Sun Valley, Idaho – CR Johnson no longer dreams of the Winter X Games. He is too busy focusing on reality.
Yet, with the annual action sports extravaganza getting underway Thursday in Aspen, Johnson, 23, finds himself talking a lot about dreams. After a freak skiing accident Dec. 8, 2005, left him in a coma for nearly two weeks, dreams were all he had.
The three months from mid-October 2005 to mid-January 2006 are still missing from his memory, recalled only in a surreal hallucination of being held captive in a small, cramped shack in the Utah Salt Flats before escaping and hopping a train back home to meet his family in Truckee, Calif.
The reality of that time span included filming a segment of his most recent ski movie, “Show & Prove,” at Brighton Resort in Utah’s Big Cottonwood Canyon. The segment called for Johnson to lead a small group of professional skiers over a blind jump in rapid succession. Johnson fell on the landing, veering off course and winding up in the path of his friend, Kye Petersen, who was unable to alter his trajectory off the jump before landing hard on Johnson’s head.
The accidental body check wedged through the narrow gap between Johnson’s helmet and goggles slammed his brain violently into the opposite side of his skull, creating trauma so severe doctors at Utah’s University Hospital induced a coma and pumped Johnson full of paralytic drugs in order to allow his damaged brain to heal. He remained comatose nearly a week longer than intended, eventually returning to consciousness, but completely paralyzed.
“I was totally helpless,” Johnson said last week. “It would take two days of really hard work just to be able to move my pinky.”
Podium to hospital in an instant
The reality of Johnson’s circumstance was a far cry from the dream life he once knew. Growing up on the snowy flanks of the fabled South Shore resorts dotting the saw-toothed frame of Lake Tahoe, Johnson learned to ride skis at the age most toddlers are learning to feed themselves.
Big mountain form cultivated on the steeps of Squaw Valley, Calif., combined with the new-school cool of halfpipe and terrain parks, and Johnson quickly emerged as a prodigy of all-around ability earning him magazine cover photos, feature film segments and reserved real estate on the sport’s most rarified podium platforms, including a silver medal spot for slopestyle and bronze medals in big air and superpipe at the X Games.
All that changed in an instant.
“That day changed the whole course of my life,” Johnson said. “There’s nothing I can do about it, so I’m not beating myself up over it, but I’ll always hate that day. Dec. 8 is the worst day ever.”
Never mind the sustenance of skiing, the kid who landed his first “1440” (four 360s combined) before age 15 was left struggling to stick a cracker in his mouth and swallow.
“I had to relearn everything. I had to relearn how to swallow food first, then how to use my vocal cords so I could talk, then how to walk,” Johnson said. “I had to learn everything over again, but I can remember last March when I went skiing with my dad. I just got off the chairlift and started skiing like I would normally ski. I wasn’t, like, hesitant or trying to go slow. It was a powder day, and I just charged right down the mountain like I would always charge on a powder day. It came so comfortable and so natural to me. It came to me easier than walking, easier than talking.”
What a difference a year makes
One year later, Johnson talks in the relaxed cadence of a typical California ski bum, hesitating only slightly when the conversation turns to this week’s X Games. Until about a month ago, Johnson had planned to compete, plotting his return to the superpipe with a visit to Breckenridge to train with an elite cadre of freeskiers, including friends Tanner Hall and Simon Dumont, in November and December.
“I was able to do 540s again and 720s again and alley-oop 540s again. And with decent amplitude, too. I mean, I was coming back. Initially I was skiing stronger than I anticipated that I would,” he said. “But at some point I just hit a wall, and I was just really scared to go any further. I couldn’t really see the tricks I was wanting to throw.”
Although his skills remain superior to the vast majority of the skiing world, Johnson still faces mental deficits that prevent him from returning to the upper echelon of pipe skiing.
“One of my deficits is computing high-level brain function and another one is multitasking. I mean, what is more of a high-level brain function and multitasking than halfpipe skiing?” he said.
The clincher came when Johnson attempted a 540-degree spin to his right side, what pipe skiers term “unnatural” for someone like CR, who naturally favors spinning to his left. Landing the jump too low in the pipe, his feet slipped out from under him and he rolled onto his head.
“I hit my head about as lightly as I could hit it falling in the pipe, and I lost 30 minutes of my memory from before that accident,” he said. “I just had my year-long checkup with my doctor and he showed me a new MRI of my brain, and there are three spots in my brain that are really big that are dead – for good. He told me, ‘Yeah, you could hit your head again and live, but if you are already down to 95 or 90 percent of your brain, how much more are you willing to spare?’ And the answer to that question is, ‘None.”‘
While there are any number of ways to react to such a life-altering injury, those who know Johnson best admire his remarkably upbeat attitude. His girlfriend, University of Colorado student Alexandra Gesten, unabashedly refers to him as her “biggest hero,” not for his amazing feats on skis, but his ability to remain positive and move forward in life with little remorse. Sponsors such as Spyder clothing, Smith eyewear, Monster Energy Drink and his hometown ski shop, Porter’s in Lake Tahoe, have signed him for another year of contracts despite his absence from the competition circuit. Only his former ski sponsor, Salomon, pulled out.
“I know he’s going to come back,” Gesten said. “I know he’s going to be an unbelievable person, and if skiing isn’t going to be what he’s going to do for the next five to 10 years, he has this unbelievable spirit in him that will find another passion in his life and he is going to succeed in it, whatever it is.”
New ventures on horizon
For now, “it” includes working as a commentator and analyst for events such as the Honda Ski Tour, which made its debut in Sun Valley last week, and working with a film production company, The Bigger Picture, he and Hall launched two years ago. Sponsorship commitments and appearances will keep him busy during the X Games, ideally distracting him from the competition he will miss for only the second time since 2000.
“It’s still a big pill for me to swallow. One day I was at the top of the halfpipe game, where I would be competing for the win in any halfpipe contest. And because of a completely freak accident – a collision with another person that I couldn’t control – now I can’t ski halfpipe anymore,” Johnson said. “I didn’t want this accident to get the best of me. And I don’t think it has. … I just had to assess what’s really important to me in my skiing career and pursue that. And right now, halfpipe skiing isn’t that important to me.”
Scott Willoughby can be reached at 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com.
