YANQING, China — Watch the crash at full speed and then in slow motion to sort out which body parts were going in what direction. Think about the fact that it happened just 23 days earlier. It seems impossible that Sofia Goggia stood Tuesday in the frigid sun with an Olympic medal draped around her neck.
Three weeks and change ago on a slope in her native Italy, her left leg went down the hill, her right up the slope, nearly full splits at upward of 60 mph. Goggia is a champion ski racer. In that moment, she was reduced to a rag doll tossed on its head. The Olympics? What about her career?
These people, those who choose to strap boards to their feet and point them straight down mountainsides knowing precisely what can and does happen to their kind, are made of different stock. Even the gold medalist in Tuesday’s Olympic women’s downhill, Corinne Suter of Switzerland, put it thusly: “It’s always difficult when you have such a hard crash, because you think, ‘Yeah, it’s okay.’ But it’s not.”
They do it anyway. Since her crash in a World Cup super-G event — so violent that her compatriot Elena Curtoni, the leader at the time, turned away from the screen in horror — Goggia had not been able to compete. The Olympic champion in the downhill four years ago in PyeongChang, she partially tore the ACL in her left knee. Goodness knows what else was going on with her body. There were legitimate questions about whether she would be able to defend her title here.
“After that crash, I don’t think anybody knows the full details of her injury,” said American star Mikaela Shiffrin, who finished 18th. “But it’s a significant injury. It feels a little bit impossible that she got here.”
Coming from a ski racer, that means something. Goggia’s idol — well, idol who became a friend — is American legend Lindsey Vonn, who won more World Cup races than any woman in history. In the final competition of Vonn’s career — the 2019 world championships — she crashed badly in the super-G, breaking a rib and blackening an eye. Her response, at 34, was to strap back in for the downhill. She was bruised and battered. She took bronze anyway.
A master electrician would have trouble figuring out how these racers are wired. From the moment she picked herself up off that slope in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy — a slope that was strewn with the remnants of a gate she plowed through and the two skis she had popped off — Goggia’s mind was on one event: the Olympic downhill.
“I always said to myself that if I could endure and overcome the period that separates me from Cortina to China,” Goggia said, “then the downhill itself would have been the easiest part.”
In theory, that’s reasonable. In practice? Well … “She’s a strong woman,” said her teammate Nadia Delago, and that is obviously true. Strong women can’t force ligaments to heal. They can, however, choose to dismiss pain.
“When you get up from bed, that’s the most difficult part of the day,” Goggia said. “Yesterday and today, I’m starting to walk like a normal person.”
Walking is one thing, skiing another. With the downhill the goal, Goggia skipped the Olympic super-G on Friday. Over the previous three days, she took a pair of training runs down the hard, speedy slope here. She couldn’t declare herself fully fit. “I would have loved to have 80 percent of my strength,” she said. But given what they subject their bodies to on a daily basis, ski racers rarely can claim to be fully fit. If her physical fitness was rated on a 1-to-10 scale, she said she was “maybe 5.5.” By Tuesday morning, with the downhill at hand, that would have to do.
“I worked on my fear, and I just wanted to be here,” Goggia said. “I just wanted to be here at the Olympic Games. I just wanted to play here. I had to pick myself back up in a way or another.”
She skied 13th, one spot behind Shiffrin, the three-time Olympic medalist whose biggest disappointments came earlier in these Games, when she skied out of both the giant slalom and slalom, her best disciplines. The downhill is Goggia’s best event. Injury or not, she had expectations, both external and internal.
“I know she’s been dealing with a lot of pressure as well this whole season,” Shiffrin said. “She’s just been shining through with it.”
So one more opportunity to do just that. Near the top of the course, on one sweeping turn, she felt pain in the knee. “But it was just one second and a half,” she said. The run lasted more than a minute and a half. Spit on the pain, and ski farther. Scared?
“No, no, no, no,” she said. “I wasn’t scared. I just said to myself: ‘I’m here. Let’s play.’ ”
After a mile and two-thirds, she crossed the finish line. She was a little more than four-tenths of a second faster than Delago, her countrywoman. When she saw the green light next to her name — indicating she held the lead — she bent at the waist and unleashed a scream that rang through the finish area, where scant fans were allowed in the stands.
“I saw the green light,” she said, “and of course I exploded.”
She knew that gusts of winds had slowed her slightly, and she wasn’t shocked when Suter, skiing two spots after her, nipped her time by all of 0.16 of a second. The disappointment, though, was fleeting. Suter was the only skier able to beat her.
Just more than three weeks ago, Sofia Goggia’s legs splayed like a fawn’s on ice. On Tuesday she stood, kissing both of her hands and waving to the onlookers as she stepped up on a podium. The record books will forever show she won silver in the women’s downhill at the Beijing Olympics. It will display nothing of what it took to achieve that, beginning with an attitude and approach the rest of us couldn’t comprehend.
