COLORADO BALLET SEASON OPENER A REBIRTH OF SORTS
Company’s season-opener features 38-year-old, back from potential career-ending injury
When Yosvani Ramos steps onto the stage on the opening night of the Colorado Ballet’s production of “Dracula,” he won’t be rising from the dead. But in coming back from a potentially career-ending injury, it may seem that way to him.
Last November, Ramos, a principal dancer, was rehearsing the grand pas de deux for the “Nutcracker” in a studio at the Colorado Ballet’s Armstrong Dancer Center in Denver. He did a small jump. When his right foot hit the floor, it did not hold, and he collapsed.
“I grabbed my foot and knew straight away. ‘Oh, my God, I tore my Achilles tendon,’ ” Ramos said. “I started to cry. It didn’t hurt, but I thought, ‘This is the end of my career.’ ”
At 38, Ramos was already at the point when something was going to force him to stop dancing. The work can be punishing, and the incidents of injuries are high. Professional dance companies, according to medical studies, have reported that between 67 percent and 95 percent of their dancers are injured on an annual basis. Most male dancers are done by 40.
Over the course of his long career, Ramos knew about injuries. He had left his native Cuba as a teenager in 1997 and gone to Paris, where he danced with the Jeune Ballet de France and Ballet de l’Opéra national de Paris. He then traveled to Great Britain, where he joined the English National Ballet and became a principal dancer.
In 2008, Ramos moved to the Australian Ballet in Sydney, performing as a principal dancer for five years before coming to the United States. He danced one season with the Cincinnati Ballet before arriving in Denver three seasons ago.
“I’ve come back from injuries,” Ramos said. “I know how to do it, but I’d never
had anything to this extent.”
Immediately after the injury, Ramos’ fellow dancers carried him to the physical therapy room. Dr. Joshua Metzl, an orthopedic surgeon with the UCHealth Steadman Hawkins ClinicDenver, was called.
The ballet’s therapist relayed the specifics to Metzl, whose over-thephone diagnosis was that Ramos had, indeed, ruptured his tendon — and that he would be fine.
“By then, I knew it was going to be OK, but in the back of your head you feel it is going to be a long, hard process,” Ramos said.
Metzl told him he’d likely be ready for the vampire.
The key was a less invasive surgical technique to repair the tendon, which runs down the back of the foot and under the heel, said Metzl, who has attended to the Colorado Ballet’s dancers as well as being an assistant team physician for the Denver Broncos and Colorado Rockies.
A decade ago, a ruptured Achilles tendon would be repaired by opening the area for surgery.
“The real downside was wound complications,” Metzl said. “It took longer to heal and recover. There was more discomfort and swelling.”
The move to less-invasive surgery initially had a trade-off, with a potentially weaker repair.
But in the last two years, new techniques have combined minimal invasiveness and a stronger repair, Met- zl said. In Ramos’ case, rather than just sewing tendon to tendon, Metzl was able to secure the tendon to the calcaneus (heel bone) with screws.
“That gives tremendous strength to the repair,” he said. “Achilles tendon ruptures can occur in high-level athletes or dancers like Yosvani, and it can happen to weekend warriors.”
And it appears that it may become more common with age. While the injury is rare among college athletes, it crops up more frequently with professional football and baseball players — and dancers, Metzl said.
A week after the accident, on Nov. 14, 2016, Ramos had surgery. His foot was in a cast for just two weeks. Then it was placed in a boot. It was time to get up, walk and start rehabilitation.
Ramos attended rehabilitation sessions twice a week at the Steadman Hawkins clinic and worked on his own at the gym five days a week. As the work got harder, rehab arrived every other day.
“At the beginning, I couldn’t even go up and down stairs, and you wonder, ‘How am I ever going to dance?’ ” Ramos said.
In March, Ramos was given the go-ahead to return to the studio for light ballet work.
By late August, Ramos was back in a studio of the Armstrong Center rehearsing a pas de deux — not with the Sugar Plum Fairy, but with the evil Prince of Darkness. Ramos was dancing the role of Jonathan Harker, who is stalked and trapped by Dracula (in this case, principal dancer Domenico Luciano).
Ballet mistress Lorita Travaglia put the two men through their paces, and at one point, as Luciano seized his prey, Ramos spun and leaped, landing on his right foot, firm and solid.
Still when asked if he was completely back, Ramos hesitated. “I would say 90 percent of what I used to be. Maybe that’s a lot of fear,” he said. That last 10 percent, he said, will come when he is back on stage.