Freeski pioneer David Wise: Three-peat beckons for American original with ‘nothing to prove’

“I remember sitting there and thinking to myself ‘wow, I might die’,” David Wise said of the moment in April 2019, at a film and photo event in Austria, when he “sent it too hard, did something dumb” and crashed into a three-foot shelf of ice.

He shattered his femur – the longest and strongest bone in the human body – into three pieces.

“If you rupture that femoral artery, which runs right along the femur, it takes only three to five minutes to bleed out and die,” added the 31-year-old American. “So I kind of had to face my own mortality there and I realised, ‘wow, this could be it for me’.”

Fortunately for Wise, a two-time Olympic gold medallist, it wasn’t the end. “When I was up in the helicopter, I realised I wasn’t going to die, so that was kind of good,” he half-laughed, last month, speaking to Olympics.com ahead of this third straight Winter Games.

These Beijing Games are Wise’s first since his catastrophic injury. He’s been building back ever since “in so many stages” and he's admitted that “there are still some things that I did in PyeongChang [at the 2018 Games] that I can’t do”.

And while it was no picnic to qualify for the Beijing Games, Wise – the only man to ever win Olympic gold in freeski halfpipe since its debut in Sochi in 2014 – has developed a new “sense of gratefulness” for “normal things”. And he believes that everything since the crash is “now a blessing” – even the small stuff.

“I didn’t really ever doubt that I would qualify,” Wise said after finally sealing his place in Beijing in the last qualifier in Mammoth Mountain, California with a first podium finish (second place) of the season. “But every single qualifying event just didn’t quite go the way I hoped.

“It went right down to the wire,”