Alpine Skiing

It wasn't even a sure thing that he'd be racing that day.

Jan Hudec had been back with the Canadian team for less than a month when the tour stopped in Val d'Isère for the world alpine championships in February. His triumphant return and eighth-place finish in the downhill at Wengen three weeks earlier - the same place he'd fallen and blown out his right knee for the third time exactly a year before - wasn't enough to earn him a spot automatically among the four Canadian men in the field.

Manuel Osborne-Paradis, Erik Guay and John Kucera were all guaranteed a place by virtue of podium finishes during the 2008-09 season. That left one bib available, and during the final training run on the steep, technical and icy Bellevarde course, Robbie Dixon actually finished slightly ahead of Hudec. But the coaches bowed to Hudec's experience, to his record (a silver medal in the 2007 world championships downhill, and first- and third-place finishes in World Cup races) and perhaps just a little bit to sentiment, given how hard he'd fought to get back on skis following the fifth surgery on his right knee.

When he slid off the course after leading at the first interval and fell awkwardly into the netting, they had to feel sick at the sight.

"I knew before I stopped sliding that I blew my knee," Hudec says from his home base in Calgary. "I couldn't believe this was happening again."

Kucera won that race, the highlight of an encouraging season for the Canadian men, but Hudec couldn't even stick around for the celebration. He was on a plane the next day, headed home, headed for surgery to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament and partially torn medial collateral ligament, this time in his left knee.

It could have been worse.

"If it had been his right knee again," says Alpine Canada's head physiotherapist, Kent Kobelka, "his career would have been over."

So now, some good news. Competing at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games is a realistic target.

After the fall, Hudec, who will turn 28 in August, returned to spend a week at home in Calgary while the knee settled down, and then headed for London, Ont., where his surgeon, Dr. Robert Litchfield, picked him up at the airport.

"It's nice to have a good relationship with the guy that's cutting you open," he says. The operation detected no added damage beyond the ligament tears, a relatively clean knee injury as these things go. "It was pretty standard, actually," Hudec says. "Compared to some of the other surgeries, it's actually been pretty nice."

He was walking and riding a stationary bicycle two days after surgery, and a week later was off to Whistler, where he reconnected with other members of the team training on the Olympic course during a break in the World Cup calendar. "That's where I realized that I could go off the drugs and start biking and really walking on it pretty well," Hudec says.

After that, it was back to Calgary, where he began an off-season regimen necessarily a bit different than the norm, though for somebody who has been under the knife so often, it must be hard now to remember exactly what the norm is.

Kobelka - who jokes that he and Hudec are almost "life partners" now because of all the time they have spent together through his injuries - says that after watching the tape of Hudec's race in Val d'Isère, he could tell that the knee actually gave way before the fall. It would seem true that he is more prone to knee injuries than others precisely because of the extreme angles he's capable of assuming while cutting through the gates. In other words, his strength is also his weakness.

The first phase of Hudec's recovery is purely rehabilitative. While the rest of the Canadian men's speed team are in Whistler this week for a final training session before a month of free time - their only real break - Hudec will continue with a program focusing heavily on cardio training (on a stationary bicycle, elliptical trainer, rowing machine and in the pool), as well as a series of balance exercises. No twisting and turning allowed.

"We want things to heal," Kobelka says. Those sessions run from 8 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon five days a week.

On or around May 10, the skiers will reconvene at Canada Olympic Park for testing. Then the eastern contingent moves on to Montreal, while the western skiers remain in place to begin almost three months of gruelling work in the gym. Days start with a four-hour workout beginning at 8:30, followed by another three or four hours in the late afternoon.

"It's kind of like a split shift at the office," Hudec says, "just a lot more physically demanding."

There's weight training every day, mixed in with cardio, agility training, core strengthening, stretching, and physio, both for lingering injuries and simply for maintenance.

Hudec will begin weight training then, and keep up as best he can.

Come the beginning of August, the team will head to winter skiing in South America - the technical skiers to Argentina, the speed team to Chile.

What Hudec will be doing in Chile depends on his progress. He says that he feels as though he could be up on snow, at least sliding around a bit, right now. "But how it feels now and how it really is inside are two different things. You really need to let it heal. I learned that from the last one."

So he'll take it easy - free skiing, and going through drills before joining the rest of the team in racing mode, running gates.

By the time they make a second trip to South America in September, following a two-week break back home, Hudec hopes to have pretty much caught up with the program. The skiers will move to the Farnham Glacier in British Columbia in early autumn, where the snow ought to be approaching winter conditions, and then head for more glacier training in Austria, in advance of the season-opening giant slalom races there, with the larger goal of being ready for the first World Cup downhill of the year at Lake Louise in late November.

That's almost three months before the big race in Whistler - and that's also when Hudec hopes to be back racing in a Canadian uniform, giving him plenty of time to return to form in advance of an Olympics on home soil. But only if all systems are go.

"I'm old enough now and I think mature enough that I can make that decision," he says. "If it really doesn't feel right, it's not worth the risk just because it's a home race. If it feels right, I'm definitely going to do everything possible to race - not just show up, but really make a bit of an impression."

"He can and will be ready for the Olympics," Kobelka says. "If everything goes well, he should be there to compete to be on that podium."

HUDEC'S HIGHS AND LOWS

Age: 28

Birthplace: Sumperk, Czech Republic

Residence: Calgary

Club: Banff Alpine Racers

Major injuries:

Dec. 7, 2003 Tore anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee during World Cup super G race in Beaver Creek, Colo.

Dec. 11, 2004 Tore anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee during Val d'Isère World Cup downhill.

Jan. 8, 2008 Tore anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee and partially tore medial collateral ligament during World Cup downhill training session at Wengen, Switzerland.

World Cup record:

Debut Feb. 2. 2002 downhill at St. Moritz (finished 49th).

Starts: 39

Victories: 1 (Nov. 24, 2007 downhill at Lake Louise).

Other podiums: 1 (bronze, Dec. 29, 2007 downhill at Bormio).