On Tuesday, Jan. 28, West Vancouver native Maëlle Ricker saw something that no one would want to see, least of all someone who was less than three weeks away from a competition in which she would be attempting to defend an Olympic gold medal.
She had stuck around Aspen, Colo., following the 2014 X-Games and was training on the snowboard cross course with members of the Canadian and American teams. Riding a section of course that she had encountered dozens of times, Ricker picked up a bit too much speed and went “backseat” on a jump, her board sliding in front of her causing her to land too far down the slope. This threw her timing off for the next jump.
“I came off the next one and got turned a bit upside down and did the exact opposite thing of what you’re supposed to do — I put my arm out to break the fall,” Ricker explained in a conference call with reporters eight days later. “It unfortunately broke me, not the fall.”
That’s when, with excruciating pain shooting through her body, Ricker looked down and saw it: her own radius bone, poking out of her skin in her left forearm. Everyone around her went into varying degrees of shock. Recalling the sight of it, Ricker lets off a disbelieving laugh.
“It was pretty crazy looking for sure.”
The laugh is what resonates the most. The more you get to know Maëlle Ricker, the more you realize that she doesn’t mind things being a little bit crazy. She might even like it. It all makes sense, then, that she’s one of the best athletes ever in a sport that sees four to six snowboarders flying down a mountain, side by side on a narrow track that contains obstacles such as rollers, step-ups, banked curves and massive jumps.
It’s kind of a crazy sport. And for Ricker, things just got a whole lot crazier.
• • •
By Tuesday evening Ricker was already undergoing surgery in Vail, an American doctor collaborating with her Canadian-based medical staff to remake her arm. Both her radius and ulna bones were broken. The smaller radius bone needed to be tucked back beneath her skin, and then both bones were fastened with plates and screws. There were eight screws in each, 16 in all, to piece the arm back together with two plates. The Sochi Olympic snowboard cross event was 19 days away.
Ricker famously won that same event in 2010 on Cypress Mountain, a hill just minutes away from the West Vancouver home she grew up in. Now at age 35, 2014 would possibly be her last shot at an Olympic podium and there she was in a hospital bed, broken.
At least, her bone was broken, but it seems her spirit was not. Anthony Findlay, owner of North Vancouver’s Level 10 Fitness and Ricker’s trainer for the past eight years, was there when the crash happened and went to visit her in hospital the next morning. It was 7 a.m., less than 12 hours after her surgery, and Ricker wanted to talk Sochi. Findlay resisted. “Let’s just think about getting you better,” he told her.
Ricker persisted, outlining all the steps she could take when they got back to the Lower Mainland to get the physiotherapy, the training, the protective equipment that she would need to get back on track for the Olympics.
“Already by then her eyes were wide open and she had that sparkle, that little zest that she has normally,” Findlay recalls. “She was already getting her mind around all the stuff that she needed to do in order to prep for this week before we left.”
Ricker’s first public pronouncement after the crash came in a press release two days later, and it was a cheeky joke about her desire to compete in Sochi and about the pain that she would feel in doing so. “My goal is to be ready for the start gate in Sochi but I’ll definitely hate pulling out of it!” was the quote.
When she spoke to reporters a week later she was still in a positive, joking mood. Ever competed with a broken bone? she was asked.
“Not this fresh,” she said. How about the doctors, physios and trainers you’ve been working with in an attempt to get back in shape for the Games? “We’ve been seeing a lot of each other. I’m sure they’re getting pretty sick of me right now.”
What about that dreaded starting gate — how are you going to pull out of there with a freshly broken arm? “I’m already able to simulate that action,” she said. “I’ve been working a lot with bungee cords already and even with some cable pulleys. Everything is really positive. I’d even say I’m surprised at what I’m able to do at this point.”
Everything is really positive? Really? Is this a mask to hide the pain, or is this what little five-foot-seven Maëlle Ricker, nicknamed Mighty Mouse, is all about? Findlay knows the answer.
“She’s one of the toughest athletes that I’ve ever had,” he said. “I’ve had pro football players that take epidurals to play a football game in the NFL, and Maëlle is right up there with the toughest of all of them.”
Every summer the members of the national snowboard team gather in North Vancouver to train, and one of the most gruelling exercises is a run up and down the massive flight of stairs behind the Save-On-Foods on Marine Drive. They call it Save-On-Stairs. One morning last summer the North Shore News sent a photographer out to get some shots of the painful process, and by the time he arrived at just after 8 a.m., Ricker was already done.
“It’s fun in a crazy way,” she said about the training, laughing again.
That’s the real Ricker, confirmed Findlay. “She enjoys things that are tough, like gruelling hikes. The hardest sessions that I’ve ever given, she kind of thrives off of that. Whereas other people curl up in a ball, her take on it is, ‘That was awesome.’ She can’t walk to the car after how intense the exercise was.”
This new challenge that his dedicated pupil has taken upon herself — competing in an Olympic Games with a devastating injury — is one more example of her over-the-top toughness.
“It’s so crazy. I look at the X-ray of her arm every day and I’m like, I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it,” Findlay said, adding that the injury would be “completely debilitating” for almost anyone else on the planet.
“She’s always managed to come back and be a star when people think she has no business still riding,” he said. If Ricker makes it all the way back to the top and wins Olympic gold again, it would be THE story of the Games, said Findlay. But even if she just gets out of the gate it’s still a marvel.
“It’s very inspiring to the other athletes. There’s hidden benefits to Maëlle going to the Olympics — she’s going to drive and pull and push everyone along . . . by being such an amazing example of determination and never, never, never quitting,” he said. “She’s special. This is going to be amazing.”
• • •
Ricker has faced Olympic pain before. She participated in the first ever Olympic snowboarding competition as a 19-year-old in 1998, placing fifth in halfpipe. Over the next few years her career was constantly interrupted by a string of knee injuries and surgeries, one of which forced her to miss the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. She was one of the best in the world in snowboard cross when the sport made its Olympic debut at the 2006 Games in Turin but her performance there was a forgettable one. Literally forgettable for Ricker — she made the final and was poised to win a medal but crashed hard in the middle of the course, suffering a concussion and torn muscles in her back and neck. She has no memory of the time from her crash until she awoke in a helicopter en route to hospital.
The 2010 Olympics looked like they actually might follow the same painful pattern. Ricker, a favourite to win gold again, fell during her first qualifying run and did not score the top-16 time needed to advance to the elimination rounds. Waiting on top of Cypress Mountain for the fog to clear before her second qualification run, Ricker fought through the fear of failure.
That tough time on the mountain turned into one of Ricker’s top-two most memorable moments of the 2010 Games. The other moment happened later that night after she became the first Canadian woman ever to win an Olympic championship on home soil.
“There’s the horrifying moment that I remember really strongly after that first qualifying run when I crashed, and then there’s the moment of walking into BC Place stadium for the medal ceremony,” said Ricker. “They’re sort of the two really big memories that stick with me, both equally powerful memories on opposite sides of the spectrum.”
Those memories came back to her during an interview she conducted with the North Shore News just four days before the crash in Aspen. She had just competed in the X-Games, finishing seventh after falling in her semifinal and winning the consolation final.
It was another event come and gone without a podium finish. Though she was still the reigning Olympic and World Champion — she finally won the worlds for the first time in 2013 — she had not hit the podium in the 2013-14 season. She was worried about her performance level.
“I’ve been in a bad pattern this year, I haven’t been able to do top-to-bottom runs without making some sort of mistake,” she said. “I have all the pieces of the puzzle, I just haven’t been able to actually put them together.” Four days later, her arm snapped.
Ricker may be the toughest woman on snow but she’s not impervious to pain. When asked if she was concerned about what would happen if she fell on her broken arm during an Olympic race, Ricker hesitated for a moment and then quickly pressed on without the normal wise crack.
“I haven’t thought about it — I’m thinking of staying on my feet,” she said. She can’t, however, pretend that the injury never happened.
“I’d be lying if I said it wouldn’t be in the back of my mind. I’m hoping that everything will go as a usual competition and that’s what I spend a lot of time visualizing and thinking about the race and technically what I’m doing on the board. Usually that overpowers any pain or anything else that’s going on.”
The biggest test will be getting out of those gates fast. If Ricker can’t get a strong pull — and really, who could with a freshly broken arm? — she’ll start every race at the back of the pack and have a perfectly valid reason for missing the podium.
But of course, that’s not the way Ricker thinks. That’s not how you become the best in the world. This broken arm could be the glue that holds the puzzle together for her, the push needed to get her back on the podium. That’s how Ricker sees it.
“It sounds crazy, but it’s helped me,” she said during the conference call. “This is almost like a burning fire of desire and it’s almost like somebody just doused a bunch of gasoline on the fire.”
That statement stirred up the reporters listening in. They had their money quote, one that perfectly illustrated the sheer audaciousness and irresistible passion of the athlete.
“I can feel the adrenalin, I can feel the excitement of going over to Russia,” she said. “I’m actually just going to use (this challenge) as a positive and use that as motivation to get me through these couple of weeks and hopefully have the race of my life.”
It was classic Maëlle Ricker. It was the voice of a champion.
