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The Cowboy Chronicles: Stefan Guay's Road Back

Wednesday, 26 May 2010 17:00

Freelance writer Chad Buchholz is spending time with some members of Canada's Alpine Ski Team as they prepare for the upcoming season and he's agreed to send us a few updates. Here's the latest installment of "The Cowboy Chronicles."

To say Stefan Guay has had a tough couple of years would be a critical understatement.

A former Junior World Champion in giant slalom and Canadian Junior Athlete of the Year in both 2005 and 2006, Stefan crashed in December 2006 on the infamous Val Gardena 'Camel Bumps' jump, overshooting the landing by some 20 meters, landing on his back, and tearing his ACL and meniscus.

The latter tear, as the 24-year-old Guay tells it, had the doctors in awe.

"They had never seen anything like it. It was the worst they had ever seen," says Guay as he relaxes over a bowl of fruit and ice cream. While training in Calgary, Stefan is spending his downtime at a house owned by teammates Manuel Osborne-Paradis and Robbie Dixon. This particular day his head is freshly shaven of the 'Chuck Liddell' mohawk he cut for the previous day's kick boxing training session. The close shave has him looking intense and older.

"Since [the crash in 2006] I've been struggling with knee problems. All my ligaments, they healed fine, but the meniscus... They tried sewing it back together a couple of times but ended up having to take it out completely," says Guay. "So there was no cushion between my femur and tibia. I tried skiing with that last year. The summer camps were going good but when it started getting into the winter and the harder conditions it was putting a lot more vibration through my knee. So by January I'd ski a day, and after a day of skiing my knee would be swollen up like a football. I wouldn't be able to walk for a week. So I'd ski a day, not do anything for a week or ten days, and then do a race and go through it all over again. As a result, at the end of that last season I ended up having a meniscus transplant."

The whole ordeal sounds brutal, but this is actually where it starts to get really interesting. As we speak now, Stef is on his road back to the World Cup circuit sporting a meniscus transplanted from a deceased donor. His knee, you could say, is a now undead.

The operation, for an athlete of Guay's caliber, is completely experimental. No other top-level athlete in the world has tried to return to competition following this procedure. In light of this, it seems safe to say that no other meniscus transplant patient has put his or her new knee cushion through the exertion that Stefan can expect to put his through this season. But so far, as they say, so good.

"They said it takes a year to heal completely. I'm at 10 months and I'm already doing squats, working out hard. And it's already doing way better than it was before the operation," Guay says.

It's now been nearly two years since Stefan last skied against the best in the world. His last World Cup race was at Beaver Creek in 2008, after which he had to pull out of the World Cup circuit because of the more or less constant pain caused by his leg bones grinding together. Still, he tried to continue on.

"I was trying to push through the pain, but after Beaver Creek I decided to just try and take it easy, stay in North America, and do the Nor-Am circuit to try and get prepared for the Olympics," Guay says. "I ended up winning the Nor-Am's by just skiing, doing the races, never training. But by the end of the year I saw the doc and he said I shouldn't be doing anything on (the knee). Last summer I had my surgery and I've just been doing rehab since then. It was my sixth surgery."

Ask most on Canada's team and they'll tell you that if anyone can come back from having six surgeries, taking nearly two years off of competitive skiing, and riding on a borrowed meniscus, it's Stef.

Dixon put it like this... "As far as technically sound, talented skiers go," before trailing off and making the international sign of 'forget about it' with his hand. Dixon hasn't forgotten that Stefan was right there with him, Manny, John Kucera, et al before any of them had even sniffed a World Cup podium. Look at the results list for Stefan's 2006 World Junior win and you see some of the ski racing world's current biggest names sitting well behind him.

"I was always ahead of them or just around them. Manny, Robbie, the Europeans like Romed Baumann, Carlo Janka - we were all really close, and now they're winning World Cups and in the top 10 all the time," says Stefan. "It's encouraging and frustrating at the same time, to know that I was right there."

And at the end of the day, it's clear Stef is going to err on the side of positive when looking at what he's had to go through.

"Even when I wasn't skiing, I was watching skiing all the time, following all the guys, seeing what they were working on. And I have all my own footage so I know how I was skiing before I got injured. As soon as I put my skis on, I know what I have to work on. I know what my goals are and what I'm trying to do," Guay says.

"I'm strong. I don't think the technical aspect of skiing will be hard to get back. I think after a summer of training I'll be right back there with the guys. My knee feels better now than it has in the last three years."

With the first dryland camp of the 2010-11 season under his belt and his knee improving all the time, Stefan Guay seems finally primed to place himself back where it seemed he was destined to be in the early days of the 2006-07 season. Back on the World Cup circuit and battling for the podium, instead of battling through the pain.