Nina O’Brien feels gratitude as she nears her first Alpine skiing competition since September 2023, when she broke her left leg for the second time in a 19-month span.
“I miss being on the road with my team and being in the start gate and waking up to go ski racing every morning,” she said. “I feel very, very lucky to be able to do this.”
O’Brien, a 26-year-old from Colorado, spoke Monday from Belgium, where she’s skiing indoors in preparation for the start of the World Cup season.
The first scheduled race is a giant slalom in Sölden, Austria, on Oct. 26.
In the 2022 Olympic giant slalom, O’Brien had a breakthrough first run, the sixth fastest of the field in her Olympic debut. In her second run, she lost her balance speeding toward the final gate, fell and tumbled through the finish line.
She broke the tibia, fibula and talus in her left leg, underwent four surgeries and managed to return for the start of the following season in autumn 2022.
O’Brien, whose best World Cup result before the injuries was ninth, finished 10th in a GS in January 2023. The next month, she won a world championship in the mixed-gender team parallel event with five other Americans. She was also second fastest in the second run of GS at those worlds, ultimately placing 11th.
She raced through that winter with shin pain. So after the 2022-23 season, she had another surgery to remove the rod that was put in her leg after the Olympic fall.
O’Brien was ready to build on her comeback in the 2023-24 season. She flew to New Zealand for a six-week, late summer training camp. With about a week left, she straddled a gate in a slalom run. It felt like her foot slammed to a stop while her body kept going.
“I just felt this deep pain low in my leg, in the boot, and my stomach dropped immediately,” she said. “I was just like, oh gosh, did I just break my leg again?”
She broke her left tibia in the same spot as in 2022, just above her ankle, with a new fracture line. Doctors said the first break did not make her more susceptible to a second. It was a fluke.
“The first time it happened (at the Olympics), it was kind of dramatic, the whole crash and the bone was (sticking) out of the leg,” O’Brien said. “This was almost the opposite. It easily could have been that nothing happened.”
O’Brien had accepted that her first broken leg was part of ski racing, given how prevalent crashes and injuries are in the sport.
“To have almost the same thing happen a second time was kind of brutal,” she said, “to feel like I was back where I had started.”
Throughout her rehab, O’Brien found that her second comeback was less burdensome than the first.
In February 2022, O’Brien flew from Beijing to Tokyo to Texas to Denver with an external fixator attached to her leg and Aleve and Advil only somewhat suppressing the pain. Higher strength painkillers weren’t available.
In September 2023, O’Brien flew from Queenstown to Auckland to San Francisco to Denver with her leg in a cast that was cut open out of precaution for swelling.
O’Brien messaged with Dartmouth admissions while preparing for season-ending surgery. The Ivy League school allowed her to enroll in the fall 2023 term that began a few days later.
She had started at Dartmouth in 2018 and, having spent much of the last six winters racing in Europe, had one quarter left to earn her economics degree. She was able to graduate with her brother Preston, who is three years younger.
O’Brien spent Christmas with her family in Denver for the first time since she was a teenager. She returned to skiing in January, slowly building into training.
She also followed the World Cup from afar while missing an entire season for the first time since her debut on the circuit in 2016 at age 18.
“It was pretty painful, just hurts your heart a bit,” she said. “But I would say the one thing that purely made me happy was that my teammates had kind of a groundbreaking year.”
Mikaela Shiffrin had a tour-leading nine race victories despite missing six weeks due to injury.
AJ Hurt and Paula Moltzan, with whom O’Brien rose through the ranks, made the podium on back-to-back days in February.
The last time three different U.S. women made World Cup podiums in the technical events of GS and slalom was in 2011-12.
“Seeing the people that I’ve spent the last five or six years training with every day have the success that I’ve known they were capable of was really inspiring,” O’Brien said. “Definitely gave me some motivation to try and get back to be in the group.”
O’Brien said the best skiing of her career thus far came at the 2021 World Championships in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, which also hosts the 2026 Olympics. She was second fastest in the opening run of the GS at those worlds and led in her second run before a late mistake dropped her to 10th.
“I know this is a comeback season again, so I feel like I don’t want to set too many strong expectations,” she said. “But long term, my goals are the same: I want to be on podiums and win medals and do all that. Despite these two injuries, I feel really good. My body feels strong now. I still feel, and I really hope, that my best races are ahead of me.”
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