YANQING, China — Sofia Goggia bent over on the leg that wouldn’t bend, and here, across the finish line that seemed uncrossable, she exploded.
She saw a green light, evidence of an Olympic lead, and her brain went racing — back through three hellish weeks, to the Jan. 23 crash that ripped up her left knee and fractured her fibula, and seemingly shattered her dreams.
On Tuesday, 23 days later, she crossed a downhill finish line in first place, and unleashed a primal scream.
She unleashed joy and pain and disbelief. Last month in Cortina, Italy, on her favorite downhill slope, her skis had split. At 58 miles per hour, she’d popped into the air, and flipped head over heels onto icy show. She partially tore her ACL, and sustained a minor fracture of her fibula, and the Beijing Games, to any sane mortal, seemed gone.
Goggia’s mere presence here, to U.S. skier Mikaela Shiffrin, felt “a little bit impossible.”
That she skied to a silver medal, Shiffrin said, was “unbelievable.”
But to Goggia’s Italian teammates, it was unsurprising.
“She’s a strong woman,” bronze medalist Nadia Delago said.
And at any point, as she prepared to race on her bum left leg, was she afraid?
“No,” she said as she pressed her lips and nonchalantly shook her head. “No. No, I wasn’t scared.”
“There’s no such thing as fear,” she once said. “It is just a mental projection of a situation that could end up going a certain way. On one hand it could be a limitation: it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if you view it as an opportunity, it becomes something that makes you stronger.”
A career full of crashes
Alpine skiing’s unbreakable woman grew up in northern Italy, and at age 9, on a basic questionnaire, she scribbled her dream: “To win the Olympic downhill.” At age 25, she realized it in PyeongChang, and four years later, she was speeding toward a double. She entered 2022 as the sport’s most dominant force. She’d won seven consecutive World Cup downhills, and some by eye-popping margins.
In mid-January, I scheduled an interview with Goggia to talk about this journey. About the dominance, yes, and 2022 Games, but more so about all she’d overcome along the way. Because the list, even by ski racing standards, is lengthy.
As a teenager, she tore multiple knee ligaments. In 2012, she strained some more. She fractured her tibial plateau during a Europa Cup race. In 2013, two months before the Sochi Olympics, she tore up her left knee again — cruciate ligament, meniscus. She went to the Games as a TV commentator. She arrived at the airport in a wheelchair. Her body and heart were broken.
She returned to competition only to suffer another injury. She underwent surgery. She returned the following season, but more knee problems forced her to cut it short. She’d been asked, and still gets asked, why she persists through the pain, and she understands the question.
But for her, “there is such a sensation” on a ski slope. “So much adrenaline, you feel so alive, that that moment makes it all worthwhile.”
She stayed relatively healthy heading to the 2018 Olympics, and won gold. Then bad luck began to strike anew. She fractured her ankle that October. A little over a year later, she suffered a compound fracture of her left arm. And a year after that, a compound fracture of the lateral tibial plateau in a freak accident, while leisurely skiing down a mountain after a World Cup race had been postponed.
But she still won the season-long downhill title. She reacquainted herself with snow in July, and with podiums in the fall. She was, in mid-January, as heavy a favorite as Alpine skiing allows, and I found her backstory remarkable. The interview was scheduled for Jan. 17.
On Jan. 15, she spun out of World Cup downhill in Austria and crashed into red netting. The following weekend in Italy, she partially tore the ACL, and cracked the fibula, and the interview, obviously, never happened. She wasn’t sure her Olympic gold medal defense would, either.
Ditching the crutches
“Leaving it,” Goggia said, “after [the crash in] Cortina, would have been so easy.”
But the Olympics, she’d long felt, “are everything.” So after three days, she ditched crutches. “With one day of crutches, you lose one week of training,” she said. The injury needed time, but “time,” she later wrote, “is what I don’t have.”
She was racing against it. She attacked pool workouts and gym rehab, far sooner than most doctors would have recommended. She cried along the way as she shoved aside fear and crowded out doubts.
She arrived in China unsure what she’d be capable of. She walked with a limp. She struggled in super-G training, and pulled out of last Friday’s race. When she completed her first downhill training run, she lifted her poles aloft in celebration. Breathing heavily, she clutched her globes to her chest, and smiled, and looked around. Emotions overwhelmed her. “It’s already a success that I’m here,” she said.
But she hadn’t endured unimaginable pain to simply show up. She wanted to compete. On Monday, she pushed a little harder in training. She could barely squat or bend her knee. Her physical fitness, she said, was a 5.5 out of 10.
But on Tuesday, she popped some painkillers, and climbed to the start gate, and cleared every thought from her mind except one.
“I’m here. Let’s play.”
She couldn’t “charge” like she wanted to, and couldn’t move like she used to. She winced on one big turn, and again later, when she lifted her herself out of a chair.
But she picked up speed and roared into first place. Switzerland’s Corinne Suter eventually bested her, and naturally, she felt disappointment. She knew she could’ve gone faster, much faster, with even just 80% of her strength. She also felt “some wind against me.”
But she’d just won an Olympic medal on a decimated knee, a medal that “maybe 2% of the people here” believed she could win. She lifted her arms skyward. Her teammates and coaches lifted her into the air.
“If in the last days someone told me, ‘You’re going to achieve a silver medal,’ I would have cried,” she said. “I’m really happy.”