“I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis about a month and a half before the Sochi Olympics. And I had a really hard 7 months before that where I was undiagnosed and still trying to train and ride. I was getting a lot of random injuries that the doctors couldn’t really explain and I wasn’t able to train properly or ride. Those were some really dark times leading into those Olympics because it was something I dreamed about for a long time getting to go and there was definitely a long period of time that I wasn’t sure if that was going to happen. So that was a really really rough time, I was so grateful just to get to the Olympics and to be able to ride but it was pretty heart breaking to not ride the way I know I can and the way I could have.
The months leading up were even worse because I think there were moments where I’m like, ‘am I going to snowboard again?’, and when I was diagnosed too it’s like ‘how am I going to do an extreme high impact sport with a joint disease’, and those moments leading up were scarier because yeah, my sport was threatened. Like it’s one thing to not get to go to the Olympics but it’s another thing to not be able to snowboard again. But yeah, The Olympics was heart breaking for me, I never expected to feel that way and never felt like that from falling in a contest before but that’s just the thing, everything is magnified there and everything is under the microscope. You don’t really realize it until it happens because I didn’t prepare myself to feel that way.” – Spencer O’Brien, Pro Snowboarder, X Games Gold Medallist, Olympian. (5/7)
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