Manon Petit-Lenoir: The big journey of the resurgent French snowboard cross athlete

Manon Petit-Lenoir knows how tough snowboard cross can be, but she also knows the joy it can bring.

From France and making her Winter Olympics debut at Beijing 2022, Petit-Lenoir finished 26th in the women’s snowboard cross event, won by Lindsey Jacobellis ahead of silver medallist Chloe Trespeuch and Meryeta Odine.

However it was a triumph for Petit-Lenoir to be at the Genting Snow Park in Zhangjiakou, after a serious crash in 2018.

The Youth Olympic Games Lillehammer 2016 snowboard cross champion had a knee injury before PyeongChang 2018 and missed those Games, training throughout them to keep getting better.

Then on 1 April, 2018, at the French Championships in Peyragudes, the now-23-year-old had a big crash in the final.

She fractured two vertebrae and two cervical bones, dislocated her shoulder and had a small head trauma.

"I didn't really realise it because when I fell, I quickly got up. It wasn't madness, I felt that I had stuck things in my back and in my neck, but hey, I went home by bus eight hours in the night," She told the French Olympic and Paralympic Committee Team’s website.

"Then I drove my car home, went to bed, and it was the next day that I called my mother. She saw me all pale and she told me we're going to the hospital right away. There they diagnosed the fractures (C2, T7, T4 vertebrae) and they decided to put me in a huge corset.

"I was really furious. I saw everything in black; I didn't understand what was happening. The day before I was driving my car, and there I was locked in a corset.

"It was only a month later when I was allowed to remove the corset. The doctor told me that we were going to wait a little longer for the neurosurgeon to remove the corset.

"And the neurosurgeon said to me: