First there was the struggle to make women’s ski
jumping an Olympic sport. Now the American team
just wants to win.
Members of the U.S. women’s ski jumping
team, from left: Sarah Hendrickson, Abby Hughes,
Jessica Jerome, Lindsey Van and Alissa Johnson.
/ nytimes.com
In her apartment in Park City, Utah, overlooking
mountains already peaked with snow, Sarah Hendrickson
tries not to obsessively replay the moment, two
months earlier, that turned her life into a cliffhanger.
At 19, Hendrickson is the current women’s ski-jumping
world champion and arguably the best female ski
jumper ever. On Aug. 21, she set yet another hill
record, at Oberstdorf, Germany, or would have, but
for her crash landing.
As Hendrickson limped to get her phone so she could
show me the video of the jump, she paused to look
down at her loose pajama pants and baggy cardigan
and apologized for her appearance. “At least I’m
still wearing Nike,” she said, sheepishly pointing
to the T-shirt under her sweater. “They’re still
one of my sponsors, right?”
She carefully eased herself back onto the sofa and
told me to press play on her phone. “I don’t have
to leave the room or anything, but I can’t watch,”
she said. This was a training jump - she didn’t
need to take it - but the day was cold and clear
with a light head wind, ideal for ski jumping. The
new, state-of-the-art German jump was said to feel
a lot like the one recently built for the Olympics
in Sochi, Russia, and she had been jumping phenomenally
well on it for days. On the screen, a tiny figure
in a shiny blue suit soars under the sun, her skis
in perfect V formation. “Sarah’s too-incredible
jump,” as the team’s head coach, Paolo Bernardi,
calls it, was 148 meters, about the length of one
and a half football fields. On the couch next to
me, Hendrickson clutched her cardigan sleeves, yawning
loudly to miss the horrible clatter of her 94-pound
body landing at more than 70 miles an hour on the
ground where the jump hill flattens, the area that
means you’ve gone too far.
Hendrickson’s surgeon calls her knee injury “the
terrible triad, plus one”: the A.C.L. ruptured completely,
the M.C.L. pulled right off the tibia and severe
damage was done to both the lateral and medial meniscus.
It would take most athletes at least 12 months to
recover from this kind of knee damage, but the Olympics
in Sochi were less than six months away. Hendrickson
said her doctor, who in August cut out part of her
hamstring to repair part of her knee, told her not
to give up hope.
“People are like, ‘Well, you’re so young, you’ll
have other Olympics,’ ” she said, adjusting a ponytail
of dark curls on top of her head, her dark brows
knit. “And it’s like: ‘No, you just don’t understand.
For women’s ski jumping this is the year to compete.’
” What she means is that this is the first Olympics
in which women will be allowed to jump. It has been
a decade-long fight to get women’s ski jumping into
the Olympics - it was one of the last restricted
winter sports - and Hendrickson’s outsize talent,
a natural ability honed since age 7 that far surpasses
that of most male jumpers, was like a banner to
parade at the opening ceremony. You said we can’t?
Well, look at this.
Before the crash, Bernardi, a men’s coach in his
native Italy who joined the U.S. women’s ski-jumping
team in 2011, called Hendrickson “totally unbeatable.”
He first heard about Hendrickson when she was still
a 60-pounder in the development clubs of Park City,
and he is the figure most associated with her success.
It’s hard to find a Eurosport video of one of Hendrickson’s
winning jumps that doesn’t include a cutaway of
Bernardi dramatically sending kisses heavenward.
But as much as it pains him, Bernardi has been forced
to change the way he thinks about his team: “So
maybe we lost the icebreaker - Sarah - the one that
if we have a bad day, she can still put all the
big lights on over our team. But my team, our team,
the U.S. girls, this No. 1 team, was not the Sarah
Hendrickson show.”
But the truth is that it pretty much was, and a
more difficult truth has emerged since her fall:
the supporting players in the Sarah Hendrickson
show may be thrust into the spotlight while she
sits things out. Abby Hughes, 24, was the youngest
on the team before the then-17-year-old Hendrickson
broke into the champion ranks by winning nine of
13 World Cup competitions in 2012. Now, Hughes,
tall and blond, is jostling hard against the team’s
other tall blond, Alissa Johnson, 26, to make the
cut for Sochi, where only four of the team’s jumpers
can compete. Ranked above them is Jessica Jerome,
26, who ended last season as the ninth-best female
ski jumper in the world. And then there is Lindsey
Van, 28, the pioneer of the sport and the first
official women’s world champion, who was in a slump
for the past two years but is now a strong contender
for a medal at the Olympics. These five women are
unusually close, having trained together year-round
since they were kids. All of them grew up in Park
City, learned to ski jump in the after-school programs
there and still live and train on the hills of the
Utah Olympic Park. So the whole team feels Hendrickson’s
accident in complicated ways - not least because
her recovery would knock one of them out of the
first Olympics for their sport.
“We still always have this feeling now, like someone
is missing,” Jerome said of Sarah. “We all had our
hearts broken when Sarah fell, but to be honest,
less and less.”
Johnson elaborated, describing how she saw some
athletes getting caught up in pre-Olympic pressure.
“You can make anything a positive thing or a negative
thing,” she said. “And what I’ve been thinking lately
is, If you stick to your program, other people will
trip up. At this point it’s a game of who’s following
themselves, and who’s not overdoing it and falling
into traps. . . . You know this team has not had
an easy time getting to the Olympics. So now it’s
just, like, stick to the plan.”
For her part, Hendrickson’s plan is “not giving
up 12 years of hard training to sit at home and
watch the Olympics on television.” She now spends
up to eight hours at a time at the gym, in rehab
training, and every day she sets aside a few minutes
to visualize her goal. “I see myself at the top
of the ski jump in Sochi,” she says. “I see myself
walking into the opening ceremony.” If she does
make the team of four Olympic athletes in January,
she has, she told me, already “grieved for” the
athlete who will be ousted because of her last-minute
reinclusion. “Of course that’s not how I want to
qualify. It will be just horrible. But it’s sport,
that’s how it works. Still, for the other girls?
I dread that day.”
Ski jumping is a Nordic sport, meaning, like cross-country
and telemark skiing, one that evolved on the snow
fields and gentle hills of Norway. It is a traditional
discipline, highly controlled, obsessed with the
most minute details like thumb angle and millimeters
between skin and suit. It is not something for expressive
hot-doggers. In the United States, where most homegrown
ski sports - snowboarding, for example - have both
the Alps and a surfboard somewhere in their genes,
the Nordic disciplines are not much considered spectator
sports. They are also almost irretrievably associated
with a quaint, gingerbreadish tweeness. So while
it wouldn’t be wrong to call ski jumping an extreme
sport - because it is crazy to go down a 400-foot-high
iced track at 60 miles an hour and then jump the
length of a New York City block with nothing but
a helmet as a safety net - it’s still not something
you’ll most likely see in the X Games.
And yet, the place that bred the top-ranked women’s
ski-jumping team is far from Norway. There were
an unusual constellation of factors that made the
conditions in Park City, Utah, nearly perfect for
the development of women’s jumping: the jumps built
for the 2002 Olympics are not only the best in the
country but among the best in the world, and the
Olympic Games themselves energized all the winter
sports programs in Park City before and after their
arrival. The ski culture is also open-minded, which
allowed Lindsey Van to start jumping - the lone
girl alongside the boys - in the 1990s. There is
a 1993 video of her, 8 years old, at the training
jumps in the area that would later become the Utah
Olympic Park. She is wearing a helmet and a black-and-white
cow-patterned suit, and her teeth look big in that
way that 8-year-old teeth do. “My goal,” she says,
coming off a jump, “is to make the Olympic team
in 2002 - for girls.”
Van, the daughter of a Detroit merchant seaman who
moved his young family to Park City after being
laid off, became a local celebrity. Soon there were
other Park City girls taking ski jumping seriously:
Jerome first, then Johnson, then Hughes. Van would
sometimes coach young girls, like Hendrickson, who
were just starting out on the smallest training
hills. The rest of her time was spent on the rinky-dink
competition circuit then available to women, which
inevitably took place on some of the world’s more
substandard jumps, the ones that Van affectionately
describes as “on the dark side of the moon” - rutted,
uneven venues in places with names like Rastbuchl,
Pohla and Notodden, where spectators might be a
handful of local townspeople and a jump hill’s landing
area might end in roads with passing cars.
The team often arrived at foreign airports with
$100 among them, no one to pick them up and the
number of a Swedish ski jumper’s mother as the only
backup plan. “We would stay in all these hostels
where 30 girls slept in a room,” Johnson says. “We
always shared equipment because somebody’s always
got lost.” Van told me how once, in Saalfelden,
Austria, the team arrived at their “guesthouse”
and found that it was a loft over a teeming cowshed.
“There was a lot less organization, a lot less money,
a lot more being young and dumb,” she said. “But
we were a family - all girl ski jumpers were a family
back then.”
Van didn’t make her childhood goal of jumping in
the 2002 Olympics, of course, because female jumpers
weren’t allowed to compete. Nor in 2006. By the
time the 2010 games were coming around, 15 of the
sport’s best jumpers filed a discrimination suit
against the Vancouver Organizing Committee, led
by Women’s Ski Jumping USA, a nonprofit group started
in 2003 to support the team. Against the wishes
of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (U.S.S.A.),
the national governing body of Olympic skiing, Van
- who had just won the sport’s first World Championships
- agreed to be the spokeswoman.
“Suddenly I didn’t even have time to train,” Van
told me. “I find myself in Canada answering questions
about Canadian law and the laws of the International
Olympic Committee. And you know what? It’s not like
you wake up one day and say, ‘I want to be an activist
for women in ski jumping.’ But it came to where
it was like: ‘Well, if you want this for yourself,
or for anyone in the future, you have to do it.
The next generation is going to come out of this,
and right now it’s you or it’s no one.’ ”
The ski jumpers lost in appeals court in November
2009, with the court ruling that neither the Vancouver
Organizing Committee nor any Canadian authority
could tell the Switzerland-based International Olympic
Committee what to do. Standing outside the courthouse,
Van wept openly, saying, “I thought that they would
go the other way.” She then called the Canadian
system of justice “weak,” likened the I.O.C. to
the Taliban and discouraged young girls from aspiring
to be the next Lindsey Van “because there is no
future.” She lost her most lucrative sponsor, and
in 2010, quit ski jumping while still ranked No.
1 in the world.
But a year later, around the time of the Olympic
announcement that women would get to compete in
a single category in 2014 - individual jump on the
K-95, the smaller of the two Sochi jump hills -
she returned. By then, the years of emotional stress
and missed training because of what the jumpers
now simply call “the fight” had compromised her
jumping. Beyond that, Olympic inclusion had a nearly
instantaneous effect on professionalizing women’s
ski jumping: suddenly there were smartly uniformed
female teams, rigorously trained and traveling with
entourages of physiotherapists and coaches. Van
was now skiing alongside not only Hendrickson, but
also a new generation of teenage jumpers like Sara
Takanashi of Japan and Coline Mattel of France.
China retrained gymnasts and sent them down ski
jumps after the Olympics were announced.
One day in Park City this summer, I watched Van
and Hendrickson jump from a low stool into the upstretched
arms of a coach, Alan Alborn, at the Center of Excellence,
the training and education facility of the U.S.S.A.
Even on the level of pure movement, I felt I could
see the weariness in Van’s effort, while Hendrickson
arced into Alborn’s arms so fluidly it seemed as
if she could do it all day. Bernardi had already
told me that the problem with Van was the problem
of experience: too much old memory padding those
muscles, too many past injuries. One morning, he
said, you wake up in a new world, still doing things
the old way. When I asked him what the issues were
with Hendrickson, he said, “The only issue with
an athlete like Sarah is that she doesn’t peak before
she has to. . . . Sometimes, you have to hold them
back.”
The resistance to women in ski jumping makes frustratingly
little sense when you recognize what female jumpers
can do. “The gap between men and women in ski jumping
is so small, you can’t believe it,” Bernardi told
me. “Every year, with girls like Sarah, the girls
are flying better, better, better.” Today, he said,
there might not actually be another sport in which,
at the superelite level, the differences in male
and female capability are so minimal. “Maybe there
is something with horses? Equestre? But even there
it is half the horse.”
Van said she believed that this is also the reason
women have been excluded from the top competitions
in the sport for so long. “If women can jump as
far as men, what does that do to the extreme value
of this sport?” she asks. “I think we scared the
ski-jumping [establishment].”
There is so little difference between women and
men in the sport because lightness and technique
count just as much as muscle and power. A jump can
be separated into four sections: the in run, where
balance is crucial as the athlete pushes off a start
bar and goes down a track; the jump, where within
a tenth of a second the athlete transitions from
rushing down the track to a hard-push takeoff; the
flight, where skis are kept in V-formation, and
the ideal model for the body is a kite, paper thin,
but with enough surface to catch good air; and finally,
the landing, which is often done in telemark style,
meaning one ski in front of the other. A ski jump
is measured by judges for both distance and style.
Women are allowed to start from a higher point on
the jump because of their lighter weight (for heavier
women, this can be an advantage).
At the final event of the Federation Internationale
de Ski World Cup at the Holmenkollen ski arena in
Norway, where I started following the women’s team
in March, the men and women were essentially jumping
the same distances. It was the first time the federation
allowed female jumpers to take the big hill, the
K-120, and the women performed well. The longest
male jump was 139 meters, from the Norwegian Tom
Hilde, Hendrickson’s boyfriend, while the longest
female jump - 134 meters - belonged to her closest
challenger, the 17-year-old Takanashi. Hendrickson,
who jumped 133.5, still took first place for her
flawless style.
As I watched the skiers fly through the air at Holmenkollen,
I often found myself squinting for some telltale
sign of whether they were male or female: a ponytail,
say, or the curve of a breast. Jumpers are often
indecipherable in the air largely because of the
sport’s physical ideal, which is skinny, sometimes
to the point of emaciation. Male jumpers, Van said,
“are the most awful, unhealthy looking humans.”
From afar, many of them look like willowy women,
often weighing less than 135 pounds, with sunken
cheeks, jutting hip bones and sticklike legs.
Increasingly, women are prioritizing lightness as
well. Van has an unusually dense, stocky build for
the sport, and Hughes and Johnson have swimmer’s
shoulders, but as the reedlike Hendrickson explained
to me, it’s only a matter of time before extreme
skinniness becomes the norm on the women’s side
as well. “For so long things were not that serious
for girls,” she said. “But now that things are getting
more competitive, with the Olympics and everything,
you will start to see one body type - the ski-jumping
body type.”
One thing the jumpers hope they’ll see more of with
the Olympics approaching is money. At least in this
country, a niche sport like ski jumping has little
chance to secure much outside interest from sponsors
without the platform of the Olympic Games (or the
youth-culture currency of the X Games). With the
exception of Hendrickson - who is individually sponsored
by Red Bull, Nike and Kellogg’s, among others -
every woman on the team has flirted with the poverty
line. A few do have sponsors - Van gets some money
from two small companies, and Jerome recently landed
Liberty Mutual - but generally, if they can scrape
together $10,000 a year outside of skiing, they
feel like they are doing well. Johnson and Jerome
wait on tables, Hughes is a nanny, and this year
Van tried to raise money through a Salt Lake City-based
crowdfunding website called RallyMe, which feels
like entry into an underground world of impoverished
athletes with Olympic aspirations: the bobsledders,
the skeleton riders, the kayakers.
The team itself is not much better off. “We’re still
always a step away from bake sales in terms of keeping
these girls in jumpsuits,” says Whitney Childers,
the communications manager for Women’s Ski Jumping
USA. “Even going into the Olympics, it’s like that.”
Today, between travel, training, coaching and physical
therapy, W.S.J.-USA spends an average of $80,000
to maintain a female athlete on the international
circuit for a year. Japan’s and Austria’s female
teams can spend nearly twice that on their best
jumpers. The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association
- which is famously more generous with Alpine skiing
than Nordic - gives a meager $50,000 to $60,000
total in support. (The U.S.S.A. gives no money at
all to the U.S. men’s ski-jumping team, which is
ranked 13.) The women’s team has a handful of sponsors,
with a chocolate-milk campaign and Visa donating
the most significant sums - the team’s official
name is the Visa Women’s Ski Jumping Team - but,
even going into the Olympics, the total corporate
sponsorship is still only $251,000 a year. Without
a good deal of creative fund-raising within the
Utah community, the numbers would never add up.
“So we get the girls out in dresses for fund-raisers,”
Childers said.
One day, after Hendrickson’s three-hour morning
workout, two months before her crash, we went to
lunch at one of her favorite restaurants, a budget
Thai place in a strip mall. Hendrickson, whose mother
was an ultramarathoner and whose father was a recreational
ski jumper in his youth, left the Center for Excellence
dressed all in Nike - Nike shorts, a Nike tank top,
a Nike zip-up jacket and Nike sneakers. She said
she was relieved that for the next few weeks she
could just train. Since returning from Norway, she
had barely spent any time at home. She took a deep
breath and recited some of her recent schedule,
which began with a trip to the Canary Islands to
see Hilde, her boyfriend, and included a media tour
for Red Bull, an Olympic press event in Hollywood
and a promotional trip for a nonprofit organization
that finances children’s sports programs in Africa.
“It’s a lot to do,” she said, breezily, “but I’m
regulating everything and making sure I’m keeping
everything at ease and not letting all this stuff
distract me.” Like many athletes, Hendrickson seems
to thrive on routine. While talking about how she
went about her days in Park City, she included the
most minute details, from shower times to breakfast
rituals (“I put my frozen berries in the microwave
for 20, no, actually 15 seconds”). In ski jumping,
where an untucked shoelace or the tiniest change
in hip angle can make a difference, the sport’s
ideal personality type, she said, “might be control
freak.”
Hendrickson separated a small portion of her tofu
curry from the rest and cut it into pea-size pieces.
It was hard to tell whether she was dividing her
lunch to encourage herself to eat more or less.
“I don’t like the feeling of being full,” she said.
“I hate it.” She ate the cut-up pieces, then asked
to take her soup, rice and remaining tofu home in
a doggie bag. She looked at my nearly cleaned plate
and asked whether I wanted a doggie bag too, as
if the few morsels left could possibly make for
a meal.
Earlier in the season, I watched her lose her usual
composure in a hotel lobby when she realized that
Bernardi hadn’t told her she could eat dinner early.
“You said 8, but I heard some teams got to eat at
6!” she said, stamping a bunny-slippered foot. “You
know I hate eating late! You know I never eat late!”
Since 2004, Federation Internationale de Ski has
implemented rules to address concerns about eating
disorders among ski jumpers. The length of skis
an athlete is allowed to use now depends not only
on his height but his weight as well. If a jumper
falls under a certain weight for his height, he
loses centimeters off his skis. Ski length makes
up part of a jumper’s power in the air - playing
a part in everything from lift to control, especially
on windy days. At the restaurant, Hendrickson explained
that she lost too much weight in the past few months.
She had to cut her skis - in June, they measured
214 centimeters (about 84 inches), when, at 5-foot-4,
she could be skiing on 232s.
“I want to be back on 220s by the Olympics,” she
said. She was particularly worried about jumping
in the wind on shorter skis. “I don’t like jumping
in the wind. I’ll tell my coach straight up: It
makes things too inconsistent. Go from too high
a gate, you can go too far, hurt your knees. That’s
actually my biggest fear.”
Hendrickson’s coaches had been concerned enough
about her strength to ask her to build “a little
more body mass.” She was encouraged to begin eating
snacks before bed, and they also wanted her to drink
protein shakes. But Bernardi, who told me that he
nearly ended his own competitive career as a Nordic
combined athlete in Italy because he became too
thin and weak after being encouraged to lose weight,
said he and the other coaches are not worried about
Hendrickson. “When we get worried, we do something.”
The morning after the Thai meal, Hendrickson and
I drove to Utah Olympic Park together. It was the
first day of summer jumping and warm for June, but
Hendrickson, wearing sweatpants and a polar fleece,
had the heat on in her car. When we arrived, Van,
Jerome, Johnson and Hughes, dressed in jogging shorts
and tank tops, were joking around and limbering
up with a small exercise ball. Hendrickson walked
off wordlessly.
Throughout this first week back in training in Park
City, her teammates suggested that Hendrickson’s
rise was causing tension among them. “Sarah’s different
than before,” Hughes said. “It’s just, as a team,
everybody adds their own element and her element
is a little hard to be around.” Jerome and Johnson
added that they felt the pressure and attention
were getting to Hendrickson.
“Sarah is a really good kid,” Johnson had said to
me, “but she’s in a situation where a lot of people
will accept really mediocre or somewhat bad behavior
- like allowing her to be short with them. And then
we have to go through all this stuff on the team,
like, ‘Is Sarah happy today, or is she going to
start screaming?’ ”
“Let’s just put it this way, I know I get cranky
when I am under a certain weight,” Jerome said.
“And with Sarah, people are just walking on eggshells.”
The Olympic Park ski jumps looked like two AstroTurf
tongues extended down the mountain. Without the
coating of snow - in the summer, the surfaces are
watered porcelain and stiff plastic matting - the
perilous nature of the sport was laid bare. At the
top of the K-120, it was all clanking metal start
bars and wind howling through the metal platforms.
The jumping, which looked so graceful, peaceful
even, from the ground, now just looked extreme,
all edge and danger. “Everybody has fear every time
they jump,” Hendrickson told me the day before.
“You are going against what your brain wants to
do - your brain will tell your body to do anything
but what you are supposed to do to jump well.”
Jerome, who had peeled her suit down to the tops
of her ski boots, was sitting on the steps near
the start bar in her underwear, waiting for her
turn to jump. The thick suits are hotter and clingier
than ever, because in the past year the Federation
Internationale de Ski clamped down on what some
jumpers call “suit doping,” or cheating with your
suit (some common tactics include super-low crotches
or webbed underarms that give the jumper extra surface
area). A jumper lands with more speed in a tight
suit, because it doesn’t catch air or provide any
kind of parachute. And when things go wrong, Van
said, “it can be like jumping out of a 30-story
window going 60 miles an hour and trying to land.
And it doesn’t matter how strong you are. There’s
just no comfortable way to do that.”
I met Van in her basement apartment near the Utah
Olympic Park. It’s a small place in a down-at-the-heels
condo complex that she shares with her twin brother
and another roommate. The apartment is sparsely
furnished with ramshackle hand-me downs. There is
a single picture of a cow on the wall and a thin
coat of cat hair on the sofa. “I live simple,” she
said. “I don’t need much.”
Standing close to her, I found it hard not to stare
at her muscled body, which radiates such dense power
that your instinct is to step back. She has been
repeatedly and seriously injured over the years
- her ankles, her knees, six broken vertebrae, a
ruptured spleen. As a teenager, Van developed an
eating disorder, but in her 20s, she decided it
was better to try to figure out how to “make [her]
fat fly.” “Fat” should be taken euphemistically;
there was not a speck in evidence. “I’ve been asked
to become an Olympic weight lifter many times,”
she said. “But you’re picking up this big piece
of heavy metal just to put it back exactly where
you picked it up from. It seems absolutely ridiculous
to me.”
Despite her disappointment with the way she was
jumping (she finished the 2012-2013 season eighth
over all), she had tried to make light of it. “Whatever,”
she said. “Ski jumping isn’t the cure for cancer.
It isn’t even cancer.” She’d long been trying to
shrug off the idea that her best jumping years might
have been spent in court rather than at the Olympics.
“So it’s the first Olympics, and it’s not my peak,”
she told me back in Norway. “But it’s still someone’s
peak; it’s the same process, just continuing, so
how can I be bummed?”
Then, a month after we met, Van had a breakthrough.
An entrepreneur in Ogden, Utah, had created a wind
tunnel, a long room with three 6-foot-diameter fans,
each with 150 horsepower, for use in assessing the
aerodynamics of things like racecars and motorcycles.
First Hendrickson was invited to try it, and then,
a few weeks later, the rest of the team got its
chance.
One by one, the jumpers attached their feet to ski
bindings bolted into the floor, and then pitched
themselves forward against the 60 m.p.h. gale produced
by the fans. Smoke passed over their torsos in order
to show how the wind split and dragged when it hit
them. Alborn sometimes lay on his back directly
under a jumper, giving directions. For Van, it was
a transformative experience. “The wind tunnel gives
you the same feeling that you have when you’re in
flight, but here it was several minutes at a time,”
she said. “Which gives your brain a chance to recognize
the feelings instead of just feeling them. I felt
things I may have only felt 20 times in my whole
life as a ski jumper. It was like I was a kid again.”
Not long after that, it was clear that Van was coming
out of her slump. For two years, Bernardi had been
trying, unsuccessfully, to get her to jump in a
position that worked better with the new, tighter
suits and the new, faster jumps. Now everything
was finally clicking. In October, she won the U.S.
National Championships. It was her 16th national
title.
“I was waiting for two years for this kind of turnaround,”
she said. “Nobody wants to do a sport for 22 years
and feel like they suck. If you’re doing something
that long, you should be good at it, right? It got
to the point where I felt like I couldn’t even call
myself a ski jumper. But now, jumping, I have the
feelings I haven’t felt in a long time. I feel happy.
I remember: jumping makes me happy.”
The question is whether the wind tunnel also blew
Sarah Hendrickson into some stratosphere of ski
jumping that her body just couldn’t handle. “Paolo
hadn’t expected me to jump as well as I was in Oberstdorf
for four more months,” she said. “After my first
jumps there, he was like, ‘I don’t know how, but
you’re just destroying it.’ My mom still asks if
it was the wind tunnel. But you know, whatever.
What if it was what I had for breakfast that morning?”
Hendrickson, who believes the accident was “just
bad circumstance,” says she knows Bernardi has at
times blamed himself. What if, on that supersleek
Oberstdorf jump, he hadn’t let her wear her fastest
suit, the blue one she usually saves for competition
days? What if he had instructed her to start from
a lower gate? Bernardi told me he doesn’t think
it was anyone’s fault. “It was because of the danger
that is inside this sport,” he said. “It was a perfect
jump on a perfect day. It was a perfect landing,
only too much speed. She did what every athlete
of her level loves to do - she went so far. She
was the best Sarah Hendrickson ever. She was too
good.”
It was when she saw herself coasting high over the
hill’s 120-meter line that Hendrickson knew she
was in trouble. By the time she threw her arms out
to try to slow down, it was too late. When she fell,
anyone within earshot could hear her crying, “I
want Paolo, I want Paolo!” The first person to reach
her on the ground was a Dutch athlete who was training
on the small hill. He untwisted her leg, which was
still stuck to her ski. By the time Bernardi got
down from the coaches’ platform, Hendrickson had
stopped pleading for him and was saying, “I’m fine,
I’m fine - I don’t need to go to the hospital.”
On the backboard in the ambulance, she clapped her
hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut.
“I didn’t want to hear anything anybody was saying,”
she recalled. When, less than an hour later, a German
doctor hinted at how bad the damage was, she began
to sob. She says she cried for nearly all of the
four days it took to get back to Park City.
Within a week, her knee was operated on by Dr. Andrew
Cooper at Salt Lake Medical Center, and she began
the slow process of recovery. The day after Labor
Day, she was at the Center of Excellence, howling
in pain as physiotherapists began the two-week course
of getting her to straighten her leg. By then her
weight had dropped to 89 pounds. A team had been
corralled to address Hendrickson’s rehab, including
Cooper, Bernardi and Alborn, the U.S.S.A. strength
coach, two physiotherapists, the U.S. Ski Team’s
media director and the nutritionist and the cook
at the Center for Excellence.
Hendrickson’s biggest obstacle now, she said, is
strength. “I really need to work on eating enough,
even if, because I am not as active, my mind is
kind of like, ‘Well, you don’t need food,’ or, ‘I’m
not hungry.’ So that’s one of my battles - I just
have to eat.”
For the first six weeks, a physiotherapist brought
Hendrickson a smoothie every day at 3 p.m. “And
I don’t know what gets put in these smoothies,”
she said, laughing. “Because if I made them, they’d
probably have half the calories.”
Hendrickson told me that her mother suggested that
the injury might be a strange sort of blessing,
absolving her from the pre-Olympic media storm and
allowing her to focus on her physical and mental
health. She sheepishly described a new guilty pleasure:
going to the coffee shop near her house to read
Harry Potter books. Hendrickson did attend a media
summit in October in her brace, where she was stunned
by the widespread assumption that she was out for
the season. “I am like: ‘Are you kidding me? I blew
out my knee five weeks ago! I would not be here
right now if I was giving up.’ ” (Jerome described
it as a demanding day for Hendrickson. “She was
being wheeled around in a wheelchair, and the main
reason all these people are talking to her is because
if she does make the Olympics, they want that really
great back story. It must have put a lot more stress
on her.”)
As Hendrickson made tea, she told me that Van has
been there through her rehabilitation - visiting,
texting, helping with her physiotherapy. “She was
the first person to reach out and come over after
my surgery,” Hendrickson said. “I was screaming
in pain. Every time I’d get pain, I would tense
up my foot, and I would get cramps. And she was
like, ‘Sarah, relax your foot.’ And she was massaging
it for me.”
Van believes Hendrickson’s injury will ultimately
make her a better jumper. “Sarah was an athlete
who was up here all the time,” she said, raising
her hand over her head. “But the farther you go
down, the harder it is, then the more you learn
about what you can take and why you’re doing the
sport. You are alone, and nothing is fun, but when
you get out of it, you see it was worth it.”
Hendrickson has begun practicing in-run positioning
again, her feet flat on the floor, her torso flush
against the tops of her thighs. Her rehab team is
engaging in some techniques that her surgeon calls
“possible voodoo - but you never know,” including
an esoteric Japanese technique of employing tight
tourniquets to direct blood flow. Bernardi has set
her red line around mid-January. If she can jump
well by then - and the U.S. Olympic Committee and
the U.S. Ski Team agrees to Bernardi and Alborn
using their discretion, rather than qualifying points,
to select the team - she will make it to the Olympics.
Meanwhile, two others, Nina Lussi and Nita Englund,
are now touring the circuit in hopes of qualifying.
Hendrickson said she tried to tell herself that
her injury happened for a reason, “and that maybe
the reason is to give somebody else a chance.” Her
phone buzzed. It was a text from Lindsey Van.
