The so-called clothing is one of the first official acts of the new sporting winter, the German athletes procure the new collections from their sponsors, from winter jackets to sunglasses. And when it finally happened again, at a drafty regional airport in Schwäbisch Hall, the ski racer Thomas Dreßen looked like an ordinary member of the alpine entourage. He was wearing the new winter jacket, which this time comes in a sky blue that should look familiar to knowledgeable observers; Even in sports fashion everything comes back at some point.
Dreßen initially joked about his marriage last summer (“We still get along well”), he reminisced about the festivities (“We were blue too, so it goes with the new look”). It was only when the reporters turned the questions to the sporty that the tone adapted to the frugal temperatures in the airport hangar. By then, at the latest, it was clear that Dreßen’s coming winter would not follow the customary script either.
The 27-year-old from SC Mittenwald is one of the best downhill skiers on the planet, five victories in the World Cup, the first in February 2018 on the rock-hard Streif in Kitzbühel. This also helped him to gain some prominence beyond the white sausage equator. Since Dreßen had a hard crash in Beaver Creek three years ago, there has always been a little and sometimes a lot of air between his missions. Last winter he only got fit for the World Cup downhill, he finished 18th, far from his demands.
Also in the coming season, which begins at the weekend in Sölden, Dreßen will only be part-time at most, that much is already certain. The question is now not only whether he will be able to ski again in December or not until February for the Olympic Games in Beijing, if at all. The question is also what form the ski racer Thomas Dreßen will actually take in the future.
Dreßen recently started a shot drive through time in Schwäbisch Hall after he suffered a total loss in his right knee in Beaver Creek. “The cruciate ligament,” he said, was still the smallest evil, he had emphasized that many times. The bigger construction sites were elsewhere: in the battered meniscus, also in the cartilage. Even then, Dreßen was struggling to continue his career.
He won the following winter on the comeback, on the descent in Lake Louise, but looking back, he knows today that he fell into a well-known trap back then: “I wanted to come back too badly.” If the knee hurt, he “still did things” because they were on the schedule that they had worked out. Dreßen now knows: Sometimes you can get ahead faster if you take two steps backwards.
Microfracturing is the name of the procedure that is supposed to stabilize Dreßen’s cartilage
As a result, his body took time out, sometimes his hip bitch, sometimes his left knee. After the World Cup last February, he had an operation on his right knee, a “major operation,” said Dreßen: the doctors drilled into the bone that lies under the damaged cartilage, blood leaked from the bone tissue and flowed into the cartilage and curdled. The stem cells floating in this blood transformed into cartilage cells, which gave the damaged cartilage new support. This procedure is called microfracturing. So far, said Dreßen, the knee has been “basically calm” and the doctors are also very satisfied. However, they fall back on an empirically thin sample: Dreßen was only able to delve into fitness training until the end.
And another tiny problem: there are hardly any athletes who have returned to high-performance sport after such an intervention. “Tom,” said Alpine Director Wolfgang Maier in Schwäbisch Hall, “would be one of the first athletes to come back from it.” This is also due to the fact that the new cartilage mass is not as resilient as the original.
One who made it after the procedure was former national soccer player Piotr Trochowski, albeit briefly. And Dreßen rushes over freeways made of ice at well over 100 kilometers an hour in everyday driving; the downhill riders only have their own shock absorbers, and that’s the cartilage. In any case, it would be a balancing act if Dreßen came back: every couple of weeks at top speed over slopes where one mistake crumbles everything – with one knee that hardly forgives mistakes.
“I still plan to drive eight to ten years, in the best of cases”
At least one thing he could rule out, said Dreßen: that he was rushing something again. “I’m not interested in a schedule right now, I’m just interested in what makes sense for the knee. It’s not about whether I’ll come back a race sooner or later, but rather that the knee will be back at all.” In such a way that it is not enough for just one year, but for many winters in a row. At the end of November they scheduled the next load tests, and he could not train on skis again until early December at the earliest.
He will miss the races in North America and probably also in Val Gardena, after which he will only come back if he can meet his requirements. In other words: to take part in victories. But he firmly believed, assured Dreßen, “that we will all have a lot of fun together for many years to come”. If he sticks to the careful protocol. “I still plan to drive eight to ten years, in the best case scenario,” he said in Schwäbisch Hall, “that will mean the next games and maybe even the next ones.”
And because he was talking about long-term goals anyway, the newlywed added one more thing: “I’m not in the mood for an artificial knee at 40 either.” He doesn’t know when he’ll have children – “but I definitely want to go skiing with them”.