In the weeks and months after the champion snowboarder Kevin Pearce sustained a traumatic brain injury while training on a halfpipe, and even while he was in a coma in a Utah hospital nearly two years ago, his friends and fans provided support through a simple slogan: I Ride for Kevin.
Next week, those people will be able to ride with Kevin.
For the first time since Pearce’s life-altering accident, he will strap on a snowboard and glide down a mountain. He plans to ride Tuesday afternoon at Breckenridge, Colo., surrounded by friends in the snowboarding community and anyone else who wants to tag along.
“I want to get everybody to come and ride with me,” Pearce said in a phone interview.
Pearce, a favorite to make the 2010 United States snowboarding team, was practicing a particularly difficult trick in Park City, Utah, on Dec. 31, 2009, when he fell and hit his head on the icy wall of the halfpipe. He spent four months in hospitals in Utah and Colorado, missing the Olympics, and emerged with an unsteady walk, blurry vision and a diminished memory.
His high-flying snowboarding career, his burgeoning rivalry with Shaun White, was over. A long, quiet road of rehabilitation loomed.
But Pearce had a goal all along: to ride again. No tricks. No big air. No spins or double corks. No halfpipe. Just ride.
“Putting myself in a place where I can get hit in the head is so not worth it now,” Pearce said. “After going through this, just jumping on a snowboard and cruising around is enough for me. That’s how I’m feeling now. That’s where my head’s at.”
Much of his rehabilitation has focused on his vision, balance and memory. On Nov. 1, his 24th birthday, Pearce had eye-muscle surgery to help get his eyes back in sync. The thick, prism-shaped lenses of his glasses have been replaced by a subtler pair, and Pearce’s once-extraordinary balance improved drastically.
While his injured brain still struggles to remember things, Pearce believes muscle memory will allow him to make a smooth glide back to the snow.
“I think it’s like riding a bike,” he said.
He stepped onto a snowboard a few weeks ago in the living room of his parents’ house in Vermont. The familiar feelings came flooding back. Confident he could make it down a gentle hill, he considered taking his first post-accident venture on the snow amid the privacy of close friends and family.
Then he reconsidered. He recalled all the signs and stickers he saw in videos and photographs of snowboarding competitions he missed while hospitalized. Because so many people supported him while he was gone, he figured that they might as well be there when he returned.
“I really couldn’t be much happier about the way things turned out,” Pearce said. “Even the smallest things, like jumping on a snowboard. It has totally changed my perspective.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/sports/snowboarder-kevin-pearce-to-ride-for-first-time-since-accident.htmlCan't imagine what it must be like, very happy for him to be getting back on a board.
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