The Winter Olympics are a carnival of danger, a spectacle of speed and slick surfaces, powered mostly by the undefeated force of gravity.
Skiers hurtle themselves down mountains faster than cars drive on highways. Sliders ride high-speed sleds down a twisting chute of ice. Ski jumpers soar great distances through the air, and snowboarders and freestyle skiers flip and spin within the sky and hope for a protected landing.
The following wipeout all the time feels moments away.
The athletes who perform these daring feats usually are not crazy. They usually are not reckless. But they do have one thing in common that may surprise those of us who watch.
They’re scared. Every one among them.
“If you’re going as fast as we’re,” American downhill ski racer Breezy Johnson said, “anywhere on the course can turn into an injury trap, if not a death trap, really quick.”
In January, Johnson, a gold-medal favorite, was injured in a crash and announced that she was out of the Olympics.
The Latest York Times interviewed three dozen Winter Olympians and others with ties to probably the most extreme sports on the Games. We desired to dive deep on the mental side of danger.
The primary query: Does fear play a job in your sport?
John Branch, Latest York Times reporter The primary general query that we’ll start with is just
John Branch, Latest York Times reporter simply: Does fear play a job in your sport?
Lloyd Wallace, Aerials, Britain The short answer is yes.
Ryan Cochran-Siegle, Alpine skiing, United States Yeah, definitely.
Red Gerard, Snowboard (slopestyle, big air), United States Yeah.
Alice Merryweather, Alpine skiing, United States Absolutely.
Erik Arvidsson, Alpine skiing, United States Yes.
Shauna Rohbock, Bobsled, retired, United States Yeah, does the fear play a job in the game?
Leon Vockensperger, Snowboard (slopestyle, big air), Germany Oh, I can, I can inform you, it has an enormous role.
Brolin Mawejje, Snowboard slopestyle, Uganda I’d say fear plays an enormous role.
Jamie Anderson, Snowboard (slopestyle, big air), United States An enormous role.
Lloyd Wallace, Aerials, Britain Fear plays an enormous role in aerial skiing.
Faye Gulini, Snowboard cross, United States There’s a ton of risk, and there’s a ton of fear in
Faye Gulini, Snowboard cross, United States what we do.
Mark McMorris, Snowboard (slopestyle, big air), Canada Fear enters my mind on a day by day basis.
Logan Sankey, Ski jumping, United States Probably any ski jumper that told you they never
Logan Sankey, Ski jumping, United States experienced fear is lying.
Jacqueline Wiles, Alpine skiing, United States I feel they’re lying.
Shauna Rohbock, Bobsled, retired, United States You’re lying.
Casey Larson, Ski jumping, United States As an athlete, you’ve got to be really good at lying to yourself.
Brock Crouch, Snowboard slopestyle, United States Fear is something that everyone deals with.
Lloyd Wallace, Aerials, Britain The one common factor that everybody has to take care of.
Shaun White, Snowboard halfpipe, United States Yeah, it’s just something that we form of take care of on the day by day.
Michael Dammert, Snowboard head coach, Germany Well, it’s your best friend and your biggest enemy.
Fear is a posh and private topic. Ask athletes what scares them, and the answers cover a broad spectrum — the fear of missing the Olympics, of regret, of disappointing family and friends, of losing control of where their story goes or how their profession ends.
However the No. 1 answer is a fear that’s visceral, tangible and customary in these sports.
It’s the fear of getting hurt.
Winter Olympic athletes in probably the most extreme sports are inclined to fall into two categories: Those that have sustained serious injuries. And people who will.
There isn’t any good time to get hurt. But there may be a worse time. Alice Merryweather knows. Just one thing could keep Merryweather, one among the highest American ski racers, out of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. And on a quiet September morning within the Swiss Alps, it did.
It was nothing but a bobble, not unlike all of the others that ski racers encounter and get better from at high speeds. Merryweather frantically tried to regain her balance.
In a moment, she pitched forward, then flung back, her backside on her skis, still pointing downhill until one caught on the ice. Two bones snapped in her left leg. Ligaments ripped in her knee. She spun forward as her face scraped the coarse ice, leaving her bloodied. Gravity dragged her downhill until she slid to a heaping stop.
Merryweather has a video of her crash. Her boyfriend, Sam DuPratt, a ski racer recovering from two broken legs, avoided watching it until recently.
Alice Merryweather, Alpine skiing, United States Yeah, so that is the video of when
Alice Merryweather, Alpine skiing, United States I crashed in September.
I, like, almost, I almost had it.
If you see that, like, it happened so quickly, I can’t
remember the sensation of my leg breaking or anything like that.
It just explains why life moves so
slowly immediately and why I even have to undergo
multiple surgeries.
Merryweather’s face healed in the following months, but her leg — and maybe her psyche — has an extended option to go.
The ski season has gone on without her. Skiers have won races that may need been hers. As with the opposite athletes interviewed, Merryweather never feared the pain of injury. It was about heartbreak. It was the fear of missed opportunity.
The final word culmination of 4 years of labor — the Olympics — will occur without Merryweather, as she heals on the opposite side of the globe.
It’ll be nearly two years before she is on skis again.
So I’m in form of a limbo phase immediately of my recovery.
I’ve had two surgeries already.
Now I’m just waiting for my tibia to heal enough that
they’ll take the rod out of it.
Anywhere from five to 11 months from now,
I’ll have the ability to get that done after which it’s going to be one other
six to nine months, after which I’ll get back on
snow, start sliding around.
I’m afraid of all the uncertainty at this point.
I don’t understand how my body goes to heal.
I don’t understand how this leg goes to feel once I try
to challenge it again, even before putting it on snow.
The enjoyment that comes from going really
fast and arcing a very
beautiful turn is like nothing I’ve ever felt
in some other aspect of my life and that
outweighs the fear 10 times to at least one.
The fear of injury isn’t unique to Winter Olympians, in fact. It’s the one thing that worries every athlete.
Nevertheless it is different with the Winter Olympics, given the concentration of dangerous sports on unforgiving surfaces. Athletes must push themselves to the brink to actually have a probability on the Olympics. However the brink is an unforgiving place.
The risks usually are not theoretical. World-class snowboarders and freeskiers have been traumatically injured and have died from accidents within the halfpipe. Top skiers have died in bad crashes, including on the Olympics. On the sliding track — the raceway of luge, skeleton and bobsled — a luge athlete, Nodar Kumaritashvili, was killed on the eve of the 2010 Vancouver Games.
Peter Parks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“I get emotional about it even today,” said Bill Schuffenhauer, a 2002 silver medalist in four-man bobsled who competed in those Vancouver Games. He remembers the heightened levels of fear for the sliding athletes who, just days after the crash, needed to compete on that track.
Bill Schuffenhauer, Bobsled, retired, United States Having the Georgian athlete die, we still needed to go
compete after that guy, you already know.
And, you already know, rest his soul, but
I assure you, every skeleton,
luge and bobsled athlete literally had
an enormous fear instilled in them when that
situation happened.
Because if we desired to compete, we still needed to go down
that very same exact track that this guy just lost his life on.
Danger ratchets up each Olympic cycle. The tricks are greater, the speeds are faster, the competition is best.
Some sports are imposing limits. The halfpipe grew to 22 feet and stopped, with no discussion of anything greater. Ski courses and sliding tracks appear to have established plateaus for top speeds. The scale of ski jumps are standard.
No sport, though, has capped the danger quite like aerials. Athletes fling themselves nearly straight up within the air to perform twists and somersaults. They land so hard that they often cough up blood.
The game limits the variety of flips to 3. And aerialists, as daring and as fearful as some other Winter Olympians, are relieved by that.
We’re hitting a limit. Aerials has been increasing in its
difficulty since Day 1.
Lloyd Wallace, Aerials, Britain So we’ve got three different sizes of jump.
Lloyd Wallace, Aerials, Britain There’s the only kicker.
Then the double kicker.
After which the triple kicker is 4 meters high, and that’s
where the vast majority of aerialists compete on.
And also you do triple somersaults.
There’s been limitations put in, and so they’ve
been stretched to the max.
You learn to crash in aerials.
Not landing in your feet and landing in your face, that
can feel such as you’ve been hit by a automobile.
And landing in your back without your skis
touching, it just seems like you’ve been folded like a suitcase.
In case you land in your back, you then never know you would possibly
cough up a little bit of blood in your lungs.
It’s too dangerous to do 4 flips.
Laura Peel, Aerials, Australia It’s banned since it’s said to be too dangerous.
Nicolas Gygax, Aerials, Switzerland Truthfully, I’m really glad that there may be this rule.
Nicolas Gygax, Aerials, Switzerland I don’t need to do 4 flips. Three is enough.
We already go 15 meters into the air and we already
are available in 65 to 70 kilometers per hour.
You’d need loads more speed again and also you’re
going to launch yourself even higher.
I don’t think there’s anybody on the market who’s really
desperate in the meanwhile so as to add an additional flip.
I feel that’s form of all the way down to, all the way down to, yeah, people’s
general self-preservation and I suppose the fear of injury.
Across most of the events, fear of injury is the invisible weight on athletes, a what-if dread that they can not fully escape. It causes sleepless nights. It fuels hours of preparation. It stirs an I-might-throw-up panic in the beginning gate.
“There have been times that races have been canceled, and I’ve been relieved, 100%,” American ski racer Erik Arvidsson said. “Because I used to be scared as hell, and I needed one other day to collect myself.”
Even the world’s top male skier this season isn’t immune.
“You get form of an ache in your legs, your knees, and you are feeling such as you lose control over your body,” Aleksander Aamodt Kilde of Norway said. “You may feel it instantly while you’re pushing out initially. You wish to push 100%, but then your mind kicks in and holds you back, and you possibly can only push out, like, 85 percent, 90 percent. After which you already know something is improper.”
Michael Dammert is the German freestyle snowboard coach and has a master’s degree in sports psychology. He called fear “your best friend and your biggest enemy.”
Dammert considers fear a basic survival instinct.
“It goes into the old areas of the brain — really within the amygdala, within the deepest layers of the brain,” he said. “That’s also why it’s so hard to regulate.”
He explained that fear causes the fight or flight response — or it freezes people.
All those reactions are good signs, in a way. Fear might limit the highest athletes, nevertheless it also might save them.
“It’s too fast for you to not have that voice in your head saying, ‘We’re going too fast, and if we hit a tree, we’re going to die,’” Johnson, the ski racer, said. “That fear is instinctive. It’s put in your brain for a reason.”
John Branch, Latest York Times reporter Because you all have fear to a point,
John Branch, Latest York Times reporter in what ways is that a great thing?
Brolin Mawejje, Snowboard slopestyle, Uganda That is it.
Brolin Mawejje, Snowboard slopestyle, Uganda Either you undergo it, otherwise you let that fear crumble you.
River Radamus, Alpine skiing, United States Fear keeps you sharp.
Anna Gasser, Snowboard (slopestyle, big air), Austria It makes you focus.
Nicolas Gygax, Aerials, Switzerland Focus.
Lloyd Wallace, Aerials, Britain I feel it focuses you.
J.R. Celski, Short-track speedskating, retired, United States It gives you perhaps slightly bit more adrenaline.
Mike Jankowski, Ski and snowboard teams head coach, United States Adrenaline. There’s endorphins.
Mike Jankowski, Ski and snowboard teams head coach, United States That’s power.
Michael Dammert, Snowboard head coach, Germany It’s a basic instinct.
Steven Nyman, Alpine skiing, United States Fear is a warning sign.
Jamie Anderson, Snowboard (slopestyle, big air), United States That’s what keeps us more protected and, like, on the sting of a cliff.
Anna Gasser, Snowboard (slopestyle, big air), Austria That’s perhaps when it is best to stop or, like, go a step back.
Leon Vockensperger, Snowboard (slopestyle, big air), Germany Dude, like, it’s all right to have, like, a nasty day.
Steven Nyman, Alpine skiing, United States A few of these younger guys are, like, “I’m just going to
Steven Nyman, Alpine skiing, United States send it.”
Ryan Cochran-Siegle, Alpine skiing, United States Send it.
Jamie Anderson, Snowboard (slopestyle, big air), United States Send it
Michael Dammert, Snowboard head coach, Germany Send it.
Brock Crouch, Snowboard slopestyle, United States Absolutely sending it.
Leon Vockensperger, Snowboard (slopestyle, big air), Germany I don’t need to send it, but everybody else is doing it, so
Leon Vockensperger, Snowboard (slopestyle, big air), Germany I probably should do too.
Jacqueline Wiles, Alpine skiing, United States Which may be very dangerous.
André Höflich, Snowboard halfpipe, Germany If we didn’t have fear, we’d all be dead by now.
To succeed in the Olympics means not only having more talent than most others on the earth, but additionally being more daring. It’s taking risks, thoughtfully.
Fear, the athletes said, is a balance. An excessive amount of will be debilitating. Too little will be worse.
“Fear,” halfpipe snowboarder André Höflich said, “is what keeps us alive ultimately.”