CANMORE, Alta. – A pair of ski boots designed to control pain may be one key to Chandra Crawford’s bid to return to Olympic cross-country skiing glory.
The young skier from Canmore created Canadian elation at the 2006 Turin Winter Games, stunning more experienced rivals with a 1.1-kilometre dash to a sprint gold medal.
She stood atop the podium and belted out the national anthem, a clip that remains on YouTube, attracting about 137,000 hits.
However, times have changed, and one of Canada’s top winter athletes must now overcome injuries – and a year off the World Cup circuit – in order to simply qualify for next year’s Vancouver Olympics.
In a recent phone interview from Ramsau, Austria, she said that part of her solution lies in her unpublicized journey to this European resort town in the country’s northeast, where Fischer, the ski manufacturer that sponsors Crawford, is doing research for her custom footwear.
She needs boots for skate skiing that will not aggravate her peroneal tendons, which curve behind the ankles.
“My problem is pain on my ankle bones,” she explained. “It seems that after all of this powerful skate-ski sprinting over the past 10 years … this tendon jumps up onto the ankle bone.”
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![Chandra Crawford celebrates her gold medal at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Torino](http://images.fasterskier.com/2009/02/crawford.jpg" "Chandra Crawford celebrates her gold medal at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Torino")
One comment
Martin Hall
November 5, 2009 at 9:52 am
I wish Chandra and Fischer all the best of luck in resolving this problem, but my experience is to stop the tendon from rolling the ankle bone will require surgery. I’ve had 2 experiences with skiers over the years with both National teams with this same occurrence or injury and we tried everything and both cases ended up on the operating table. The groove or notch the tendon rides in is too shallow and that is why the tendon can move or slide out and over the ankle bone.
The surgery requires deepening the groove—that’s what was done and what I remember.