Katie Ormerod, who was one of Team GB’s biggest hopes for a Winter Olympics medal in Pyeongchang before the snowboarder broke her heel in training, has revealed her injury was so severe it took more than an hour for hospital staff to get her boot off.
“As soon as I hit the floor I knew it was a really bad injury and I was in excruciating pain,” Ormerod said. “I’ve never felt pain like it. But the hardest bit was having to pull my boot off, which took them one or two hours.
“The team got scissors and they had to cut as much of the boot off as they could. There was still a little bit that they had to slide off and eventually they just pulled it off me and it was agony. I was screaming in pain, it was awful.”
Ormerod is still in hospital in Seoul a week after her accident but the 20-year-old is confident of making a full recovery. “I was really lucky to have one of the world’s best surgeons, who did a really good job. There were some little complications because the way that my bone broke into two pieces, it almost pushed through the skin which meant that it started to kill a bit of the skin. I’m just waiting to see whether that is an issue or not.
“Right now all the heel is black from where the skin is dying. I’ve got a lot of incisions down the side as well, so I think there will be quite a few scars.”
Despite the injury Ormerod still intends to get back on a snowboard – but it will not be until the summer at the earliest. “The surgeon had to go into it in quite a few places. Down the side of it and at the back and maybe underneath as well. He put two pins in too. The heel is one of the hardest bones to break in the body. No one could believe I broke it that badly. They’ve never seen an injury like that before in snowboarding. I was just really unlucky.”
