Her Career Is Full of Twists and Turns

It was spring Down Under, so Australian skier Alisa Camplin was training for the Winter Games in New York. In October, four months before she could defend her gold medal in aerials, she blew out her right knee.

Arrivederci, Torino?

“I was in Lake Placid, where they had the ‘Miracle on Ice,’ ” she said. “They had the ‘Do You Believe in Miracles?’ DVD sitting on the counter. I thought, if I believed enough in my head, my body would follow.”

Her fingers were crossed, but her knee was shredded. It could be fixed, of course, but with surgery and many months of rehabilitation. Too many, she told her doctor. Get me to Turin, or at least give me the chance to get there.

“I am a bit of a walking research project,” the 31-year-old Camplin said.

She appears delicate, a petite blond with a megawatt smile, a couple of inches taller than 5 feet, barely more than 100 pounds. If doctors awarded frequent-patient points, she might be a world champion there too.

She developed anemia as a child, so she stopped running and took up gymnastics. In two years, she suffered four stress fractures in her back, so gymnastics was out too.

At 19, she took up freestyle skiing. She had never seen snow.

“Everyone thought I was an absolute lunatic,” she said.

She kept flipping through the air -- and falling. The catalog of body parts broken, separated, dislocated or torn included neck, shoulder, collarbone, hand, knees, ankles and Achilles’ tendon.

And head, repeatedly -- nine concussions in her first six years, one so traumatic she had to be evacuated from the slope by helicopter. After the ninth, she consulted with a Canadian neurologist familiar with NHL players.

“I tell guys that make $20 million a year their career is over,” he told Camplin. “I’m telling you, you need to stop.”

She promised herself she would quit if she suffered another concussion. That was in 1999 and so far so good. She won a gold medal four years ago, the first Australian woman to do so at the Winter Olympics.

The medal did not confer immunity from injury, though. In October 2004, as she practiced a quadruple twist in a training pool, the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee snapped.

“That was OK,” she said. “Not the head.”

Last October, in another pool, she tried the same move, with the same result. That was not OK, not with the Olympics four months away.

In the standard procedure for repairing a torn ACL, surgeons drill holes in the knee and thread spare connective tissue through them. Dr. Julian Fuller, Camplin’s orthopedist, had replaced her original ligament with part of her right hamstring.

This time, in an attempt to speed recovery, Fuller did not harvest a replacement from Camplin’s body. He used a tendon from a cadaver, warning Camplin that the graft might not hold under a rehabilitation schedule so aggressive that Fuller found no precedent in medical journals.

On the day after surgery, still in her hospital bed, Camplin worked out to a Jane Fonda exercise video.

“Leg lifts and butt lifts,” Camplin said.

On the second day after surgery, she tossed aside her crutches. On the third day, she hit the gym.

On the 55th day, she practiced her jumps in a pool. After three months, she hit the slopes, with a knee repair that surgeons typically caution could take seven to 12 months to take hold.

“It could have been so mushy it would have popped out the first time I was on skis,” Camplin said. “I was ready for that. I wouldn’t have had any regrets.”

So good on her, as they say in Australia, for getting here. Her winter has been long on rehabilitation and short on training, and so she calls herself “under-prepared” for the Olympics. In her absence, however, none of her competitors have dominated, and a longshot is still a shot.

“I’m not here to be an Olympic tourist,” she said.

After all, it ain’t over until ...

“We’re in Italy,” Camplin said. “They have opera here. The way I figure it, they’ll have a fat lady singing at the closing ceremony.”