New book The Comeback Quotient reveals how we can all benefit from mastering psychological resilience skills in sport and life. This exclusive extract looks at the incredible true story of Winter Olympian Petra Majdic
Petra Majdic arrived in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the 2010 Winter Olympics in top form. Considered a gold-medal contender in the women’s sprint event, the 30-year-old Slovenian cross-country skier had racked up six podium finishes, including three wins, in eight World Cup events leading up to the Games. On the morning of day five, Petra was transported from the Olympic Village to nearby Whistler Olympic Park to prepare for the day’s racing, which for her would consist of four rounds of sprint races (assuming she kept advancing) in the span of four hours. In her practice starts, she outpaced several male competitors as her coach, Ivan Hudač, looked on, struggling to maintain a poker face. She was so ready.
Then disaster struck. While cruising around the 1.4km course minutes before the start of the qualifying round, Majdic lost control on an icy corner and skidded into a 10-foot-deep gully, landing in a rocky creek bed. A blast of pain in Petra’s back sent a reflexive cry back to the surface she had just vanished from, drawing a rush of would-be rescuers to the crater’s edge. Instead of waiting for rescue, however, Petra gathered her wits and scaled up the snowy precipice, the whole right side of her torso ablaze, repeating the same words over and over to the stricken race officials who received her at the top: ‘Take me to the starting line!’
In a later interview, Petra explained that ‘too much had gone into that moment’ for her to even consider not racing. Nearly her entire life, in fact. Raised on a farm in Kamnik, a small town in the Slovenian Alps, Petra had few advantages as far as her athletic ambitions were concerned. Slovenia had never produced an Olympic medallist in cross-country skiing, offering scandalously little developmental support to aspiring young skiers for a country with so much snow.
BEYOND THE AGONY
At the 2006 Games in Turin, Petra was in a lead group of 11 racers in the 10km classic event when a crewman for the German team bumbled onto the course and collided with her, knocking her to the ground. She rebounded to finish sixth, but Petra would have to wait four long years for her next — and probably last — chance to win her country’s first Olympic medal in cross-country skiing.
Then the accident in Whistler. It wasn’t just Petra’s body that sustained damage in her plunge into the gully. She also b
