Beltrametti faces the future

Beltrametti addresses the media less than a month after his horrific crash Keystone

Less than four weeks after suffering permanent paralysis in a World Cup ski race, young Swiss star Silvano Beltrametti has spoken publicly about his fate and his hopes for the future.

After calling a media conference at the national paraplegic centre in Nottwil, the 22-year-old athlete said the last three and a half weeks had been extremely difficult but that he was now looking forward to building as independent a life as possible.

“In the last few weeks I’ve been swinging from the lowest low to the highest high, going down and up all the time,” Beltrametti admitted. “But now I think I’m ready to face the challenge of the next five months, the challenge of becoming another man.”

Five months is approximately the length of the rehabilitation course which Beltrametti will now undergo in Nottwil, having left the centre’s intensive care station on Wednesday.

Astonishing detail

Describing the months ahead as the hardest training camp he’ll ever have to attend, Beltrametti seemed well aware of the difficulties that still lie ahead, both physically and mentally. Already though he is able to talk in astonishing detail about the accident in Val d’Isere and explain how he’s beginning to come to terms with the aftermath.

“For a short time (after the crash) I didn’t know what was happening,” Beltrametti told the 60 or so journalists at Thursday’s media conference. “I lay there and immediately felt that I couldn’t move my legs anymore and knew 99 per cent that I was going to be permanently paralysed.

“Stroke of fate”

“I can only say that of the five hundred times that you go down a slope like that an accident such as this will happen one time. For me it’s just a stroke of fate, or something that God wanted so as to give me another type of challenge. And that’s how I’ve accepted it.

“A sportsman always has to think that when he has a bad injury it could still have been worse. And so I’m just happy now that I can be here, I can speak and think like a normal person.”

Beltrametti’s team of doctors at Nottwil said that even they had been surprised at how quickly the skier had begun his rehabilitation.

“In physical terms, his high level of fitness enabled us to mobilise him just two days after his operation,” Dr Dieter Michel told swissinfo. “Normally that would take around a week. And he’s also shown himself to be very strong mentally. It would usually take someone around one to two months to be able to talk the way he is talking.”

Long way to go

Dr Michel warned though that being able to talk about paraplegia is still a long way from actually accepting it.

“You can never really accept paraplegia but you can learn to live with it,” Dr Michel explained. “In my experience though it’s a question of many years. By the end of the five month physical rehabilitation, though, we hope to have helped Silvano towards some future profession.”

Beltrametti himself said he had not yet given any thought as to what that profession might be and added that he could not at the moment contemplate a life in disabled sport.

He insisted though that he had always been a fighter on the ski slopes and would remain one in the months and years ahead.

by Mark Ledsom