Barring a miracle, Tiana Gairns will not race this season on the World Cup ski cross tour.
A wipeout in training left her with a broken tibia, the weight-bearing bone just below the knee, and the 26-year-old from Prince George has been grounded ever since while her Canadian teammates have been shredding a path to the medal podium.
Injuries have been a common theme for Gairns through much of her World Cup career. She’s had concussions and a shoulder injury that forced her to miss the entire 2018-19 season and despite that was coming on strong the past two seasons, having achieved her first World Cup medal with a third-place result in March 2023.
She was just getting back into form recovering from a tendon injury that happened almost two years ago when she took a bad fall that broke her leg Nov. 27 in the Canadian team training camp in Idre Fjall, Sweden.
“I had a ski pop off because it was very rutty and really icy and trying to stop myself I hyper-extended my leg in the crash and the shock through it was hard enough that it blew up the top of my tibia,” said Gairns.
“It, being a break, is the best result I could have hoped for because it typically heals very well and I don’t have any ligament damage, which takes longer to come back from. My break didn’t require surgery, which means my timeline is probably half as long as it would be if I had surgery.”
Gairns is just started bearing weight on her injured leg and is doing what she can to keep her conditioning up. She thinks she’ll be back on skis in March but figures she won’t race again until next season - a critical one for ski crossers with the Olympics coming up in Italy in February 2026.
The Canadian ski cross team had a camp in September in Chile but Gairns had to go easy on her leg, still recovering from the injury to her hamstring tendon that limited her to just two races in 2023-24.
“After I stopped skiing last year it’s was pretty problematic for awhile and I had an injection this summer which seemed to help a bit, but there’s only a few things you can do for a tendon that will help and a lot of it is just slowly increasing the load,” she said.
“It finally had gotten to the point where I could handle a typical training load by Sweden and I was looking forward to the winter. The tendon injury has been tough, it hasn’t been just been an uphill progression, it’s been a lot of getting a little better and then getting worse, so I’ve had a lot of frustration.”
In ski cross, four skiers race each other on a steep twisty course packed with banked corners and high-speed jumps, and there’s no way to do that when one of your two shock absorbers is damaged. Gairns just needs time to heal her leg.
“I have the trust of the experience of getting back to a place where I was able to ski with my tendon and I knew it took six more months of progression to get there, and I haven’t lost all that progression, so I know a bit better now I can trust the process I will get there” she said. “Even though it feels slow and there’s bumps on the road I have that experience to rely on.”
O Canada has been getting plenty of airplay in the post-race awards ceremonies since the start of the season in early December. Canadians have won five of the first 10 World Cup races (men and women) and have 10 of the 21 podium finishes.
Reece Howden won the most recent World Cup race Dec. 21 in Innichen, Italy. The native of Cultus Lake, BC is second in the FIS points race with 296, just 14 back of leader Florian Wilmsmann of Germany. Kevin Drury of Toronto, the 2020 points champion, is also in the hunt, ranked sixth overall (109).
India Sherett of Cranbrook is second in the FIS World Cup points standings with 325, 44 behind leader Daniela Maier of Germany, while defending Crystal Globe champion Marielle Thompson of Whistler is not far off the pace in third place with 320 points, still within striking range for her fifth Crystal Globe. Hannah Schmidt of Ottawa ranks seventh and Abby McEwen of Edmonton is 10th in the world.
Since 2009, Canada has been a ski cross powerhouse in World Cup and X Games events and the current strength of the team bodes well for next season with the Olympics looming.
“We’re just so strong,” said Gairns, who raced her first World Cup event in January 2018. “Even in training you never know who’s going to beat each other and that shows how strong and deep our team is. When you have people who are consistently getting to the top of the podium or are consistently on the podium, and those are the people you’re training with, it doesn’t surprise me that everybody is skiing as well as we are.
“Having a team where you’re pushing each other in all the training environments is huge because there’s no day you can slack off. Because if you slack off someone will beat you. It’s just a culture that drives each other. It comes from the athletes but also from the coaches and the support staff - everyone’s looking for that advantage we can have over the other teams. The passion you find there and the motivation from everybody working toward the same goal and putting in the max effort into every day, that’s what shows in the end.”
Gairns and fellow World Cup team member Gavin Rowell of Prince George compete in a sport that operates in relative obscurity that doesn’t grab the public’s eye until the Olympics are on, when all of a sudden, people can’t get enough of a highly-entertaining event often referred to as roller derby on skis. Gairns says she likes the fact they are under the radar most of the time, in sharp contrast to the intense glare Canada’s world junior hockey team is now under this week in Ottawa.
“I appreciate that we have less pressure than some other sports, because if you think about someone who’s good at hockey, the amount of pressure they must feel from the amount of people cheering them on,” she said.
“Funding wise it’s a little bit harder, there’s not as much money in the sport because it’s a little bit more obscure. But for me personally it’s easier to perform because I don’t have as much pressure as a sport that would have the whole nation watching it.”
The World Cup tour resumes Jan. 15-16 in Reiteralm, Austria.
