BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 9 : SUMMER GAMES SPOTLIGHT : ROWER FINISHES AMAZING STORY

Canadian rower Silken Laumann has been to two previous Olympics and won a medal before, but Sunday’s bronze in the women’s single sculls final was “amazing,” she said.

Laumann, 28, finished third to Romania’s Elisabeta Lipa and Belgium’s Annelies Bredael--and she did so less than three months after severely injuring her right leg in a freak rowing accident. She has undergone five operations and faces a sixth later this month.

“I still remember some days in the hospital that I was feeling so sick and so bad, and it seemed like such a long stretch of time,” Laumann said. “And, now, I realize that wasn’t very long ago, and it seems pretty amazing. As time goes on, it seems more and more amazing.”

On May 16, during warm-ups for a regatta in Germany, Laumann’s boat was accidentally struck by a men’s pairs boat, driving a piece of wood into Laumann’s lower right leg, peeling back the muscles above her ankle. Because she is a rower, she theorizes, her fitness helped her make a quick recovery. And because she is a rower, she was able to return to her sport even before she could walk, since the sitting position in the boat kept her feet high enough that she had no excessive swelling.

Laumann continues to walk with a cane and has a plastic shield covering the lower leg, making Sunday’s race even better than her seventh-place finish in double sculls in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, or her third place in double sculls--with her sister, Danielle--in the ’84 Los Angeles Games.

Asked if she might have won had she been in perfect health, Laumann graciously said: “You can’t predict what could have been, and I don’t want to take that away from the winner. It was a hard fight to win the bronze, but it was worth every second of it.”

Also, she said, the pain of the rowing effort made so many parts of her body hurt that she couldn’t feel her right leg during the race.

To finish the day nicely, Laumann’s boyfriend, rower John Wallace, 30, won a gold medal as part of Canada’s eight-man boat.