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PARK CITY — As the Olympic action begins this week, Utah athlete Kimber Gabryszak will be sitting it out, her Olympic dream dashed by a traumatic brain injury.
But surprisingly, it was not a spectacular crash that caused the injury. She said it was the routine punishment her sport dishes out.
When a skeleton slider screams down the track at up to 85 miles per hour, the sharp, banked turns exert tremendous force.
"When we go through these extremely high-pressure curves, we're pulling 4 or 5 G's, which is actually more than astronauts on liftoff," Gabryszak said.
Gabryszak, of Park City, and her husband, Brad Stewart, have been skeleton sliders since 2005. She's currently recuperating from hip surgery, but it was brain damage that knocked her out of the Olympics a few weeks ago.
She said G-forces push the slider's head down; neck muscles often aren't strong enough to resist.
“Since you're only an inch or two off the ice, you'll actually ride on the ice,” she added. “So here you can see, that's from my face riding on the ice."
That's right, scrape marks on the chin of her helmet. In recent years, she and Stewart both noticed concussion-like symptoms: headaches and feeling spacy.
"The ice is not perfectly smooth, it's not like glass. So it's like that,” Gabryszak said while hitting the table. “You're basically getting shaken-baby syndrome, is what I call it."
As an athlete it's really hard to, oh, I'm going to cry. I didn't really want to cry. You know, when you've trained nine years for something, it's really hard to let it go. Especially when it's that close.
–Kimber Gabryszak
A year ago, on a track in Germany, her head hit particularly hard and she was diagnosed with a concussion.
"They think it was so bad because it had been building up, season after season after season,” she said. “And then, when it happened, it was like the 100th concussion, which is obviously worse than your first concussion."
The last straw was on the same track two months ago.
Her face smacked the ice so hard it cracked her visor and gave her another concussion. She knew it was time to give up the Olympic dream.
"As an athlete it's really hard to, oh, I’m going to cry,” Gabryszak said. “I didn't really want to cry. You know, when you've trained nine years for something, it's really hard to let it go. Especially when it's that close."
She'd like to see the rules changed so the sleds can be redesigned to have shock-absorbing suspension systems. Even more than that, she wants to raise awareness. She wants to keep the sport alive, but do less injury to the sliders.
"We're seeing a lot more frequency of concussions being reported in our sport, and I don't know if we're seeing more concussions or if people are more aware of it now," she said.
She plans to sell her sled to avoid the temptation of getting back on the ice for the sport she loves. Gabryszak expects to return soon to her job as a city planner for the town of Saratoga Springs.
