Photo: Instagram
In a shocking public statement issued Thursday afternoon, Kaitlyn Farrington announced her retirement. Taking to Instagram, the Olympic gold medalist cited a spine condition:
Here we go. The past few months have been really difficult. I’ve met with many specialists and they all confirmed I have congenital cervical stenosis of my spine, a condition I was born with and never knew I had until a recent fall in Austria led me to get an MRI. It’s taken me these few months to come to terms with my diagnosis and the fact that I must retire from competitive halfpipe snowboarding. I am so thankful for my friends, family and sponsors for their support throughout this time. It’s been an unbelievable run and I look forward to my next quarter century. Cheers to early retirement…
ESPN simultaneously published an exclusive interview with the champion, in which they tell the story of the past three months, from the personal discovery of the condition to her public statement. In October 2014, Farrington was in Hintertux, Austria, for a product shoot with sponsor Giro when she took a fall that ultimately sent her to the hospital looking for answers.
It wasn’t the hardest fall of her career, but it was the strangest in that she completely lost feeling in her body. “I couldn’t feel anything from the neck down,” shetold Alyssa Roenigk of ESPN.com. “I was looking up at the sky thinking, ‘Get up. Just get up.’ All I wanted to do was stand up and walk. I heard the guys yelling, ‘Are you all right?’ and all I could say was, ‘Help. Help. I need help.'”
At the hospital, she explained these strange sensations to her doctors. They, in turn, recommended an MRI, looking for signs of what they called “transient quadriplegia.” The results were unexpected — the doctors instead came across a relatively rare condition: “When I went back to have him read the MRI, the first thing he said was, ‘You have congenital cervical stenosis and can never snowboard again.’ I burst into tears. I yelled at him and told him to get out of the room. I wasn’t ready to hear it. It was the worst conversation of my life.”
She eventually found out she would be able to continue snowboarding, but at a much more casual pace. She would no longer be able to ride competitively.
“I can walk. I can still snowboard,” Farrington explained. “I just have to keep my feet on the ground. I still want to be a professional snowboarder, I just have to figure out what that means.”
I hope she figures out what that means soon — the slopes won’t be the same without her. The Inertia Mountain’s thoughts and well wishes go out to Kaitlyn and her family, including the snowboard one that saw her ascend to the top of podium at Sochi.
Read the entire story on ESPN.
