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For competition in high-speed sports activities, crashes are an inevitable menace, but many elite athletes say it may be tricky to get again on their motorcycles—or skis—even supposing their frame heals. Some by no means get better.
In alpine snowboarding, there has rarely been a Global Cup race this iciness and not using a helicopter commencing for the medical institution.
American Mikaela Shiffrin suffered a perforated pelvis impaling herself as she crashed in an enormous slalom in Vermont in November, Czech Tereza Nova used to be positioned in a man-made coma after crashing in downhill coaching at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany in January and Frenchman Cyprien Sarrazin suffered a critical concussion in coaching in December in Bormio, Italy.
Such crashes are continuously adopted by way of a protracted rebuilding procedure, no longer handiest of the frame but additionally of the psyche.
“When you crash at 130 kilometers an hour (81 mph), it leaves traces in your head. It would just be lying to yourself to say that everything is fine,” French skier Alexis Pinturault, the double blended global champion, advised AFP on January 22.
Two days later, he fell within the Tremendous-G, fracturing a bone in his proper knee. His season, and even perhaps his profession, used to be over.
Remaining season he ruptured a ligament in his left knee in Wengen.
‘My frame mentioned no’
When he were given again on his skis, he felt that one thing used to be unsuitable—he felt afraid.
“When it got here to taking extra dangers, one thing in my head used to be conserving me again. My frame mentioned no.
“We have to relearn that everything is under control, that we can cope. Obviously, it takes time.”
The message is repeated in different high-risk sports activities.
Belgian bike owner Steff Cras additionally wanted time to come back again after a multi-rider crash final April at the Excursion of the Basque Nation which additionally sidelined stars Remco Evenepoel and Jonas Vingegaard with damaged bones and different accidents.
Cras mentioned he narrowly neglected a concrete block at greater than 60 kph.
“Another 20 centimeters (eight inches) and I was dead,” he advised AFP.
He broke ribs and vertebrae, suffered a collapsed lung and may no longer breathe for 30 seconds.
Lower than 4 months later, he completed sixteenth within the Excursion de France, however that effort got here at a value.
“I pushed my body too much and I paid for it. I developed shingles,” he mentioned.
“The head, strangely, was fine. On the other hand, I was scarred by another crash when I hit a spectator in the Tour de France,” in 2023.
“Afterwards, mentally, I was dead. I was afraid to ride in the peloton with spectators along the road. I still think about it today.”
Cras noticed a psychologist.
“The simple fact of dissecting the traumatic event can, sometimes, be enough,” mentioned Cecilia Delage, a French sports activities psychologist who has labored with Olympic moguls snowboarding champion, Perrine Laffont.
However more often than not, this “post-traumatic stress” calls for extra in-depth mental paintings “so that the fear of hurting oneself again does not prevail over the desire to perform”.
Racers can battle to apply two competing impulses on the similar time.
‘Phantom data’
“We end up with athletes who launch themselves into a descent at full speed on the brakes,” Laffont mentioned.
“Like when you drive a car on snow. If you master driving without using the brakes, you will arrive safely. If, on the other hand, you put on the brakes because you’re afraid, you’ll go flying into the scenery.”
A number of ways exist to regard concern.
“When there is trauma, it means that there is phantom information in the brain that can distort decisions. At 100 kmh it quickly becomes very dangerous. We have to neutralize this ghost,” mentioned Fabien Deloche, a French psychological trainer who works with skilled skiers and cyclists.
The purpose isn’t to get rid of concern however to turn out to be it.
“If you disconnect fear, you disconnect prevention. So you have to reshape it and use it to increase your focus and connection to yourself,” mentioned Deloche.
Many athletes use hypnosis. Pinturault opted for vegetotherapy, which goals to inspire repressed feelings to floor bodily, and meditation.
“The goal is to ‘resynchronise’ the body with the brain to regain control over the trauma,” he mentioned.
Delage mentioned it will be significant to “understand the relationship that the person has to fear, risk and therefore death”.
‘Worry of demise’
She mentioned the roots can return to early life and even the instant of delivery “which may have gone badly”.
“I had a case the place the athlete used to be very frightened of head trauma and did not perceive why. After half-a-dozen classes, he had a flash. He remembered that, as a kid, he had hit his head on a rock within the sea and noticed himself die.
“It was a memory he had completely forgotten. The practice of sport reactivated his fear of dying.”
After the basis of the worry is recognized and handled, psychological preparation can start.
The Spanish rider Enric Mas turned into petrified after 3 falls in shut succession. He controlled to “get out of the hole” with the assistance of a psychologist and a consultant downhill trainer who made him descend mountain passes in Andorra for an entire summer season.
From time to time, treatment does no longer paintings.
Antoine Deneriaz, Olympic downhill champion in 2006, by no means recovered from a crash in Are, Sweden, simply 3 weeks later.
When he aroused from sleep within the medical institution, he used to be “very scared”. That used to be the start of his ordeal.
He raced “with the handbrake on” and felt “permanent stress” that now and again made him “cry in the middle of a meal.”
“At the end of my tether,” he ended his profession a 12 months later.
Pierre Latour, a 31-year-old French bike owner, is considering quitting announcing he has been “scared to death” on descents since a heavy crash in 2019.
He has attempted the whole thing: psychologist, hypnotist, psychological instructor, Eye Motion Desensitization and Reprocessing, downhill trainer, or even a healer. Not anything is helping.
“It feels good for a while but at the slightest upset, everything explodes in my head, like an alcoholic touching a drink,” he advised French day by day Le Parisien in 2023.
Deloche mentioned each case is other.
“Some people can perfectly accept the risk. Others decide they can’t take the stress anymore. It’s eating them up. They say to themselves: ‘I came here to have fun with my friends, and now I find myself crapping my pants every day. I’m sick and tired of playing the good guy’, and they stop.”
The psychological injury turns into “like a fracture that won’t heal, that mends as best it can and bothers you for life,” mentioned Delage.
‘Self-sabotage’
Some withstand mental remedy, Delage mentioned. “When he considers that we are treading on too slippery a flooring, that is going to dissatisfied him an excessive amount of, and he shuts the whole thing down, as a mental protection mechanism.
“By exploring the accident, we realize that there may be self-sabotage. I had a cyclist whose fear was not so much of hurting himself as of being yelled at by his father. To have his head ripped off by his old man asking: ‘Have you been an idiot again?’ The trauma is not always what we think it is.”
In motorsport too, velocity and threat are a part of the drivers’ day by day lifestyles.
“We have been aware of the danger since we were very young,” mentioned Australian Method One motive force Daniel Ricciardo.
“But,” he added, “our sport has also become much safer over the years.”
The advent of the halo, a bar above the motive force’s head, stored French motive force Romain Grosjean in 2020 when his automotive crashed into a security barrier earlier than catching fireplace.
In a automotive, “we are in a security cell”, French rally motive force Adrien Fourmaux advised AFP.
A early life mountain motorbike fanatic since early life, he selected rallying as it used to be “less dangerous”.
Impressed by way of the revel in of motor sports activities, snowboarding and biking are desirous about strengthen the protection of athletes and set in movement a virtuous dynamic: fewer falls, fewer accidents and no more concern.
© 2025 AFP
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