Covid, carnage and convalescence: Why one athlete’s extraordinary journey to the Olympics took 16 years
By Don Riddell, CNN
(CNN) — From the age of just nine, Bruna Moura vowed that she would make something of her life. She can vividly remember being pulled to the front of the classroom in Foz do Iguaçu in Brazil so that her teacher could belittle her for not answering a question 100% correctly.
“She said that I was too dumb and I would never go anywhere, never be anything, never be anyone,” she recalled in an interview with CNN Sports.
The question? Which South American countries border Brazil, and which do not?
She says that she answered most of it correctly, forgetting only Bolivia and Suriname. By the time she got back to her seat, Moura was determined to prove her teacher wrong.
She said, “It was in that moment I decided whatever I want to be in life, I will get to the top of it.”
By the time she was 15, her aspirations were beginning to crystallize: Moura would be a professional athlete and compete in the Olympic Games.
“The top of a sports career is reaching the Olympics,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in the first or the last place, if you are an Olympian, your name is written in the books.”
On February 10, at the age of 31, Moura became an Olympian, but her road to the Games was tougher than she could have ever imagined – a 16-year odyssey involving both summer and winter sports, a Covid-19 scare and a fatal car crash that could have easily killed her.
A heart defect leads to a new path
Moura’s original plan was to compete in her home Olympics, in Rio, as a mountain biker in 2016. But fate had other plans.
A promising talent on the junior World Cup circuit, Moura was diagnosed with an atrial septal heart defect that would require surgery. She couldn’t afford to pay for the treatment, so one of her former coaches – who was also a cross-country skier – invited her to a training camp to try and raise some funds.
It turned out to be kismet – not only was Moura able to pay for the surgery, but she also discovered a new sport.
“I saw in cross-country skiing an opportunity, maybe a better chance, to fulfil my dream,” she said.
Moura competed in her first cross-country world championships in 2017, and she set her sights on the 2022 Beijing Olympics. She qualified for the second and final berth in the Brazilian women’s team at the last attempt in Switzerland.
“It was an explosion of excitement,” she recalled. “I could hardly believe it because, for 2022, it was a very difficult process, it was just joy.”
Her Olympic dream was so near, but little did she know it was still so far. The day after the Brazilian Olympic Committee announced her place on the team, she tested positive for Covid-19 and was sent into quarantine where she was training in Austria.
She says that she punched the wall in frustration: “It was really difficult to deal with, how am I going to test negative in time to fly?”
The clock was certainly ticking – her flight to Beijing was scheduled for January 26 and it was already January 18.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she said, “It was really difficult to deal with.” She remembers thinking, “This is the worst moment of my life, it cannot get any worse. Little did I know.”
An Olympic dream crashes in Italy
Moura quarantined herself in Austria, and she was testing negative on January 24.
On January 27, she was able to leave quarantine, planning to travel from Obertilliach to Munich to catch a flight to Beijing. She intentionally booked a minivan so there would be room for her ski equipment and enough distance between herself and the driver to reduce the risk of any coronavirus contamination.
For reasons she still doesn’t understand, the driver chose not to travel through Lienz, instead he plotted a more indirect route through Northern Italy. She remembers his face and their initial conversation and how she began to feel anxious and sick in the back seat as he picked up speed on the fast roads below the mountains.
She had surprised herself by not immediately putting on her seatbelt but was now having visions of opening the door and jumping out if anything went wrong. Moura fastened her seatbelt and tried to doze off; she says that when she opened her eyes, everything seemed to be black.
“There was no door on the side and some people in the van, and I was like, ‘What is happening here?’” she said. “I couldn’t remember anything. Where was I going to? Where I’m coming from? I couldn’t remember anything, the only thing I knew was that I am Bruna.
“Two seconds later, everything was hurting badly and I could barely breathe. Every time I tried to breathe, my lungs would hurt a lot.”
What happened became painfully clear: A devastating head-on car crash. Photos from the scene show that the van she was traveling in had come to rest diagonally against a guard rail and the front of the vehicle had been totally crushed. A fuel truck lay on its side a few feet away.
Moura says she asked about the driver, but nobody would answer. She later learned he had been killed upon impact.
It was only after she had been airlifted to hospital that she began piecing everything together – she’d been involved in a head-on collision and her left side was a mess. She had sustained lung damage, her arm was broken in two places, she had three broken ribs and had three fractures in her foot. Her shoulder and abdomen were badly injured; she had a severe concussion. She was lucky to be alive.
If she hadn’t fastened her seatbelt, or if she’d been sitting in the front, she would have been killed. If she hadn’t been wearing durable shoes, she would have lost her foot.
“I had angels on my shoulders,” she said.
It just so happened that the crash had occurred only 50 miles from Tesero in Italy, where the Olympic Cross Country skiing competition would be held in 2026; so near, but so far. At that moment, her Olympic dreams seemed to be dashed.
The doctors allowed her to convalesce at home, 11 hours away, in The Netherlands. She slept downstairs in the living room and watched the Olympics on television. She said the opening ceremony felt like a punch in the face.
“I remember the Brazilians entering the stage and I really wanted to cry,” she lamented. “That was the moment where I felt it’s over. I didn’t want to show my family how sad I was because I knew they were so sad for me.”
Coming full circle
Watching the Games was bittersweet, but it was also a welcome distraction from her pain and suffering. She barely got out of bed for the first three weeks, but two months after the accident, she was able to walk without crutches.
By August, she was roller skiing again and, although her foot was still hurting, she set her sights on the next Olympics in 2026 and a return to northern Italy.
Four years later, Bruna Moura finally made it to the start line of an event at the Olympic Games – the qualification race for the Sprint Classic. As she reflected on her journey, it was hard not to be overwhelmed by all the memories of everything it had taken to get this far.
“I got so emotional that I was shaking, I totally lost my power,” she said.
She had waited 16 years, and now she was just moments away from fulfilling her dream: “In about five minutes, I am an Olympian, the faster I finish, the faster I am an Olympian.”
Of the 89 skiers who entered the qualification round, Moura finished 74th; two days later, she competed in the 10km, finishing 99th out of 111 starters. In both events, once she had crossed the finish line, she remained to celebrate the Olympic spirit with every skier who came home afterward.
From start to finish at these Games, her joy has been written all over her face.
Moura knows how fragile life can be, how easily her story could have been written another way. She competed in Italy with photos of her late grandma and one of her best friends tucked inside her suit; Maíra Marques de Oliveira had promised to cheer for her on the sidelines when she made it to the Olympics, but she died suddenly from a pulmonary embolism in 2024.
She still has medical challenges and has learned to live with the constant pain in her foot. She says she thinks about the accident every day. Before leaving Italy, she will return to the site of the crash, in front of the Lodenwirt hotel in Vandoies di Sopra.
“To think that everything went so wrong, not so far from here, and now I am having the moment of my life in this place so close to where that all happened, it is crazy,” she said. “It feels like I’m closing the circle.”
The stars of the Olympics are the athletes who stand on the podium, adorned in medals, but Bruna Moura is proof that every athlete has an inspirational story to tell.
“No matter what the setbacks are, you need to keep fighting for what you believe, for what you really, really want,” she said.
“Becoming an Olympian is a dream, but seeing my story spread in such a positive way and bring hope to other people is my gold medal. I couldn’t have dreamed of anything better, not even close to this.”
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