahead of the bump in the road. “It’s rare that he has to be full-on to win an event,” Hamelin says. But he’s so far ahead of the field he often doesn’t need his best to win. Kingsbury trains with the help of his ski coach, physical trainer Scott Livingston and mental performance coach Jean François Ménard, to deliver his very best. It’s an awfully short list of athletes who can win against the best in the world without being at their best. His coach, Michel Hamelin, thinks he was stronger than that, more like 80 per cent. He thinks he was at 70 per cent of his physical best in Deer Valley where he still put down his hard tricks on the jumps and raced to win. “Don’t crash, don’t crash,” he told himself at the top of those first runs. His first races in Deer Valley are the only time Kingsbury recalls being at all nervous about his comeback. A month later he won both events again at the world championships in Kazakhstan. He won the moguls and dual moguls World Cups in Deer Valley, Utah nine weeks after his injury. Once he got to the bottom of his qualifying run, almost unbelievably, he was leading the world again. When he returned to competition in February he was the hunter for exactly one run - just over 24 seconds.
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It will be a good experience to start from behind for a change: ‘I’ll be the hunter.’ ” “It’s going to be very good for me to learn from this injury,” he told himself. Would he get back to peak form? Would he have lingering pain? How many races would he have to miss?īut as soon as he got home and put together a rehabilitation plan with his support team he was already seeing the positives. When he was told that he’d fractured his T4 and T5 vertebrae he was worried. He turned at the last moment to protect his face and neck so his back took the hit on the icy mound. Last November on a routine jump in training he landed further forward than expected and “flew like Superman” face first towards the mogul he should have been skiing around. Ruka is where he wore his first yellow bib as points leader, set several of his records and left seriously hurt for the first time in his career. “It’s not because I crashed that I don’t like it anymore. Next weekend, the 29-year-old from Deux-Montagnes, Que., will race in the season opener in Ruka, Finland, where he broke his back last year. Whether it’s winning against the best in the world or coming back from injury, Kingsbury makes it look easy. He was awarded the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s most outstanding athlete in 2018. He holds every single record in moguls skiing, including the most World Cup podiums (93) and the most wins (65).
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He’s the reigning Olympic and world champion. And there is no other way than that to describe Canadian moguls skier Mikaël Kingsbury. Injury is an unfortunate part of all high-performance sports and, thankfully, there’s no shortage of inspirational comeback stories.īut just how dominant does an athlete have to be to embrace a broken back as a useful learning experience?