X games skier hurt

Of course, …. Looks like its time to start planning your ski trips to France, dearest British readers. The near complete ban on travelers from the ….

Congratulations to Mikaela Shiffrin who came back from a. Chris Benchetler is ascending his legend in skiing culture with the addition of three new models with Atomic Skis. I won US nationals. Um, and it honestly didn't seem like I could have lost that. It felt as if a bomb had gone off in my knee and I was devastated. I was crushed. I thought for sure everything was all over. Stone has a very calming effect on me.

He didn't look at it just like this big thing that we're trying to accomplish. He was like, well, here's this small piece and this small piece and this small piece and we can put you back together. For me, it's not just about repairing the joint. It's about working where their mind and their attitude and their nutrition and their lifestyle to see if I can help them really achieve levels that they thought wouldn't be possible again after they were injured.

Stone has given me back to knees. I'm not done yet. I haven't given everything that I can give and I'm not afraid to, to keep trying.

Professional freestyle skier, Jen Hudak needs two hands to count the bones and joints she's injured over the years. It's hardly surprising. Her career involves skiing at top speed into a giant half pipe of snow packed so hard it's almost ice. She flies up and over the edge of the pipe and hovers briefly, twisting and turning in midair before landing back to do it all over again, trick after trick. Certainly Jen has achieved greatness. Now she has her sights set on Olympic Gold in Sochi , when half pipe skiing will be an Olympic sport for the first time.

All this despite some serious setbacks. In , a devastating knee injury threatened to cut short Jen's sporting career. She sought out The Stone Clinic to help repair her joint.

As a pioneer in the field of orthopedics, Kevin R Stone MD uses stem cells and growth factors to help rebuild joints naturally rather than with artificial replacements. Her arguments won over Olympic officials, and the discipline will debut at the Sochi Games in , where she likely would have been the gold-medal favorite. She's also been very dedicated in trying to define her sport but not define herself by winning.

For her, it's been about making herself the best she can be rather than comparing herself to other people. She was, Judge said, as committed to the grass roots of the sport -- holding clinics for youngsters and working with up-and-coming competitors -- as performing at the top levels.

News of Burke's death spread quickly through the action-sports world, where the Winter X Games are set to start next week in Aspen, Colo. Jeremy Forster, the program director for U. Freeskiing and U. Snowboarding, said freeskiers would remember Burke "first, as a friend, and then as a competitor who constantly inspired them to do greater things. Her popularity transcended winter sports. Pearce's injury -- he has since recovered and is back to riding on snow -- was a jarring reminder of the dangers posed to these athletes who often market themselves as devil-may-care thrillseekers but know they make their living in a far more serious profession.

The sport's leaders defend the record, saying mandatory helmets and air bags used on the sides of pipes during practice and better pipe-building technology have made it a safer sport, even though the walls of the pipes have risen significantly in the past decade. They now stand at 22 feet high.

Some of the movement to the halfpipe decades ago came because racing down the mountain, the way they do in snowboardcross and skicross, was considered even more dangerous -- the conditions more unpredictable and the athletes less concerned with each other's safety.

But there are few consistent, hard-and-fast guidelines when it comes to limiting the difficulty of the tricks in the halfpipe, and as the money and fame available in the sport grew, so did the tricks. In , snowboarding pioneer Jake Burton told The Associated Press that much of this was self-policed by athletes who knew where to draw the line. Freestyle is a very safe sport in large part because we had to build a safe sport in order to get into the Olympics.

In , Burke broke a vertebra in her back after landing awkwardly while competing in slopestyle at the X Games. It was her lobbying that helped get the X Games to include women's slopestyle -- where riders shoot down the mountain and over "features" including bumps and rails. It wasn't her best event, but she felt compelled to compete because she pushed for it.

She came to terms with her injury quickly. It's part of the game. Everybody gets hurt. Looking back on it, I'd probably do the exact same thing again. She returned a year after that injury and kept going at the highest level, trying the toughest tricks and winning the biggest prizes.