'I feel like myself again': Valérie Grenier set for return to World Cup super-G, Lake Louise
CBC
It's late morning during the pre-season grind for alpine skier Valérie Grenier, who enjoys sipping coffee following an extended sleep on her day off in Colorado. An afternoon of rest is planned after a walk and grocery shopping in Silverthorne with her Canadian women's teammates.
Grenier is upbeat and relieved near the end of another pain-free training camp in 2022, a big deal for those who have followed her career.
"I feel I'm doing [the same] volume as everyone else and I can go all-out every day," Grenier said over the phone recently. "I feel so good and I'm grateful for that because I haven't felt this way in a long time."
Unfortunately, Grenier has yet to complete a World Cup race this season after appearing to lose an edge last Saturday during her opening run of the women's giant slalom in Killington, Vt. Last month, she was set to race a GS at the World Cup opener that was cancelled due to rain and warm weather in Solden, Austria.
This week, Grenier arrived in Lake Louise, Alta., where scheduled downhills Friday and Saturday and a super-G Sunday will be live-streamed on CBCSports.ca, the CBC Sports app and CBC Gem.
The 26-year-old hasn't raced super-G at the mountain resort in Banff National Park since 2018 when she placed fifth and 5-100ths of a second behind bronze medallist Viktoria Rebensburg of Germany.
Two months later, Grenier broke her right leg in four places and her right ankle travelling about 130 kilometres per hour in a downhill training run at the world championships in Are, Sweden. She needed a second surgery five months later when the bone wasn't healing properly.
Nearly four years after the crash, Grenier is ready to return to speed racing "for real" after a few unsuccessful attempts. She was back on skis Oct. 17, 2020 following multiple surgeries, physiotherapy and COVID-19, finishing 25th in giant slalom in Solden. But it was a different story a month earlier when Grenier stood at the top of a mountain for her first training run post-injury and couldn't push out of the gate in Zermatt, Switzerland. The crash kept replaying in her head.
WATCH | Grenier suffers mental block upon return from injury:
The mental challenges forced Grenier to abandon thoughts of downhill or super-G and shift to giant slalom, a more technical and slower discipline. She raced 13 times before a disqualification at her second Olympics last February in Beijing after getting caught on a gate just seconds from the end of her first run.
When she attempted a super-G on March 5, a "crazy scared" Grenier pulled up halfway down an icy and bumpy course in Lenzerheide, Switzerland.
"As much as I wanted to fight through it, you can't when you don't feel 100 per cent and you're going that fast," said Grenier, who grew up in the Ontario farming community of St. Isidore, east of Ottawa. "It was hard [mentally] to [stop] because that's not me. I'll keep going through anything, but at that moment there was no way.
"For a long time, it seemed I wasn't going to get back to my old self. Before my injury, I was the crazy one. I would give it my all and not think about the consequences."
WATCH | Grenier ties career-best finish on Jan. 8, 2022, in Slovenia:
