Postscript Appended
First there was the struggle to make women's ski jumping an Olympic sport. Now the American team just wants to win.
Martin Schoeller for The New York Times
Lindsey Van in a training jump at the Utah Olympic Park in June.
Martin Schoeller for The New York Times
Clockwise from left: Sarah Hendrickson, Abby Hughes, Lindsey Van, Jessica Jerome, and Alissa Johnson
Martin Schoeller for The New York Times
Jessica Jerome and Alan Alborn, the head program and development coach, training in Park City.
Martin Schoeller for The New York Times
Ski-jumping Olympic hopefuls, from left: Alissa Johnson, Jessica Jerome, Lindsey Van, Abby Hughes and Sarah Hendrickson.
Martin Schoeller for The New York Times
Sarah Hendrickson in front of the K-90 and K-120 hills in June.
Martin Schoeller for The New York Times
Martin Schoeller for The New York Times
Martin Schoeller for The New York Times
Sarah Hendrickson during a training jump in June.
Martin Schoeller for The New York Times
Martin Schoeller for The New York Times
By MIREILLE SILCOFF
Photographs by MARTIN SCHOELLER
November 22, 2013
In her apartment in Park City, Utah, overlooking mountains already peaked with snow, Sarah Hendrickson tries not to obsessively replay the moment, two months earlier, that turned her life into a cliffhanger. At 19, Hendrickson is the current women's ski-jumping world champion and arguably the best female ski jumper ever. On Aug. 21, she set yet another hill record, at Oberstdorf, Germany, or would have, but for her crash landing.
As Hendrickson limped to get her phone so she could show me the video of the jump, she paused to look down at her loose pajama pants and baggy cardigan and apologized for her appearance. "At least I'm still wearing Nike," she said, sheepishly pointing to the T-shirt under her sweater. "They're still one of my sponsors, right?"
She carefully eased herself back onto the sofa and told me to press play on her phone. "I don't have to leave the room or anything, but I can't watch," she said. This was a training jump — she didn't need to take it — but the day was cold and clear with a light head wind, ideal for ski jumping. The new, state-of-the-art German jump was said to feel a lot like the one recently built for the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and she had been jumping phenomenally well on it for days. On the screen, a tiny figure in a shiny blue suit soars under the sun, her skis in perfect V formation. "Sarah's too-incredible jump," as the team's head coach, Paolo Bernardi, calls it, was 148 meters, about the length of one and a half football fields. On the couch next to me, Hendrickson clutched her cardigan sleeves, yawning loudly to miss the horrible clatter of her 94-pound body landing at more than 70 miles an hour on the ground where the jump hill flattens, the area that means you've gone too far.
Hendrickson's surgeon calls her knee injury "the terrible triad, plus one": the A.C.L. ruptured completely, the M.C.L. pulled right off the tibia and severe damage was done to both the lateral and medial meniscus. It would take most athletes at least 12 months to recover from this kind of knee damage, but the Olympics in Sochi were less than six months away. Hendrickson said her doctor, who in August cut out part of her hamstring to repair part of her knee, told her not to give up hope.
"People are like, 'Well, you're so young, you'll have other Olympics,' " she said, adjusting a ponytail of dark curls on top of her head, her dark brows knit. "And it's like: 'No, you just don't understand. For women's ski jumping this is the year to compete.' " What she means is that this is the first Olympics in which women will be allowed to jump. It has been a decade-long fight to get women's ski jumping into the Olympics — it was one of the last restricted winter sports — and Hendrickson's outsize talent, a natural ability honed since age 7 that far surpasses that of most male jumpers, was like a banner to parade at the opening ceremony. You said we can't? Well, look at this.
Before the crash, Bernardi, a men's coach in his native Italy who joined the U.S. women's ski-jumping team in 2011, called Hendrickson "totally unbeatable." He first heard about Hendrickson when she was still a 60-pounder in the development clubs of Park City, and he is the figure most associated with her success. It's hard to find a Eurosport video of one of Hendrickson's winning jumps that doesn't include a cutaway of Bernardi dramatically sending kisses heavenward. But as much as it pains him, Bernardi has been forced to change the way he thinks about his team: "So maybe we lost the icebreaker — Sarah — the one that if we have a bad day, she can still put all the big lights on over our team. But my team, our team, the U.S. girls, this No. 1 team, was not the Sarah Hendrickson show."
But the truth is that it pretty much was, and a more difficult truth has emerged since her fall: the supporting players in the Sarah Hendrickson show may be thrust into the spotlight while she sits things out. Abby Hughes, 24, was the youngest on the team before the then-17-year-old Hendrickson broke into the champion ranks by winning nine of 13 World Cup competitions in 2012. Now, Hughes, tall and blond, is jostling hard against the team's other tall blond, Alissa Johnson, 26, to make the cut for Sochi, where only four of the team's jumpers can compete. Ranked above them is Jessica Jerome, 26, who ended last season as the ninth-best female ski jumper in the world. And then there is Lindsey Van, 28, the pioneer of the sport and the first official women's world champion, who was in a slump for the past two years but is now a strong contender for a medal at the Olympics. These five women are unusually close, having trained together year-round since they were kids. All of them grew up in Park City, learned to ski jump in the after-school programs there and still live and train on the hills of the Utah Olympic Park. So the whole team feels Hendrickson's accident in complicated ways — not least because her recovery would knock one of them out of the first Olympics for their sport.
"We still always have this feeling now, like someone is missing," Jerome said of Sarah. "We all had our hearts broken when Sarah fell, but to be honest, less and less."
Johnson elaborated, describing how she saw some athletes getting caught up in pre-Olympic pressure. "You can make anything a positive thing or a negative thing," she said. "And what I've been thinking lately is, If you stick to your program, other people will trip up. At this point it's a game of who's following themselves, and who's not overdoing it and falling into traps. . . . You know this team has not had an easy time getting to the Olympics. So now it's just, like, stick to the plan."
For her part, Hendrickson's plan is "not giving up 12 years of hard training to sit at home and watch the Olympics on television." She now spends up to eight hours at a time at the gym, in rehab training, and every day she sets aside a few minutes to visualize her goal. "I see myself at the top of the ski jump in Sochi," she says. "I see myself walking into the opening ceremony." If she does make the team of four Olympic athletes in January, she has, she told me, already "grieved for" the athlete who will be ousted because of her last-minute reinclusion. "Of course that's not how I want to qualify. It will be just horrible. But it's sport, that's how it works. Still, for the other girls? I dread that day."
Ski jumping is a Nordic sport, meaning, like cross-country and telemark skiing, one that evolved on the snow fields and gentle hills of Norway. It is a traditional discipline, highly controlled, obsessed with the most minute details like thumb angle and millimeters between skin and suit. It is not something for expressive hot-doggers. In the United States, where most homegrown ski sports — snowboarding, for example — have both the Alps and a surfboard somewhere in their genes, the Nordic disciplines are not much considered spectator sports. They are also almost irretrievably associated with a quaint, gingerbreadish tweeness. So while it wouldn't be wrong to call ski jumping an extreme sport — because it is crazy to go down a 400-foot-high iced track at 60 miles an hour and then jump the length of a New York City block with nothing but a helmet as a safety net — it's still not something you'll most likely see in the X Games.
And yet, the place that bred the top-ranked women's ski-jumping team is far from Norway. There were an unusual constellation of factors that made the conditions in Park City, Utah, nearly perfect for the development of women's jumping: the jumps built for the 2002 Olympics are not only the best in the country but among the best in the world, and the Olympic Games themselves energized all the winter sports programs in Park City before and after their arrival. The ski culture is also open-minded, which allowed Lindsey Van to start jumping — the lone girl alongside the boys — in the 1990s. There is a 1993 video of her, 8 years old, at the training jumps in the area that would later become the Utah Olympic Park. She is wearing a helmet and a black-and-white cow-patterned suit, and her teeth look big in that way that 8-year-old teeth do. "My goal," she says, coming off a jump, "is to make the Olympic team in 2002 — for girls."
Van, the daughter of a Detroit merchant seaman who moved his young family to Park City after being laid off, became a local celebrity. Soon there were other Park City girls taking ski jumping seriously: Jerome first, then Johnson, then Hughes. Van would sometimes coach young girls, like Hendrickson, who were just starting out on the smallest training hills. The rest of her time was spent on the rinky-dink competition circuit then available to women, which inevitably took place on some of the world's more substandard jumps, the ones that Van affectionately describes as "on the dark side of the moon" — rutted, uneven venues in places with names like Rastbuchl, Pohla and Notodden, where spectators might be a handful of local townspeople and a jump hill's landing area might end in roads with passing cars.
The team often arrived at foreign airports with $100 among them, no one to pick them up and the number of a Swedish ski jumper's mother as the only backup plan. "We would stay in all these hostels where 30 girls slept in a room," Johnson says. "We always shared equipment because somebody's always got lost." Van told me how once, in Saalfelden, Austria, the team arrived at their "guesthouse" and found that it was a loft over a teeming cowshed. "There was a lot less organization, a lot less money, a lot more being young and dumb," she said. "But we were a family — all girl ski jumpers were a family back then."
Van didn't make her childhood goal of jumping in the 2002 Olympics, of course, because female jumpers weren't allowed to compete. Nor in 2006. By the time the 2010 games were coming around, 15 of the sport's best jumpers filed a discrimination suit against the Vancouver Organizing Committee, led by Women's Ski Jumping USA, a nonprofit group started in 2003 to support the team. Against the wishes of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (U.S.S.A.), the national governing body of Olympic skiing, Van — who had just won the sport's first World Championships — agreed to be the spokeswoman.
"Suddenly I didn't even have time to train," Van told me. "I find myself in Canada answering questions about Canadian law and the laws of the International Olympic Committee. And you know what? It's not like you wake up one day and say, 'I want to be an activist for women in ski jumping.' But it came to where it was like: 'Well, if you want this for yourself, or for anyone in the future, you have to do it. The next generation is going to come out of this, and right now it's you or it's no one.' "
The ski jumpers lost in appeals court in November 2009, with the court ruling that neither the Vancouver Organizing Committee nor any Canadian authority could tell the Switzerland-based International Olympic Committee what to do. Standing outside the courthouse, Van wept openly, saying, "I thought that they would go the other way." She then called the Canadian system of justice "weak," likened the I.O.C. to the Taliban and discouraged young girls from aspiring to be the next Lindsey Van "because there is no future." She lost her most lucrative sponsor, and in 2010, quit ski jumping while still ranked No. 1 in the world.
But a year later, around the time of the Olympic announcement that women would get to compete in a single category in 2014 — individual jump on the K-95, the smaller of the two Sochi jump hills — she returned. By then, the years of emotional stress and missed training because of what the jumpers now simply call "the fight" had compromised her jumping. Beyond that, Olympic inclusion had a nearly instantaneous effect on professionalizing women's ski jumping: suddenly there were smartly uniformed female teams, rigorously trained and traveling with entourages of physiotherapists and coaches. Van was now skiing alongside not only Hendrickson, but also a new generation of teenage jumpers like Sara Takanashi of Japan and Coline Mattel of France. China retrained gymnasts and sent them down ski jumps after the Olympics were announced.
One day in Park City this summer, I watched Van and Hendrickson jump from a low stool into the upstretched arms of a coach, Alan Alborn, at the Center of Excellence, the training and education facility of the U.S.S.A. Even on the level of pure movement, I felt I could see the weariness in Van's effort, while Hendrickson arced into Alborn's arms so fluidly it seemed as if she could do it all day. Bernardi had already told me that the problem with Van was the problem of experience: too much old memory padding those muscles, too many past injuries. One morning, he said, you wake up in a new world, still doing things the old way. When I asked him what the issues were with Hendrickson, he said, "The only issue with an athlete like Sarah is that she doesn't peak before she has to. . . . Sometimes, you have to hold them back."
The resistance to women in ski jumping makes frustratingly little sense when you recognize what female jumpers can do. "The gap between men and women in ski jumping is so small, you can't believe it," Bernardi told me. "Every year, with girls like Sarah, the girls are flying better, better, better." Today, he said, there might not actually be another sport in which, at the superelite level, the differences in male and female capability are so minimal. "Maybe there is something with horses? Equestre? But even there it is half the horse."
Van said she believed that this is also the reason women have been excluded from the top competitions in the sport for so long. "If women can jump as far as men, what does that do to the extreme value of this sport?" she asks. "I think we scared the ski-jumping [establishment]."
There is so little difference between women and men in the sport because lightness and technique count just as much as muscle and power. A jump can be separated into four sections: the in run, where balance is crucial as the athlete pushes off a start bar and goes down a track; the jump, where within a tenth of a second the athlete transitions from rushing down the track to a hard-push takeoff; the flight, where skis are kept in V-formation, and the ideal model for the body is a kite, paper thin, but with enough surface to catch good air; and finally, the landing, which is often done in telemark style, meaning one ski in front of the other. A ski jump is measured by judges for both distance and style. Women are allowed to start from a higher point on the jump because of their lighter weight (for heavier women, this can be an advantage).
At the final event of the Federation Internationale de Ski World Cup at the Holmenkollen ski arena in Norway, where I started following the women's team in March, the men and women were essentially jumping the same distances. It was the first time the federation allowed female jumpers to take the big hill, the K-120, and the women performed well. The longest male jump was 139 meters, from the Norwegian Tom Hilde, Hendrickson's boyfriend, while the longest female jump — 134 meters — belonged to her closest challenger, the 17-year-old Takanashi. Hendrickson, who jumped 133.5, still took first place for her flawless style.
As I watched the skiers fly through the air at Holmenkollen, I often found myself squinting for some telltale sign of whether they were male or female: a ponytail, say, or the curve of a breast. Jumpers are often indecipherable in the air largely because of the sport's physical ideal, which is skinny, sometimes to the point of emaciation. Male jumpers, Van said, "are the most awful, unhealthy looking humans." From afar, many of them look like willowy women, often weighing less than 135 pounds, with sunken cheeks, jutting hip bones and sticklike legs.
Increasingly, women are prioritizing lightness as well. Van has an unusually dense, stocky build for the sport, and Hughes and Johnson have swimmer's shoulders, but as the reedlike Hendrickson explained to me, it's only a matter of time before extreme skinniness becomes the norm on the women's side as well. "For so long things were not that serious for girls," she said. "But now that things are getting more competitive, with the Olympics and everything, you will start to see one body type — the ski-jumping body type."
One thing the jumpers hope they'll see more of with the Olympics approaching is money. At least in this country, a niche sport like ski jumping has little chance to secure much outside interest from sponsors without the platform of the Olympic Games (or the youth-culture currency of the X Games). With the exception of Hendrickson — who is individually sponsored by Red Bull, Nike and Kellogg's, among others — every woman on the team has flirted with the poverty line. A few do have sponsors — Van gets some money from two small companies, and Jerome recently landed Liberty Mutual — but generally, if they can scrape together $10,000 a year outside of skiing, they feel like they are doing well. Johnson and Jerome wait on tables, Hughes is a nanny, and this year Van tried to raise money through a Salt Lake City-based crowdfunding website called RallyMe, which feels like entry into an underground world of impoverished athletes with Olympic aspirations: the bobsledders, the skeleton riders, the kayakers.
The team itself is not much better off. "We're still always a step away from bake sales in terms of keeping these girls in jumpsuits," says Whitney Childers, the communications manager for Women's Ski Jumping USA. "Even going into the Olympics, it's like that." Today, between travel, training, coaching and physical therapy, W.S.J.-USA spends an average of $80,000 to maintain a female athlete on the international circuit for a year. Japan's and Austria's female teams can spend nearly twice that on their best jumpers. The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association — which is famously more generous with Alpine skiing than Nordic — gives a meager $50,000 to $60,000 total in support. (The U.S.S.A. gives no money at all to the U.S. men's ski-jumping team, which is ranked 13.) The women's team has a handful of sponsors, with a chocolate-milk campaign and Visa donating the most significant sums — the team's official name is the Visa Women's Ski Jumping Team — but, even going into the Olympics, the total corporate sponsorship is still only $251,000 a year. Without a good deal of creative fund-raising within the Utah community, the numbers would never add up. "So we get the girls out in dresses for fund-raisers," Childers said.
One day, after Hendrickson's three-hour morning workout, two months before her crash, we went to lunch at one of her favorite restaurants, a budget Thai place in a strip mall. Hendrickson, whose mother was an ultramarathoner and whose father was a recreational ski jumper in his youth, left the Center for Excellence dressed all in Nike — Nike shorts, a Nike tank top, a Nike zip-up jacket and Nike sneakers. She said she was relieved that for the next few weeks she could just train. Since returning from Norway, she had barely spent any time at home. She took a deep breath and recited some of her recent schedule, which began with a trip to the Canary Islands to see Hilde, her boyfriend, and included a media tour for Red Bull, an Olympic press event in Hollywood and a promotional trip for a nonprofit organization that finances children's sports programs in Africa.
"It's a lot to do," she said, breezily, "but I'm regulating everything and making sure I'm keeping everything at ease and not letting all this stuff distract me." Like many athletes, Hendrickson seems to thrive on routine. While talking about how she went about her days in Park City, she included the most minute details, from shower times to breakfast rituals ("I put my frozen berries in the microwave for 20, no, actually 15 seconds"). In ski jumping, where an untucked shoelace or the tiniest change in hip angle can make a difference, the sport's ideal personality type, she said, "might be control freak."
Hendrickson separated a small portion of her tofu curry from the rest and cut it into pea-size pieces. It was hard to tell whether she was dividing her lunch to encourage herself to eat more or less. "I don't like the feeling of being full," she said. "I hate it." She ate the cut-up pieces, then asked to take her soup, rice and remaining tofu home in a doggie bag. She looked at my nearly cleaned plate and asked whether I wanted a doggie bag too, as if the few morsels left could possibly make for a meal.
Earlier in the season, I watched her lose her usual composure in a hotel lobby when she realized that Bernardi hadn't told her she could eat dinner early. "You said 8, but I heard some teams got to eat at 6!" she said, stamping a bunny-slippered foot. "You know I hate eating late! You know I never eat late!"
Since 2004, Federation Internationale de Ski has implemented rules to address concerns about eating disorders among ski jumpers. The length of skis an athlete is allowed to use now depends not only on his height but his weight as well. If a jumper falls under a certain weight for his height, he loses centimeters off his skis. Ski length makes up part of a jumper's power in the air — playing a part in everything from lift to control, especially on windy days. At the restaurant, Hendrickson explained that she lost too much weight in the past few months. She had to cut her skis — in June, they measured 214 centimeters (about 84 inches), when, at 5-foot-4, she could be skiing on 232s.
"I want to be back on 220s by the Olympics," she said. She was particularly worried about jumping in the wind on shorter skis. "I don't like jumping in the wind. I'll tell my coach straight up: It makes things too inconsistent. Go from too high a gate, you can go too far, hurt your knees. That's actually my biggest fear."
Hendrickson's coaches had been concerned enough about her strength to ask her to build "a little more body mass." She was encouraged to begin eating snacks before bed, and they also wanted her to drink protein shakes. But Bernardi, who told me that he nearly ended his own competitive career as a Nordic combined athlete in Italy because he became too thin and weak after being encouraged to lose weight, said he and the other coaches are not worried about Hendrickson. "When we get worried, we do something."
The morning after the Thai meal, Hendrickson and I drove to Utah Olympic Park together. It was the first day of summer jumping and warm for June, but Hendrickson, wearing sweatpants and a polar fleece, had the heat on in her car. When we arrived, Van, Jerome, Johnson and Hughes, dressed in jogging shorts and tank tops, were joking around and limbering up with a small exercise ball. Hendrickson walked off wordlessly.
Throughout this first week back in training in Park City, her teammates suggested that Hendrickson's rise was causing tension among them. "Sarah's different than before," Hughes said. "It's just, as a team, everybody adds their own element and her element is a little hard to be around." Jerome and Johnson added that they felt the pressure and attention were getting to Hendrickson.
"Sarah is a really good kid," Johnson had said to me, "but she's in a situation where a lot of people will accept really mediocre or somewhat bad behavior — like allowing her to be short with them. And then we have to go through all this stuff on the team, like, 'Is Sarah happy today, or is she going to start screaming?' "
"Let's just put it this way, I know I get cranky when I am under a certain weight," Jerome said. "And with Sarah, people are just walking on eggshells."
The Olympic Park ski jumps looked like two AstroTurf tongues extended down the mountain. Without the coating of snow — in the summer, the surfaces are watered porcelain and stiff plastic matting — the perilous nature of the sport was laid bare. At the top of the K-120, it was all clanking metal start bars and wind howling through the metal platforms. The jumping, which looked so graceful, peaceful even, from the ground, now just looked extreme, all edge and danger. "Everybody has fear every time they jump," Hendrickson told me the day before. "You are going against what your brain wants to do — your brain will tell your body to do anything but what you are supposed to do to jump well."
Jerome, who had peeled her suit down to the tops of her ski boots, was sitting on the steps near the start bar in her underwear, waiting for her turn to jump. The thick suits are hotter and clingier than ever, because in the past year the Federation Internationale de Ski clamped down on what some jumpers call "suit doping," or cheating with your suit (some common tactics include super-low crotches or webbed underarms that give the jumper extra surface area). A jumper lands with more speed in a tight suit, because it doesn't catch air or provide any kind of parachute. And when things go wrong, Van said, "it can be like jumping out of a 30-story window going 60 miles an hour and trying to land. And it doesn't matter how strong you are. There's just no comfortable way to do that."
I met Van in her basement apartment near the Utah Olympic Park. It's a small place in a down-at-the-heels condo complex that she shares with her twin brother and another roommate. The apartment is sparsely furnished with ramshackle hand-me downs. There is a single picture of a cow on the wall and a thin coat of cat hair on the sofa. "I live simple," she said. "I don't need much."
Standing close to her, I found it hard not to stare at her muscled body, which radiates such dense power that your instinct is to step back. She has been repeatedly and seriously injured over the years — her ankles, her knees, six broken vertebrae, a ruptured spleen. As a teenager, Van developed an eating disorder, but in her 20s, she decided it was better to try to figure out how to "make [her] fat fly." "Fat" should be taken euphemistically; there was not a speck in evidence. "I've been asked to become an Olympic weight lifter many times," she said. "But you're picking up this big piece of heavy metal just to put it back exactly where you picked it up from. It seems absolutely ridiculous to me."
Despite her disappointment with the way she was jumping (she finished the 2012-2013 season eighth over all), she had tried to make light of it. "Whatever," she said. "Ski jumping isn't the cure for cancer. It isn't even cancer." She'd long been trying to shrug off the idea that her best jumping years might have been spent in court rather than at the Olympics.
"So it's the first Olympics, and it's not my peak," she told me back in Norway. "But it's still someone's peak; it's the same process, just continuing, so how can I be bummed?"
Then, a month after we met, Van had a breakthrough. An entrepreneur in Ogden, Utah, had created a wind tunnel, a long room with three 6-foot-diameter fans, each with 150 horsepower, for use in assessing the aerodynamics of things like racecars and motorcycles. First Hendrickson was invited to try it, and then, a few weeks later, the rest of the team got its chance.
One by one, the jumpers attached their feet to ski bindings bolted into the floor, and then pitched themselves forward against the 60 m.p.h. gale produced by the fans. Smoke passed over their torsos in order to show how the wind split and dragged when it hit them. Alborn sometimes lay on his back directly under a jumper, giving directions. For Van, it was a transformative experience. "The wind tunnel gives you the same feeling that you have when you're in flight, but here it was several minutes at a time," she said. "Which gives your brain a chance to recognize the feelings instead of just feeling them. I felt things I may have only felt 20 times in my whole life as a ski jumper. It was like I was a kid again."
Not long after that, it was clear that Van was coming out of her slump. For two years, Bernardi had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get her to jump in a position that worked better with the new, tighter suits and the new, faster jumps. Now everything was finally clicking. In October, she won the U.S. National Championships. It was her 16th national title.
"I was waiting for two years for this kind of turnaround," she said. "Nobody wants to do a sport for 22 years and feel like they suck. If you're doing something that long, you should be good at it, right? It got to the point where I felt like I couldn't even call myself a ski jumper. But now, jumping, I have the feelings I haven't felt in a long time. I feel happy. I remember: jumping makes me happy."
The question is whether the wind tunnel also blew Sarah Hendrickson into some stratosphere of ski jumping that her body just couldn't handle. "Paolo hadn't expected me to jump as well as I was in Oberstdorf for four more months," she said. "After my first jumps there, he was like, 'I don't know how, but you're just destroying it.' My mom still asks if it was the wind tunnel. But you know, whatever. What if it was what I had for breakfast that morning?"
Hendrickson, who believes the accident was "just bad circumstance," says she knows Bernardi has at times blamed himself. What if, on that supersleek Oberstdorf jump, he hadn't let her wear her fastest suit, the blue one she usually saves for competition days? What if he had instructed her to start from a lower gate? Bernardi told me he doesn't think it was anyone's fault. "It was because of the danger that is inside this sport," he said. "It was a perfect jump on a perfect day. It was a perfect landing, only too much speed. She did what every athlete of her level loves to do — she went so far. She was the best Sarah Hendrickson ever. She was too good."
It was when she saw herself coasting high over the hill's 120-meter line that Hendrickson knew she was in trouble. By the time she threw her arms out to try to slow down, it was too late. When she fell, anyone within earshot could hear her crying, "I want Paolo, I want Paolo!" The first person to reach her on the ground was a Dutch athlete who was training on the small hill. He untwisted her leg, which was still stuck to her ski. By the time Bernardi got down from the coaches' platform, Hendrickson had stopped pleading for him and was saying, "I'm fine, I'm fine — I don't need to go to the hospital." On the backboard in the ambulance, she clapped her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut. "I didn't want to hear anything anybody was saying," she recalled. When, less than an hour later, a German doctor hinted at how bad the damage was, she began to sob. She says she cried for nearly all of the four days it took to get back to Park City.
Within a week, her knee was operated on by Dr. Andrew Cooper at Salt Lake Medical Center, and she began the slow process of recovery. The day after Labor Day, she was at the Center of Excellence, howling in pain as physiotherapists began the two-week course of getting her to straighten her leg. By then her weight had dropped to 89 pounds. A team had been corralled to address Hendrickson's rehab, including Cooper, Bernardi and Alborn, the U.S.S.A. strength coach, two physiotherapists, the U.S. Ski Team's media director and the nutritionist and the cook at the Center for Excellence.
Hendrickson's biggest obstacle now, she said, is strength. "I really need to work on eating enough, even if, because I am not as active, my mind is kind of like, 'Well, you don't need food,' or, 'I'm not hungry.' So that's one of my battles — I just have to eat."
For the first six weeks, a physiotherapist brought Hendrickson a smoothie every day at 3 p.m. "And I don't know what gets put in these smoothies," she said, laughing. "Because if I made them, they'd probably have half the calories."
Hendrickson told me that her mother suggested that the injury might be a strange sort of blessing, absolving her from the pre-Olympic media storm and allowing her to focus on her physical and mental health. She sheepishly described a new guilty pleasure: going to the coffee shop near her house to read Harry Potter books. Hendrickson did attend a media summit in October in her brace, where she was stunned by the widespread assumption that she was out for the season. "I am like: 'Are you kidding me? I blew out my knee five weeks ago! I would not be here right now if I was giving up.' " (Jerome described it as a demanding day for Hendrickson. "She was being wheeled around in a wheelchair, and the main reason all these people are talking to her is because if she does make the Olympics, they want that really great back story. It must have put a lot more stress on her.")
As Hendrickson made tea, she told me that Van has been there through her rehabilitation — visiting, texting, helping with her physiotherapy. "She was the first person to reach out and come over after my surgery," Hendrickson said. "I was screaming in pain. Every time I'd get pain, I would tense up my foot, and I would get cramps. And she was like, 'Sarah, relax your foot.' And she was massaging it for me."
Van believes Hendrickson's injury will ultimately make her a better jumper. "Sarah was an athlete who was up here all the time," she said, raising her hand over her head. "But the farther you go down, the harder it is, then the more you learn about what you can take and why you're doing the sport. You are alone, and nothing is fun, but when you get out of it, you see it was worth it."
Hendrickson has begun practicing in-run positioning again, her feet flat on the floor, her torso flush against the tops of her thighs. Her rehab team is engaging in some techniques that her surgeon calls "possible voodoo — but you never know," including an esoteric Japanese technique of employing tight tourniquets to direct blood flow. Bernardi has set her red line around mid-January. If she can jump well by then — and the U.S. Olympic Committee and the U.S. Ski Team agrees to Bernardi and Alborn using their discretion, rather than qualifying points, to select the team — she will make it to the Olympics. Meanwhile, two others, Nina Lussi and Nita Englund, are now touring the circuit in hopes of qualifying.
Hendrickson said she tried to tell herself that her injury happened for a reason, "and that maybe the reason is to give somebody else a chance." Her phone buzzed. It was a text from Lindsey Van.
Postscript: November 22, 2013
Coach Paolo Bernardi quit the United States women's ski jumping team on Thursday after this article went to press. "I resign for personal reasons, and it was a hard decision," Bernardi wrote on his Facebook page, in a post that has since been deleted. "... I hope to find another team soon that can give me the motivation to start again." In an email to The Times, Bernardi said the reason for his quitting was "deeper" than only Sarah Hendrickson's setback, but "of course has a lot to do with Sarah." Erik Renmaelmo, who most recently was the assistant coach of the Norwegian women's ski-jumping team, has succeeded Bernardi.
