In an instant, one of his bones broke, his career too. While she was at the top of her sport at the national level, Tifany Huot-Marchand must now fight if only to walk again. On October 9, the tricolor short-tracker suffered a serious fall during a competition in the Netherlands. Since then, the 28-year-old Frenchwoman has been fighting to regain the use of her right hand and walk again, with the hope of skating again one day.
In L’Équipe, Tifany Huot-Marchand talks about “the most difficult ordeal of [sa] life “. “I’ve already fallen a thousand times except that when I fell, I immediately knew it was going to be serious, begins the champion. It’s more than rare in the world of short-track. It shocked everyone. »
In the 1000m semi-final, the French short-tracker tried to overtake before getting caught up in the fall of one of her opponents. The diagnosis made, the skater suffers from a fracture of the cervical C5 and must undergo an operation.
“I’m so disappointed that I didn’t pass out…”
“When I fell, with the shock, I was told that my brain went into off mode because it was such a violent impact… I’m so disappointed that I didn’t pass out because I ‘ve seen and felt everything, says the short-tracker. Felt, no, because I no longer felt my legs and my body at all. It was just my eyes moving. (…) In my head, I was already telling myself that it was unthinkable that I would never walk again. »
Evacuated by helicopter, Tifany Huot-Marchand is then taken to the emergency room. “This fracture pinched the nerves and the spinal cord, which is why my arms still burn me today,” she laments.
“You’ll probably never walk again”
The Frenchwoman meets her surgeon just before the operation. “Before anesthetizing me, she says, he looked at me and said to me: You will probably never walk again. I started screaming and they put me to sleep. »
Today, Tifany Huot-Marchand specifies that she can sit all day, a great evolution. “I still don’t feel my legs when I walk. I don’t know how to describe this feeling. I walk but I don’t have the sensations inside my thighs, ”she describes.
The fight still looks long but the French has only one goal in mind: to practice her passion again. “When they learned of the accident, many members of my family told me that they hoped that I would never do short-track again. I told them that ice cream was my goal. “If she chose to testify on this ordeal, it is also because she wishes” to give hope to other people “.
