Brodie Seger didn’t feel much physical pain when he ruptured his right ACL and tore his lateral meniscus at the 2023 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships.
Instead, the knowledge of his season’s abrupt and unceremonious end was what bothered him.
Seger had placed second in the final downhill training run of February’s World Championships in Courchevel, France. He was confident about his chances, and for good reason. After all, fellow Whistler Mountain Ski Club (WMSC) contender Jack Crawford had just become the super-G world champion earlier that week.
Crawford had proved once again that Canadians could hold their own against the European giants of alpine skiing, and his teammates were raring to go.
WMSC’s streak of success did continue on Feb. 12, as Cameron Alexander fought his way to the first World Championships medal of his life. Crawford placed a respectable fifth. Seger wasn’t so fortunate.
Instead, the 27-year-old landed awkwardly on a jump during his attempt down the l’Éclipse track, and in an instant, his right knee buckled.
“I [wasn’t] even in pain, like, my knee didn’t even hurt. I just felt the ligaments pop and they were gone,” Seger recalled.
The 2022 Beijing Olympian knows that his odds of making it through an entire career without serious injury were always slim. That’s the chance that he and many other professional skiers take in order to be great. Even so, he described the accident as “heartbreaking.” He wanted to accomplish more this season.
Nonetheless, Seger is resilient. He didn’t cry out in anger or sadness as medical authorities flew him off the ski hill. He kept his composure in the finish area, where it dawned on him that his season was over.
Yet, when Seger watched Alexander receive a bronze medal after the same race that laid him low, he couldn’t help but get emotional. The two brothers-in-arms embraced after the award ceremony, and Seger credits his teammate for showing him that bouncing back from a major injury is more than possible.
The ties that bind
Seger and Alexander have much in common. They are both WMSC success stories and mainstays on the Canadian national ski team. They know each other extremely well, often playing summer sports or going out for dinner with their teammates. They also injured themselves at the same downhill race in France more than two years ago.
On Dec. 13, 2020, many of Earth’s best alpine speed merchants took to the slopes in Val-d’Isère during a stop on the World Cup circuit. Alexander was slated to go 35th, and Seger 10 spots behind him. Seger prefers to focus on his own race prep instead of watching his teammates perform, so he wasn’t paying attention when Alexander demolished his knee midway through the event.
Seger had an inkling that one of his teammates might have gone down, for he noticed Alpine Canada personnel paying close attention to radio chatter in the distance. Regardless, he completed his own pre-race rituals, launched himself out of the start gate… and caught an edge near the finish line.
After tumbling into the finish area at high speed, Seger was quickly taken into the medical tent. His coach at the time, Agneta Platter, informed him that he’d have to wait for the ambulance to return to the venue. That’s when he found out that Alexander had already been injured.
Eventually, Seger joined his compatriot at a local hospital to receive treatment for a separated AC joint in his shoulder. For some reason, the doctor—a European-based physician who, due to COVID travel restrictions, was volunteering for Alpine Canada—was agitated that day.
Seger remembers the doctor asking him to put an IV needle into his arm. He complied, only for the doctor to leave the room because he’d forgotten something else, possibly another piece of equipment.
The ensuing events were a comedy of errors.
Seger continued to sit in the waiting room and hold a needle in his arm—a needle that had begun to drip his blood all over the clinic floor. Local French nurses were (understandably) none too pleased. More importantly, Seger realized that it had been several hours since he’d last eaten.
“I was totally aware of what was happening,” he recalls. “I’m holding this needle and I [say to our doctor]: ‘hey, I’m feeling kind of woozy.’ The next thing I know, I start to pass out, leaning back in this chair.”
According to Seger’s memory, the team doctor tried to keep him awake by slapping him on the cheek. “Stay with me, Brodie!” the man exclaimed.
Meanwhile, Alexander was lying on the X-ray table across the hall with painkillers running through his veins. The door was slightly ajar, allowing him to catch a glimpse of Seger slumped against the wall with a doctor frantically trying to keep him conscious.
At that moment, from his limited vantage point, Alexander genuinely believed that his good friend was dying.
Seger struggles not to laugh, retelling the anecdote today. “It was a comedy, and it was a tragedy at the same time, but it was definitely a bonding moment,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.
The bizarre story does have a happy ending. On March 4, 2022, Alexander marched into Kvitfjell and won Canada’s first World Cup downhill gold since Erik Guay did so in 2014 on that same Norwegian course. Today, he is a World Championship bronze medallist, and you couldn’t tell by watching him that he has a reconstructed knee.
“Alexander had a long road coming back from his injury,” Seger said. “He had two follow-up surgeries for that, and [he’s made it back]. The fact that I [hurt my knee] on a day when Cam Alexander took home a World Championships medal has set me on the right foot in so many ways for my recovery.”
Journey to the top
Truth be told, Seger has been set on the right foot since the day he joined WMSC as a nine-year-old who was clueless about ski racing.
The Seger brothers, Brodie and Riley, were born in North Vancouver. Their parents do not come from a high-performance background—enjoying a good powder day is just a weekend passion for them. However, Patricia Seger’s cousins, Joey, Carmine and Paul Boskovich, are former ski racers—and before long they were recommending that Patricia and her husband Mark enrol their boys in racing.
“I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, but I was a good enough skier to have some success early on,” Seger recounted. “Plus, I’m definitely the type of person who doesn’t want to be bad at something. I want to show that I’m giving my best effort and that I can … really refine a skill, so I think that’s where [ski racing] sort of became a passion for me.”
After years of junior skiing with WMSC, Seger began his first season of FIS competition at 15 years old. From there, he quickly qualified for BC Alpine and spent three years with the provincial team before making his way into Canada’s national development pipeline.
Riley nipped at his heels the entire way.
“When [Riley] came into racing, he was kind of like, ‘I want to beat my big brother,’” Seger said. “Nick Cooper, who was our BC Team coach and is now the national technical team coach, used to poke fun at me and say, ‘the younger sibling’s always better.’ I definitely felt driven by that as well—I [wasn’t] going to let Riley beat me. We probably were a little bit more at each other’s throats when we were younger.”
Yet, the brothers’ relationship mellowed with time, and now they cherish their shared opportunity to represent the Maple Leaf together.
“When I was on the BC Team, I started travelling more and I didn’t see [Riley] nearly as much,” said Seger. “Then, he was on the BC Team when I moved on to the national team, and so for a while there, we were totally on different schedules.
“The next thing you know, we’re both on the national team, living and travelling together for a lot of the year. It was a cool experience to be back together like that, and I felt like it was good for us. We’re closer than ever because of that.”
Seger was named to Team Canada in 2016 and had his first full-time World Cup campaign in 2019-20. His first breakout moment came at the 2021 World Championships in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, where he finished fourth in super-G less than two months after separating his shoulder in France.
A year later, Seger joined fellow Whistlerites Crawford and Broderick Thompson at the Beijing Winter Olympics. There, they learned to face the pressure that comes with competing on the world’s grandest stage.
“When we first showed up there, we all kind of felt like, ‘this is amazing, we made it here,’ and the pressure was taken off because just making it to the Olympics is big,” said Seger. “But as the race days crept closer, it felt inevitable that the pressure would build back up again because then, I started to realize that this was something I’ve worked my whole life towards.
“This is something I really, really wanted on a personal level.”
Setting an example
Alas, the results didn’t come. Seger placed 22nd in Olympic downhill and failed to complete his super-G run at the Yanqing National Alpine Skiing Centre. He could have allowed those disappointing performances to fluster him, but he understands that every world-class skier must be able to let go of the things he or she cannot control.
Standing in the start gate for the downhill portion of his final Olympic event, alpine combined, Seger allowed himself to relax. He wanted to have some fun.
Afterwards, CBC commentator and 2006 Canadian Olympian Kelly VanderBeek informed Seger in the media zone that he had put himself into third place. “It didn’t even occur to me that I was sitting in medal contention [going into the slalom part of the event],” the Whistlerite said.
Unlike Crawford and Thompson, Seger has pretty much phased slalom out of his career. After all, combined events are becoming increasingly rare in alpine skiing, and generally only feature at the Olympics and World Championships. Seger had not been on slalom skis in two years prior to the Beijing Winter Games, but facing the chance to win a medal, he did what any champion would do.
He took to Instagram to seek advice.
“I didn’t really have a big chance in the slalom, so it was just about enjoying the fact that I was doing it again for the first time in a while, and trying to make it down with a relatively clean run, and not totally embarrassing myself,” Seger said.
Again, he approached the challenge with a fresh, loose mindset. It was by no means an elite slalom run, and it wasn’t enough for Olympic hardware, but it did net Seger a ninth-place result among 26 of the best skiers on Earth.
Any young athlete would do well to learn from Seger’s skills, his resilience and his ability to maintain sight of the big picture. Even more so, they can look up to the man he is.
“Kids are fortunate to learn from [Seger] because of the person that he is,” said WMSC executive director Michael Janyk, a three-time Olympian. “Look at the person behind the athlete. When kids see him going out there, being charitable and doing extra stuff, I think that paints a really nice, well-rounded human for them to follow.”
“My parents instilled that in me,” Seger explained. “They didn’t necessarily care what I ended up doing in life. What they cared about most was making sure that their kids were good members of society, giving back to the world around them. I naturally care about being an example to the younger kids.
“I feel like ski racing has given me so much in terms of personal development, never mind athletic achievement, and that’s why I would encourage anybody to get into the sport if they can. It makes me want to pass on the things that I’ve learned.”
Now facing the road to recovery once more, Seger trusts the plan that his team has outlined for him. He knows that others, like Alexander and Thompson, have thrown down some of their best career performances after a debilitating injury.
Most of all, he doesn’t question for one second the motivation he has to come back stronger than ever.
