NORTH Vancouver native Manuel Osborne-Paradis says he will not likely hit the slopes for a World Cup race until at least the New Year as he continues to recover from injuries sustained in a race last January.
Osborne-Paradis has been rehabbing his left leg since breaking his fibula and tearing the ACL in his knee during a World Cup race in Chamonix, France on Jan. 29, 2011. This week the downhill specialist said he's eyeing the World Cup race scheduled for Feb. 2-5, 2012 in Chamonix as a possible venue for his return to the sport's highest stage.
Osborne-Paradis noted that he's not looking to get revenge on that particular hill, rather it just so happens that his doctors have pegged that as a possible return date. He's been doing dryland training since the injury but has not been back on snow to train with his teammates. The knee is getting better but it still gives him some grief from time to time, he said.
"I wake up some days and it's angry at me and I don't know what I did wrong. It's just kind of like, 'C'mon, get better, so I can get skiing and hang out with all my teammates,'" Osborne-Paradis told Postmedia News at an Alpine Canada event in Vancouver Wednesday, adding that his knee is feeling much better than it did just three weeks ago. "It's like night and day. Three weeks ago, I couldn't do jumps and now I can jump down the street no problem."
Osborne-Paradis infamously made headlines this summer when he fell off the back of a party bus and was dragged for several metres during the Calgary Stampede. He suffered severe road rash on his backside, setting back his timetable for rehabbing his knee.
On Wednesday Osborne-Paradis admitted that he was "an idiot" on the night of the incident and said that he learned a valuable lesson about needing to "grow up to be the mature athlete you want to be. It's fun to be young and invincible, but eventually you realize you're not."
