Olympic skeleton racer Katie Uhlaender has sustained numerous broken bones and other types of injuries that would make most elite athletes consider retirement.
A knee cap that was shattered in seven places, a broken foot and ankle, a torn hip muscle and a blown-out knee have resulted in eight surgeries and a series of physical setbacks.
But it was a broken heart that sent the 29-year-old off course in 2009.
Her father Ted Uhlaender, the former major league outfielder who played for the Minnesota Twins and Cincinnati Reds, died from cancer.
“He was all about me doing whatever I wanted to do as long as I put a 100 percent into it,” Uhlaender tells The Post from Sochi, Russia, ahead of the opening ceremony on Friday. “And he made me work for it. Part of why I think losing him was so hard is because he was such a key component to my foundation. I felt like, after I lost him, I was relearning how to approach life without him. He was always there for me to go to if I had doubts.”
It was the toughest blow for the laid-back, free spirit with a shock of “patriotic” red, cropped hair. The petite 5-foot-3 powerhouse, who now raises cattle on her father’s Kansas farm, and is also training for a potential spot on the women’s national weightlifting team, placed a disappointing 11th at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010.
Uhlaender was left reeling until two other Olympians helped her “put the pieces back together.”
Track-and-field great Carl Lewis and skiing legend Picabo Street stepped in to guide the devastated daredevil. Lewis convinced Uhlaender that her father gave her the tools to live without him, and Street helped her mentally refocus.
After all, injuries aside, Uhlaender’s physical ability was never in question. The elite competitor started skeleton racing on a lark. One night after high school, she challenged a girl at a Colorado recreation center to a race. That girl was a bobsledder and persuaded Uhlaender to try the skeleton, where solo racers lie face down on a sled and race along a course roughly a mile long at speeds up to 90 miles per hour.
“Then, eight weeks later, I was national champion, so I was like, ‘Do I go to college or do I go to the Olympics?’ And I chose to try and make the Olympics,” she says, casually.
Three years later, she competed as the only US woman skeleton racer in the 2006 Torino games. She came in sixth place. This after undergoing surgery for both a broken ankle and broken foot.
In 2008, she blew out her ACL and MCL ligaments in her right knee while free-style skiing. Yet, there were more physical punishments to come for this adrenaline junkie.
“In April 2009, I was on a snowmobile and shattered my knee cap into seven pieces and also punctured a hole into my femur head and tore the labrum in my hip. And I didn’t know that [about the hip injury] until a year later when I tried to start training again and I couldn’t squat. I had surgery in 2011.”
After eight surgeries and the tortuous emotional rehab, the resilient Uhlaender was in the best shape of her life — primed to be the splash of the Sochi games. Then, on Oct. 15, 2013, she smacked her head during a training run in Lake Placid, sustaining a concussion. She says it was her scariest injury yet.
“I thought I had been through enough adversity,” says Uhlaender.
Once again, she’s come back kicking and screaming to the top of the heap. Her mentor Street will be there to cheer her on during her events on Feb. 13 and 14. She’ll also have her father’s signed 1969 Twins baseball card taped to her sled.
“I definitely felt like I needed something just because it sucked to not have him around,” she said. At least in the initial wake of his loss but now she is learning to let go of the physical reminders. “Now I feel closer to him already.”
But, most of all, she still carries his battling spirit with her.
“That’s the way my dad raised me. Now, I’ve got my fists up and I am ready to fight. I don’t care if I am in Russia or I am in the USA. This is for my family, for my country and for me.”