.otto.do you know what injuries he got from that?
Hey man, the only injuries I got was a fractured orbita (eye socket) and a little concussion, from smashing my knees into my face. To the guy that thought I broke my legs, luckily that’s not what happened. I didn’t injure my legs at all, they were totally fine somehow. I mean, of course the day after the crash, I felt like I was hit by a truck. Every single muscle in my body felt sore. But my knees, ankles, hips etc. did not hurt at all. I still have no idea how that’s possible, but I’m glad that I got away like that.
Even if it doesn’t look like it, the conditions were far from perfect. The clouds were moving all the time, so the speed would change between every speedcheck. We spent a lot of time in Livigno trying to figure out the right speed, it took a lot of days to get somewhat good enough conditions to hit it. It’s scary, when you can feel wind at the drop-in of a jump like that. It was a 600m inrun that we had to race tuck, to get at least 110 km/h (70 mph) to clear the knuckle. Going into a jump that fast is intimidating, considering that a 52 degree take-off looks like a fucking quarterpipe when you approach it at that speed.
Going that fast, it’s hard to tell, if you’re going 110-115, which would have been the right speed, or not. If you were just a couple of km/h off, it would result in knuckling or overshooting. There were a couple of well-known riders supposed to hit it, that I consider waaay better jump skiers than the rookie that I am compared to them, that decided to not do it, because it seemed to be too gnarly. It looked way bigger in real life, than it does on video, it’s hardly imaginable. That was more snow than the whole nine knights feature for example.
So like I said, we spent a lot of days on the jump trying to figure it out and we had to wait for a long time until we could hit it for the first time. Right after we hit it for the first time, the wind would pick up, so we had to call it off. So we waited again and speedchecked everyday, but it wouldn’t be possible to hit it, because everything had to be absolutely perfect. When we thought we had a good enough day, Paddy overshot it, because the snow conditions on the take-off would have changed that much, during our days of waiting.
There actually were like 3 days between Paddy’s crash and mine. The reason I still decided to hit it was because I didn’t want to disappoint anyone that believed in me and I wanted to prove it to myself that it is possible to do tricks at that speed. To be honest I still think it is, you just need an absolute perfect day, which we didn’t have unfortunately.
It was a stupid decision to hit it on the day I crashed, the conditions were far from good enough, but I still went for it, because I wanted it to be done. It’s challenging your mind when you wake up so many days in a row, thinking “Yo, today is the day. We need to finally get it done!”, you needed to be mentally prepared. And then you go up the mountain and even though it’s sunny and everything, you couldn’t do it, because of it being too slushy, too windy or whatever, is fucking with your mind.
As soon as I left the take-off, I could feel the wind pulling me down and I immediately knew, I was about to eat shit big time. I was so scared of tearing all my acls, mcls etc. and breaking some bones while tumbling down the 47 degree landing, but that wasn’t the case and even today I still don’t understand, how my legs didn’t take any harm at all. Guess I got super lucky.
I’m still a little disappointed, that we couldn’t do any of the tricks that we planned to do for your viewing pleasure, but on the other hand, I gotta be grateful that I didn’t die on that jump. That was by far the scariest thing that I ever got to do.
Shoutout to Paddy Graham for going first, that was mental.
TLDR: Got lucky, didn’t injure my legs at all, conditions were not good enough, sorry for not being able to do the tricks we wanted to do, glad I didn’t die, would probably do it again tho.