CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — When Emily Fischnaller stepped to the luge starting line eight months after a horrific crash at the 2018 Olympic Games that left her with a broken neck and broken back, an unfamiliar emotion flooded through her body, one she hadn’t felt in 15 years of doing her sport. Fear. Crashes, luge athletes will tell you, are part of the game, a necessary teaching tool that helps young lugers learn how to navigate sliding on their back down an icy course, sometimes faster than 90
Fear.
Crashes, luge athletes will tell you, are part of the game, a necessary teaching tool that helps young lugers learn how to navigate sliding on their back down an icy course, sometimes faster than 90 miles per hour. You crash, you learn from it, you get back on the sled.
But in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Fischnaller (née Sweeney) had a different experience.
On her fourth and final run, Fischnaller lost control on the ninth curve, and her sled lost contact with the ice — a scenario that can quickly take a sliding sports crash from bad to catastrophic. She careened off her sled and slammed into the ice as medical personnel rushed to help her.
Luge is the most dangerous of the three sliding sports (bobsled and skeleton are the others) — ironic because athletes in that event actually have the most control. The tension in a luge sled allows athletes to manipulate it just so, digging in the runners and steering with sharp precision around curves. But if the sled catches wrong, “it can take you somewhere you really don’t want to be,” said Fischnaller, who is set to compete at her third Olympic Games when women’s luge begins Monday. While women’s doubles makes its Olympic debut in Cortina, Fischnaller will compete only in women’s singles.
Winter Olympic athletes, particularly those who compete in events that involve flying down a mountain or icy track at breakneck speeds, are not exactly known for self-preservation instincts. They compete in heart-stopping sports that inspire both awe and fear, all with the knowledge that what they’re doing could kill them. That adrenaline rush, they admit, is part of the appeal.
Fischnaller, 32, is no different. After the crash, she walked gingerly through the mixed zone, assuring reporters, “I’m OK.” It wasn’t until test results came back that she and Team USA doctors realized she’d broken her neck, back and pinky finger. And it could have been worse: In a split-second decision, Fischnaller had the awareness to tuck her head as she started to crash, preventing what could have been a severe concussion.
At this time, this was of little comfort to her sister Megan.
Megan, 38, was a luge Olympian herself at the 2010 Games. She understands the intricacies and dangers of the sport and, like her little sister, never really feared crashing. But when she saw it live — Megan was in South Korea at the time — her stomach plummeted.
“As soon as she went over the hill and lost contact with the ice, I knew what was happening. To this day, I haven’t even seen the rest of the crash,” Megan said, her voice catching. She paused before choking out the next sentence through tears. “I just, I can’t watch it again. I won’t.”
Fischnaller immediately flew home to upstate New York, hopped up on painkillers and muscle relaxers that did little to quell her discomfort. Typically, when an athlete is injured at the Games, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee protocol is to upgrade them to first class for their trip home. It made no difference for Fischnaller. “There was just no comfortable position,” she recalled.
All events have concluded. See full medal count.
Back in the States, a brutal car ride over a wintery, bumpy road awaited her. Gripped with pain, tears streamed down her face the entire two-hour trip from the airport to her parents’ home in Albany.
More tests and conversations with doctors revealed that surgery wouldn’t be necessary. Fischnaller simply needed to wait it out and let her body heal. She said X-rays now “make it look like there’s a thumb in my neck. Bone-wise, everything just kind of fills in. I compressed one of my other vertebrae, too, and now it’s oddly shaped. But it’s stable.”
Within months, she was back to training. This came as no surprise to Megan, who said Emily, the youngest of the three Sweeney children, has always had a “fly or die” mentality.
“I mean, not literally,” Megan said. “But the rest of us, especially when we were little doing ski lessons and learning luge, we’re holding our breath. She’s like, how fast can we go?”
In hindsight, Emily says now, she came back “way too early.” She struggled with the push and pull of wanting to be with her team, and wanting to give herself time to recover. She also worried that if she didn’t return to the ice quickly, psychologically, she might never be able to.
“That crash hit me from all angles,” she said. “It was physical, mental — I’m not even religious, but it was spiritual, too. When you go through something like that, you lose parts of yourself. I was afraid of going through something like that again, afraid because I didn’t know, physically, what my body was going to do.
“This sport had never scared me before, and now I was scared on multiple levels.”
She wasn’t in shape, either. When she first returned to the track, her nervous system was so unaccustomed to sliding that she threw up after every practice run.
So why didn’t she just walk away?
She sighed.
“I’m way too stubborn.”
She also had a support system. Fischnaller leaned hard on her family, teammates and coaches, as well as her then-boyfriend, now husband, Italian luger Dominik Fischnaller, the two-time Olympic bronze medalist in men’s singles after earning the podium again Sunday in the men’s event. She met with a psychologist for a year. And she reminded herself that if she wanted to return to the sport she loved, there was an element of control she had to relinquish.
“There are no breaks in luge,” she said. “As soon as you pull off, you’re in it. That leap was really challenging to take again.”
But it proved possible. In January 2019, less than a year after her crash, she won bronze at the world championships in Winterberg, Germany.
Summer Britcher, who has been teammates with Fischnaller going on 20 years, witnessed Fischnaller’s comeback firsthand and remains in awe of a woman she considers both a friend and competitor.
“It was really hard to watch,” Britcher said of the crash. “The way she handled that, to come back the following year, was amazing. And she’s continued that work ethic, approach and strong mentality over the past seven years.”
Soon, Fischnaller set her sights on the 2022 Games, determined to not let her last Olympic memory be one of heartbreak.
In Beijing, she finished 26th during a Games that everyone described as disappointing and not a true Olympic experience given the harsh COVID restrictions. Training for the next quad was a foregone conclusion, especially because it was scheduled to be held in Cortina, Fischnaller’s new home. Last summer, she and Dominik built a house in Meransen, Italy, near the Austrian border and about 90 minutes from the new Cortina track.
Fischnaller said she lives now with a baseline of pain that’s become her new normal. She’s had to adjust her training, pre- and post-race routines, constantly assessing how fatigued her neck is. “Once I get to a compromised spot, it spasms, and then I’m out,” she said. She’s had to make tweaks at home, too: She can no longer sleep on her side, which makes Dominik envious. “I wish I could sleep on my back!” he’ll whine to her. “Break your neck,” she’ll tease.
She has not returned to the South Korea track, and has no plans to. She’s confident she could conquer it this time, physically and mentally. But at what cost?
Coming into Cortina, she is ranked 14th in the world. Britcher, appearing in her fourth Olympics, is No. 2, and the best U.S. chance to medal, though Fischnaller did win bronze at last year’s world championships.
She’s found joy and purpose off the track, too. She started a non-profit, Champions 4 Change, aimed at connecting Olympians and Paralympians with disabled individuals. Last summer, she enrolled — and excelled in — German courses, determined to converse with locals around her new home.
But she still wants an Olympic medal. While Fischnaller acknowledges that it would be great if she had the attitude that simply finishing a luge race is a win after what she went through, she’s not exactly wired that way.
“I wish I had that perspective,” she sighed. “But I want to win, always.”
That attitude gives Megan relief. It’s on brand for her sister to attack her sport with an unforgiving relentlessness, a singularly-focused passion that’s infectious and inspiring. It’s who she was as a little girl, who she still is now and who she’ll be when she steps to the starting line Tuesday.
“I broke my neck and back at the Olympics doing extreme sledding. Like, that’s not relatable to the average person,” Fischnaller said. “… But I’m also a person who went through a traumatic experience who put herself back together to face a fear, and that’s really relatable.”
This week, she’ll be fearless again.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Olympics, Global Sports, Women's Olympics
2026 The Athletic Media Company
Category: General Sports
