After Unlucky 13th and Injury to Disks, Stone Lands Gold

Never underestimate the power of a wantin’ woman.

Nikki Stone wanted an Olympic gold medal. So she went out and won one here Wednesday in women’s freestyle aerial skiing.

“Coming back and winning gold--aahh--I’m so excited!” she said, obviously very excited. “I still can’t believe it!”

But that’s the end of the story.

It started, really, in Lillehammer, Norway, four years ago. Then an up-and-coming star of the U.S. freestyle team, Stone figured to be in medal contention at the Olympics there. Instead, she sprawled the landing on her second jump and finished 13th in the qualifying round. In Olympic aerials, the top 12 advance to the finals.

Stone was so devastated that she nearly quit her sport. Her coach persuaded her to give it another try and the next season she won the World Cup title and was first in the world championships. Things were looking up, way up.

Then she got a backache. The granddaddy of all backaches. She got it from landing all those jumps.

“What I did to my back is called internal disk disruption,” she said.

Those of us with occasional back trouble cringe at the name. But the name is the easy part.

“The way they explained it to me, if you take an egg and shake it, the shell doesn’t break but the inside gets scrambled,” she said. “That’s basically what I did to a couple of my disks. They tell me my back will never go back to its original state, so I’ve had to build up the muscles in my back to support those disks, so they don’t rupture.

“A year and a half ago . . . I was the most miserable person you could ever imagine. The doctors told me I’d never jump again and had me believing them at first.”

But Stone decided that not jumping again was not an option and eventually found doctors who suggested that, with proper workouts, she might be able to ski again. She hit the gym hard, working for months with weights to encase her fragile disks in a girdle of muscle.

“Every time I went to work out, I would tell myself, ‘Gold medal! Gold medal! Gold medal! Gold medal!’ ” she said.

“Coming here and achieving it is the best thing ever.”

Hard to argue with that kind of determination.