Sport nearly crippled me, says gold medal victor Williams
AN OLYMPIC gold medallist has revealed how sport left her body so broken, she moved out of a four-storey townhouse and into a bungalow so she did not have to climb the stairs.
In 2010, Amy Williams won Britain’s first solo Winter Olympics gold medal for 30 years with victory in the women’s skeleton at the Vancouver games, but has been “living with pain every single day” since a crash in 2002.
Such was the difficulty climbing and descending the stairs in her Bath townhouse, Williams opted to move to a knee-friendly bungalow nearby on the advice of another athlete. “I just brush over the pain, because every single day I am in pain. It’s a part of my life,” the 36-year-old told The Daily Telegraph.
The skeleton is where athletes lie face down on an ultra-light sled, and hurl themselves round an icy, curvy course at speeds of more than 90mph.
In 2002, she suffered a slipped disc after a crash and the effects are still with her today.
“I had back pain for my whole career, but only my close team really knew [the extent]. My physios would be working on it just trying to get me through the next race,” she said.
Recently, another slipped disc has caused her to be “plagued with headaches and migraines”, but the worst problems have been with her knees.
“I have lifted weights since I was 14 or 15, so to a degree it’s wear and tear, but I have had a lot of operations. My big injury came the week after I retired in 2012. I was trying a new cycling machine and I snapped and busted everything from my ACL to my cruciate.
“I sold my house because I had too many stairs. It simply hurt too much.”
She and husband Craig decided life would be much easier in a bungalow.
After a long day looking after son Oscar, one, it still hurts to get up off the sofa, but Williams concedes: “My medal is still worth the pain.”