Ashley Wagner felt trapped in a world she didn’t understand.
Ten years ago, the future Olympic skater suffered skull-crushing headaches and failed to grasp basic conversation after banging her head on the ice multiple times. Words sounded garbled and she couldn’t summon a response to let people know her situation.
“I was stuck in this silent terror,” Wagner said.
America’s premier skater, who is performing Thursday and Saturday at the 2017 U.S. championships in Kansas City, Missouri, has waited almost a decade to reveal the harrowing experiences she has suffered from head injuries after falls. The three-time U.S. champion has started sharing the ordeal in the past year to jump-start a conversation about the risks of concussions in figure skating.
“Now it is important to get the skating world aware of the impact that concussions can have on your life if you leave them untreated and don’t actively do anything to improve yourself,” Wagner said.
A sport known for beauty, grace and circus-like jumping is just beginning to confront the concussion issue that has been at the forefront of safety concerns in contact sports such as football, hockey and soccer the past decade. Although statistics on head injuries are not available like in some other sports, elite skaters such as Wagner are calling for more awareness about the risks.
The first time Wagner hit her head she didn’t understand the long-term ramifications of traumatic brain injuries. The incident happened a year after forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu published medical research, in 2005, about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease that is caused by repetitive blows to the head. At the time sports-related concussions were not part of the national conversation like today.
The teenage Wagner was forced to deal with diminished cognitive functions without fully knowing what was happening to her.
“Coming from an Army family, it was one of those things you kind of walk it off,” she said in May while in San Jose for a Stars on Ice show.
Wagner, now 25, didn’t get the symptoms checked by a physician or let her brain recover from the first blow that happened while practicing difficult triple flip jumps unsupervised. She recalled being dizzy and seeing spots. The skater hit her head on the ice again when falling a few days later, and by her own account has suffered a half dozen concussions from spills during practices.
Robert Cantu, co-founder and medical director of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, said repeat incidents such as Wagner’s could lead to post-concussion syndrome that might last for years.
“I would get totally overwhelmed and lost on the ice,” Wagner said of performing after the first two head injuries. “I wouldn’t know where to go, I wouldn’t have an idea of my program because of everything going on around me would take away from my focus.”
She suddenly couldn’t handle math and science classes that had once come easy to her.
“To go from AP math classes to struggling to get through basic grade 12 math is something that is very humbling and disconcerting,” Wagner said. “When you feel like your life is out of control, I was desperately grasping at anything I could that would help everything make sense.
“If you break your arm and your arm hurts, it makes sense. You can’t see a broken brain.”
Although she has since consulted neurologists, the 2016 World silver medalist has created her own preventative program based on reading medical literature. Wagner challenges her mind with the singular pursuit of practicing triple jumps by learning to play guitar, studying Spanish and always reading — the current book is W. Bruce Cameron’s “Dog’s Purpose: A Novel for Humans.”
“If I got into that stagnant place I wasn’t going to get any better,” Wagner said.
The skater who trains under Rafael Arutyunyan in the Los Angeles area also does daily exercises to strengthen her neck muscles. Neurologists who study sports concussions recommend such exercises to help limit the damage should an athlete suffer a blow to the head.
Some physicians also promote the use of protective head gear while practicing. Wagner says skating’s vanity keeps her and many of her peers from wearing helmets.
“The anecdotes aren’t enough to scare them into doing something proactively,” said Stanford graduate Rachael Flatt, a 2010 Olympian who coaches at Sharks Ice San Jose. “There hasn’t been enough research” on traumatic brain injuries and skating.
Wagner’s initial fear of discussing her medical situation also highlights a problem in a sport where officials decide an athlete’s fate by making team selections for international competitions. Wagner kept her symptoms private because she was emerging as a serious candidate for the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver.
“Going into that Olympic cycle the last thing you want to have public is a flaw — and a flaw that is not going to go away,” she said.
Wagner eventually finished third at the 2010 trials when the United States had only two available Olympic spots. Four years later, the skater was fourth at the trials but made the Sochi Games team based on her performance over the entire season.
By most accounts, Wagner has enjoyed a thriving career despite limitations from the head injuries. Just learning a program’s choreography is difficult because of memory function loss. Wagner isn’t sure about the future of her cognitive health but doesn’t plan to retire even if she makes her second Olympics next year in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
“There is no place I’d rather be than center stage in the middle of that ice performing,” Wagner said. “It’s all I know. It’s all that I really want to know.”