You have only to see the smashed helmet to realize how close Richard Long came to death when he lost control on an Arapahoe Basin slope and slid head-first into a tree.
The plastic shell is broken, and a caved-in section of the charcoal-colored liner shows the spot just above and behind his ear where his skull fractured.
“Without the helmet, there is very little doubt, he would not have survived,” Stewart Levy, chief neurosurgeon at St. Anthony Central Hospital, said today at a news conference.
Long, 15,a member of the Ontario Alpine Ski team, was practicing a giant slalom run Nov. 12 when he collided with the tree at up to 50 miles per hour, said his father, Brammer Long.
Richard Long, whose ability to speak and process language was damaged, sat quietly in a wheelchair as his father recounted the accident — and the anxious two week-long wait for his son to come out of a coma, to members of the media.
Brammer, 50, a professional ski coach, was with another son at Copper Mountain, when a second coach got a call from A-Basin telling him of the accident. “I looked at the coach and he said “I think it is bad.”
Brammer took the cell phone to talk to a third coach who was working with Richard when the boy lost control dodging one of the poles making up the course. “By the tone of the coach’s voice I spoke to, I thought he wasn’t going to make it,” he said, tears welling in his eyes.
Weather conditions kept the Flight for Life helicopter grounded, and Richard was rushed down from the mountains in an ambulance.
His left temporal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for speech and language, was bruised, and he had multiple broken bones and a ruptured spleen, Levy said.
He was given drugs, lots of them, to control swelling of his brain. Though his spleen had to be removed, he didn’t require brain surgery.
Two weeks later he surfaced from his coma, said Lisa Long, 45, his mother. “It was a huge relief to see him wake.”
Levy expects Richard to recover his ability to speak, and to ski again. But he doesn’t know if the boy, who hoped to compete in the Olympics, will ever ski as well as he did before the accident.
“I think he will want to race again,” his father said, and Ron, trying to speak, nodded his agreement.
On Thanksgiving Day, with the accident still on her mind, Lisa took her other son, Braden, 18, to ski where Richard was injured. “It was the hardest thing to do,” she said.
She won’t try to stop Richard if he wants to race again. “We will support him in what he wants to do.”
Tom McGhee: (303)954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
