At some point in the next few days, Lloyd Wallace will blast down a steep ramp at 40mph, flip his body high into the air as he goes up another one, and perform a spectacular triple-twisting triple backflip. The move is dangerous enough by itself. But something else will also plague Wallace’s mind: the last time he attempted the trick, nearly three months ago, he ended up in a coma.
The British aerial skier remembers nothing of the incident in Mettmenstetten, Switzerland, on 17 August. Or the days he spent in a hospital bed. Instead he has pieced together fragments of what happened, like a detective, from those who watched his manoeuvre go badly wrong and then raced to rescue his lifeless body after it plunged into a pool of water. “It was just a normal training day at the water ramp,” he explains calmly. “I had done a few jumps in that session already, maybe five or so, and I was just attempting one of the tricks I have been doing for a few years now: a lay double-full full – a triple-twisting triple backflip.”
The move involves Wallace doing a first somersault, then dropping his arms to do two full rotations on the second flip, before twisting on a third flip and landing clean. It is, he insists, nowhere near as difficult as it sounds. But having caught a bad edge on the ramp everything suddenly went haywire.
“It put me off balance,” he continues, “and because we go through so much compression when we go up the jump I had buckled into it and hit from my hips to my head. I was knocked out immediately and fell into the water.
“I was very lucky that there were the Ukrainian and Belarusian doctors at the side of the pool who jumped in immediately and took me out. I was then helicoptered to hospital where they put me into an induced coma for 24 hours. I was extremely lucky that I did not have any major problems. The first thing I remember was probably being in hospital, waking up a few days later.”
Incredibly, Wallace suffered no other injuries apart from a serious concussion and was released from hospital soon afterwards. After two months of rehabilitation, he was recently able to begin jumping again. But rather than make him have second thoughts about his profession, the incident has only hardened the amiable 22-year-old’s resolve to emulate his parents, Robin Wallace and Jilly Curry, who competed for Team GB in aerial at the 1988 Winter Olympics – when it was a demonstration sport – and 1992 Games respectively.
“Both of my parents went to the Olympics doing this sport,” says Wallace, whose younger sister Elodie is also part of the British aerial ski team. “My dad coached it for years and years. They knew it could happen. But there was never a point where we were thinking: ‘Lloyd’s going to come out of hospital and not ski again.’
“It didn’t matter how long it was going to take, I was always going to get back on it and try and qualify for the Games.”
Wallace has the talent to go with that pedigree. Having been a national-ranked gymnast as a boy, he switched to aerial as a 14-year-old and progressed to the extent that two years ago he won bronze at the junior world championships. In 2016 he also achieved Britain’s best World Cup result since 1995 by coming seventh at Deer Valley in Utah. As things stand, he is in line to become Britain’s first male aerial skier to compete at an Olympics since Kevin Harbut in 1998.
Yet it looks like being a close-run thing. Only the top 25 in the world will go to Pyeongchang in February, and right now Wallace is ranked 21st. He knows he needs to perform in the six World Cup events this season, starting in Beijing next month. However if Wallace makes it to South Korea he believes his improvement since training full-time with the Switzerland team means anything is possible.
“I’m not expecting to go and get a medal but aerials is an incredibly high-risk sport,” he says. “There’s four knockout rounds. If it goes well, anything can happen in competition. It’s just one jump and every round is effectively a new competition so you crash one of those jumps, you’re out.
“As an athlete, when you hear about the Winter Olympics you get that little tingle,” he adds. “I think that tingle has been exaggerated since I’ve come back from my injury. And if it goes well for me, if I jump to the ability I know I can jump, I might be able to get myself into that Super Final. It’s anyone’s game then.”
At the very least Wallace knows he has a shot at glory. And that’s something not even he would have believed possible several months ago.