Colby Stevenson | Beijing 2022 Olympic Profile
Team USA Freestyle Skier Colby Stevenson shares how a terrible car accident threatened his chances of ever skiing again, and explains the lessons he learned from his amazing comeback story.
Video Transcript
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COLBY STEVENSON: I'm Colby. I live in Park City, Utah. I actually grew up here. I've been in this sport since I was, like, eight years old, and it happened to be an Olympic event after I started. So it's really exciting.
And yeah. I missed my opportunity in 2018. I tore my shoulder out in one of the Olympic qualifiers. So I'm really looking forward to staying healthy this year, and hopefully going to Beijing.
I was in a terrible car accident. I shattered my skull, and stuff. And it took a lot of determination and hope to come back from that, because we really weren't sure if I was going to physically be the same again, or ever be able to ski the same again. So yeah. I just kept my head down, lived day-to-day, worked on my recovery here at the SOE-- Center of Excellence-- and yeah. Like, five months later, I was back on skis. Definitely not 100% healthy, but had the mental strength to push through it.
And it actually taught me a really valuable lesson in life to just not take anything for granted. And you know, every day is a blessing that we're here. So yeah, I'm, like, living out my bonus years after that. And I just, like, took that into competition, basically skiing for the love of the sport rather than like trying to win. That was kind of the big change that happened for me after the accident.