Katie Ormerod and the 2018 Winter Olympics were just not meant to be.
Just a day before she was due to compete at Pyeongchang the British snowboarder came off a rail in training too early. The result was splitting her right heel bone in half.
With her debut Olympic dreams in tatters, Ormerod ended up watching the Games from a hospital bed. What followed after that was seven operations, skin grafts and a full year of arduous rehab.
“It was definitely the most painful injury I had in my life,” says the now 24-year-old looking back on that incident.
“I didn’t think it was possible to feel that much pain, which was not nice at all.
“Then the rehab as well, that was really intense. I was on crutches for four months, I had to relearn how to walk again - things like that.
“It was really not easy but I just had to remain positive throughout it all as I just wanted to get back to snowboarding as quickly as possible.
“Not even just snowboarding, I wanted to be able to walk again and not have a painful limp.”
“I know now that I can overcome anything”
There was a lot of noise surrounding Ormerod leading up to those 2018 Games, and rightly so. She had already become the first British woman to win a Big Air World Cup in 2017 and was in the best shape of her career up to that point.
All the talk was of her really making an impression in Pyeongchang but the severity of her injury soon halted that.
Unsurprisingly the journey back to competition brought plenty of mental challenges along the way.
“On the physical side I had everything under control because I really looked into the really small gains that I made,” the Red Bull athlete explains.
“Every day was a new day to make progress. Every single day I went into the gym, I knew that every rep I was doing, of every exercise I was doing, was one rep closer to being able to walk properly and being able to snowboard.
“That was almost easier to keep my mind good and positive because I could see that progress physically.
“But mentally it was challenging because I wasn’t out in the mountains snowboarding with my teammates, I wasn’t competing and doing what I love.
“I was in a gym doing rehab and nine months into that rehab the physical side started to slow down.
“I was physically the strongest I’d ever been but I was still in a lot of pain and I couldn’t understand why.
“That’s when the mental side started to get really challenging but I just had to be really resilient and focused.
“I truly believed - even in those really hard times - that I would get through it and I just had to have that belief and hold onto it.”
Come back she did - and with a bang at that. In March 2020, her first full season back from injury, she became the first Briton to win a World Cup snowboard title.
That would have been an achievement in itself but when you marry that up with the comeback journey it becomes even more special.
“I know now that I can overcome anything,” Ormerod adds.
“Any obstacle that life throws at me, I know that I can deal with it and I’ll come back stronger.
“I had a few injuries in my career but none of them compared to breaking my heel and the pain and the rehab that came with that.
“I know now that, because I went through it, I can overcome anything and I feel so much stronger because of that.”
“I’m not going to let that define me”
For many of us, the thought of gearing up to your first Olympics before having it wrecked by injury would be hard enough to come back from.
But for Ormerod, with Beijing 2022 on the horizon, she has put everything that happened four years ago to the back of her mind.
“I’m a massive believer in everything happens for a reason, and that it just wasn’t meant to be my time in 2018,” she says.
“I just had to be really accepting of that straight away. This has really not gone how I planned so I just had to accept this is how it is and focus on the positives to come back stronger.
“Ultimately going forward I was in a position where I could just focus on the positives and be like, ‘ok that happened but I’m not going to let that define me’.
“I’m going to come back and go on to do bigger and better things.”
Bigger and better things could certainly be on the horizon for the West Yorkshire snowboarder out in China.
While she may have been in great shape in 2018, 2022 could be about to see the best version of Katie Ormerod yet.
“I feel like I’m an even stronger athlete now, which I’m really excited about,” she explains.
“I’m coming into the Winter Olympics in really good shape again where I’ve had the best season of my career between Pyeongchang and now.
“I’m feeling really confident, my riding has progressed loads and I’m basically going into Beijing in a really good position.
“I’m just really excited to get there.”
She adds: “I’m just going into it the same way I go into any other competition. My mindset is in a really good place where I know I’m going there and I’m just going to do the best that I can do and not focus on the end result.
“I’m focusing on going there, sorting my run out, piecing a good run together, doing the best that I can do on the day and that’s all I can ask of myself. Hopefully the result will come with that if I do my best.
“I feel like going in with that mindset to have fun and enjoy it. Then hopefully it will come rather than being like, ‘I’m going there and I need to get in the final, I need to get on the podium.’
“If I go in with the mindset of enjoying myself, and I’m going to do the best that I can do, then it generally goes well.”
- To find out more about Katie Ormerod, please head to her athlete profile page on RedBull.com
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