Olympics: Competitor won bronze with broken arm

Winter Olympic medallist Alex Coomber told today how she won her bronze with a broken arm.

The 28-year-old, who won a bronze medal in the bob skeleton event, smashed her left arm on February 2 as she was training in Canada but kept her suspicions of a break quiet so as not to hinder her Olympic chances.

Coomber, who returned from Salt Lake City on Saturday, only had time for a check-up two days ago in her local hospital in Shepton Mallet, Somerset, where an X-ray confirmed there was a break near the wrist.

The RAF intelligence officer was referred to hand and arm specialistsl, who put a cast on her arm and told her to rest.

‘‘I thought it was broken. On the first day of training in Calgary I had a bad hit on the second run and it didn’t improve. I kept hitting it quite a few times you do when you do a bob skeleton run,’’ she said.

‘‘Every run it was always hurting quite a bit because you have to use it to steer but I only noticed the pain when I got to the bottom after the run.

‘‘I took painkillers, but by February 20, when I won my medal, the pain was the same.’’

Coomber said she suffered general aching and a pain which made her wrist and hand quite stiff when she tried to twist the hand to turn keys or put any pressure on it.

‘‘I just put up with it and thought I would wait until I got home. It was not so much stiff upper lip as I wanted to race and my coaches wouldn’t have let me race if we’d known it was a break.’’

Coomber is now forced to take is easy and said she was glad to be home in the Somerset village of Dean to catch up on ‘‘the mundane things like car insurance’’ with her husband Eric and their dog, Fogarty, after what she said had been a ‘‘very long season’’.

Though she must keep her plaster cast on for four weeks she will carry on training her legs.

But she said the arm healing period tied in with the rest and recuperation she needed after the Olympics anyway.