If the Games were held in 2020, it’s highly unlikely Sky would have been fit to compete in Tokyo.
Stu said his daughter was “lucky to be alive” after crashing last May between two ramps while attempting a jump in training, fracturing her skull, breaking her left arm and wrist, and suffering lacerations to her heart and lungs.
Her parents wanted her to stop skating but she said: “This will not stop me. I am going for gold in Tokyo 2021.”
In June a video was posted on her Instagram showing the moment she lost control at the top of a ramp. It cut away before the fall to a shot of an air ambulance, followed by a message to her followers from her hospital bed, black eye, arm in a cast.
Nothing is normal for this incredibly talented 13-year-old but perhaps this video, which has more than two million views, underlines just how different her life is.
Sky also tumbled before her Olympic qualifier, breaking her arm, but still came first while wearing a protective cast.
She breezed into Wednesday’s final in Tokyo, making light work of her heat with the second-highest score.
It was a nervy start as she fell in her first two runs, putting her fourth going into her last effort – which she admitted she wasn’t expecting.
“I thought I was gonna get it. I was a little shocked after the first run. Then after the second fall, I was like, ‘Am I gonna make it?’
“Sakura [Yosozumi, Japan’s gold medal winner] told me: ‘You got it, Sky. We know you’re gonna make it’. That really made me feel better.”
Words of encouragement from her dad also helped.
“He was like: ‘You know, it’s just a contest. It doesn’t define you.’ That made me feel better – it is just a contest and if you fall, that’s what it is,” added Sky.
The teenager, who celebrated her 13th birthday just 16 days before the opening ceremony in Tokyo, showed incredible composure to get a clean final run and complete the kickflip indy – the trick that wiped her out in her first two attempts – to seal the bronze with a score of 56.47.
