Robbins Nest: Chronicling the comeback kids

At the risk of making this column sound like an American Medical Association report, if Dane Spencer’s return and Caroline Lalive’s determination to come back (again) aren’t two of the most compelling stories of the winter, two other nominees have to be Johnny Spillane and Marco Sullivan. Injured and re-injured (and in Spillane’s case, re-re-injured) in recent seasons, each of them never held a pity party for himself. Each simply tightened his jaw and trudged back into rehab so he could get back onto the World Cup. And in his first competition of this season, each finished second.
WARM FUZZIES: At the risk of making this column sound like an American Medical Association report, if Dane Spencer’s return and Caroline Lalive’s determination to come back (again) aren’t two of the most compelling stories of the winter, two other nominees have to be Johnny Spillane and Marco Sullivan. Injured and re-injured (and in Spillane’s case, re-re-injured) in recent seasons, each of them never held a pity party for himself. Each simply tightened his jaw and trudged back into rehab so he could get back onto the World Cup. And in his first competition of this season, each finished second.
    Spillane was the surprise gold medal-winner in the sprint at the 2003 Nordic World Championships in Val di Fiemme, Italy. In the final 150 meters, he blackjacked Austrian ace Felix Gottwald and Germans Ronny Ackermann and Georg Hettich just as they were divvying up the medals on their way to the finish line. Spillane shot up the left side and passed them to become the first American to win nordic gold at the Olympics or worlds level. (Indelibly etched in my mind’s eye is him sailing over the finish line twirling a ski pole over his head.) About 20 minutes later, he started hitting a blizzard of injuries. Shoulder problems and back ailments almost derailed him. His mantra, though, remains “It’s OK, colonel. It’s only a flesh wound. I can charge that machine gun nest.” On Nov. 30, he turned on the jets in the final 200 meters or so in Kuusamo, Finland, and hot-footed his way to second place behind Ackermann. “Johnny never gave up on himself,” his dad, Jim, said following the podium. “He was determined to make it back.”
    On Dec. 4, 2003, Sullivan crashed at the bottom of a training run on Beaver Creek’s Birds of Prey run, exploding ligaments in his right knee. He missed the rest of ’04 and all of ’05, but returned to make the 2006 Olympic team. When he didn’t get to race, it motivated him to put some urgency and consistency into training and racing. A year ago, he turned in his best World Cup result, finishing fourth in Val Gardena, Italy, one-hundredth of a second off what would have been his first podium. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, in the first downhill of this season, Sullivan was second at Lake Louise. Welcome back to the podium, guys …

M*A*S*H Report: Former U.S. and Canadian cross-country head coach Marty Hall is on the shelf. He slipped on ice while getting into the Silver Star nordic playpen in British Columbia. He had two hips replaced several years ago — improved his golf swing, he said — but now he’s broken one. … The VIP section during the Audi Aspen Winternational had a hospital ward look as it included Lalive, aspiring World Cup racer Julia Littman and former women’s team mother hen Lisa Wilkinson. Lalive is rehabbing from a right knee injury from a training crash in October in Pitztal, Austria; she’s planning on moving to Santa Barbara, Calif., next month to resume her education while she continues her rehab, using the same trainer Bryon Friedman has been working with for two years. Littman tore her right ACL in a preseason crash last month at Copper Mountain.
    Wilkinson, who left the team after the 2006 Olympic season, shredded an ACL, too — playing dodgeball. (Probably wasn’t wearing her pads, of course). … Ex-moguls world champ Hannah Kearney, out for the last month of last season following left ACL surgery, is expected back in action next month when the freestyle World Cup circus makes its annual North American swing. … And let’s not overlook moguls skier Dave Babic, who took a bullet in his singlehood. He’s the newest newlywed on the freestyle team but details are sketchy on his wedding …

ADD LINER: Lalive, continuing to think positively (“Oh, I have my down times, too,” she conceded) in her umpteenth comeback, puts all of her injuries into a comic book scenario. “I think I have a super power. Y’know, all those super heroes with the super powers, but they all have their kryptonite,” which renders them powerless. “That’s me — I have a super power to heal … and then it all explodes on me,” she said, laughing through the pain. Before her latest medical miscue, she, of course, was injured two years ago on the day she was named to her third Olympic squad …

BREVITY IS … : Kris Freeman is from Cow Hampshuh, which produced golden-tongued orator (and statesman) Daniel Webster. But Webster Freeman ain’t. It’s not in his DNA to be loquacious; and, of course, loquacious is a word Freeman — the posterchild for managing diabetes (“I live my life without limits”) — probably wouldn’t use under any circumstances. Still, you have to marvel at his ability to telescope a potentially long answer into minimum verbiage. Discussing his fifth-place finish Dec. 2 in a 15-kilometer classic technique race on a hilly course in Kuusamo, Finland, Freeman said simply, “It was a race about fitness — and I’m fit.”… The irony, of course, 72 hours before the race, he was getting over a cold that laid him low much of the week and kept him in bed for a couple of days. …

Colin Hilton, president and CEO of the Utah Athletic Foundation, won’t be getting a lump of coal in his stocking this Christmas. Certainly not if U.S. Ski Team athletes ¬— particularly aerialists, ski jumpers and nordic combined athletes — have anything to do with it. Hilton has directed a tidal change in thinking at Utah Olympic Park, setting an adamantly pro-active direction for dealing with national federations. Aerialists will be training at UOP until Dec. 22 and the nordic skiers got to jump longer at the end of summer and then got back on snowy ski hills earlier than usual, courtesy of Hilton’s “We’re here to help the sports” approach …

Still looking for that perfect Christmas gift? It’s never a bad time to give (or receive) flannel sheets … mmmmmm …

Warm holidays.