Crash landing
FOUR MONTHS AGO LLOYD WALLACE WAS IN A COMA — NOW AERIAL SKIER IS BACK WITH A …
IF EVER a crash landing can feel OK, it was probably this one. Yesterday, as Lloyd Wallace bounced through the snow on his back in China, it will not have been lost on him that he was lucky to be there at all.
He has ambitions to qualify for the aerial skiing at the Winter Olympics in February and his tumble in the World Cup event three hours’ drive north of Beijing was less than ideal.
But given where he was four months earlier, namely in a coma after an altogether more serious crash, being back in competition is enough for now.
In fact, it is simply remarkable, a fact underlined by him having zero recollection of what happened on August 17.
All he can say is he woke up one day and was told there had been an ‘accident’ in training.
The rest has been reconstructed for the 22-year-old by those who were there in Mettmenstetten, Switzerland, watching on as he continued his preparations for Pyeongchang 2018.
‘They’ve had to piece it together for me, bit by bit,’ Wallace (right) told Sportsmail before flying out to China for his return to the World Cup circuit, where he finished 19th in his first run on Saturday and last after crashing yesterday.
‘From what I’ve been told, I am pretty lucky, and not just in the sense I am able to compete again. Very lucky, actually.’
The onlookers four months ago saw him go down the ramp just fine, getting up to around 60kph as he hit the transition between the downslope and upslope. So far so good — just another training day for the 2015 world junior bronze medallist.
‘Then I caught an “edge”,’ he said. ‘So simple.’ And yet so devastating if you’re an aerial skier, those masters of flight who launch off runways to a height of 50m, flipping and twisting as they go. In competition, they land on snow; during summer training, they land in water.
Wallace’s hope that Thursday was to pull off a triple twist, triple back flip. Except that ‘edge’ — when the edge of a ski snags on the slope — killed his speed and balance at the worst point of the jump. ‘This was a bad one at a bad time,’ Wallace said. ‘Balance gone. From what I’ve been told, I carried on up the slope, my hips hit the slope and my head banged off the edge of the kicker (the end of the slope where you jump into the air). My helmet was split in half and I was unconscious on impact. ‘From there, they say I flew off the ramp and landed in the water and I was lucky because the Ukrainian and Belarussian team doctors were there and jumped in as soon as they saw me hit. I was taken by helicopter to the hospital in Zurich and put in an induced coma.’ He was kept in a coma for 24 hours and stayed in hospital for a further week. ‘I have no recollection at all,’ Wallace said. ‘ I have no memory of anything in my life from the day before until a few days later, when they woke me up and my dad was in the room. ‘I can’t even remember having dinner the night before. It is all just gone. A lot of people were very worried but I have no idea what happened other than what I was told. And I think that’s a good thing.’
His recovery has been quite extraordinary, particularly in light of the fact that on October 18, about two months after the accident, he was back training on the snow. If all goes to plan, he will finish in the top 25 on the World Cup circuit and qualify for the Winter Olympics in South Korea, so in that context Saturday’s 19th place was encouraging.
‘From a medical point of view, I am OK now,’ Wallace said. ‘I wouldn’t be risking anything if I wasn’t. I had a very bad concussion but of the things I might have had, I have been lucky that it wasn’t worse.
‘The doctors are happy and now I know what I want to do. It feels great to be upside down again. It was important to get back on the horse, to not build the injury into something in my mind. For that, I have been helped by not knowing the details. I can’t have a flashback if I have no memory. Now it is about the Olympics and seeing what I can do if I get there.
‘I’m not going to say I have medal aims, but if I get through to the final, who knows?’
That fact he was back yesterday, competing and tumbling, is testament to that.