Netherland's Hermijntje Drenth, Marloes Oldenburg, Tinka Offereins and Benthe Boonstra with their gold medals on Aug. 1, in Vaires-sur-Marne.Ebrahim Noroozi/The Associated Press
Just a couple years ago, Dutch rower Marloes Oldenburg was undergoing life-threatening back surgery after a nasty bicycle accident.
Now she is celebrating an Olympic gold medal.
Oldenburg helped the Dutch team win the women’s four class on Thursday, despite still being unable to fully move her head sideways because of the crash that shattered her back into multiple pieces.
“Amazing,” Oldenburg said. “For everybody who needs a little bit of inspiration, it’s possible to break your neck and get the Olympic gold.”
It didn’t look so good right after the accident. Doctors asked Oldenburg if she wanted to donate her organs if the surgery didn’t go well. They said they didn’t know if she would survive or walk again.
Rowing was far from a priority for Oldenburg, so competing at the Olympics was not in her thoughts at the time.
“At that moment, not at all,” she said. “I was in a lot of pain, could not move, could not walk. But that was two years ago. This year I didn’t think about the neck at all.”
At the time of the accident, Oldenburg was celebrating the silver medals she had won at the world championships a week earlier. She landed on top of her head after her bicycle flipped over while she went across a tiny bridge on a mountain biking route in the Netherlands. She broke the first vertebrae and damaged a main artery in the neck during the fall.
The surgery lasted nearly six hours as doctors screwed six pins to her spine. Oldenburg still couldn’t move her legs right after the operation, and it took almost a month before she could walk again. She said the recovery process was gruelling, as she had to relearn how to do many things, including how to swim.
“Sometimes when I look back, I see a memory on the phone, like videos from two years ago, and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I could move my head,’” she said with a laugh. “Now I cannot move my head anymore.”
But she can still win an Olympic gold medal.
Follow the latest news and highlights from the Paris Olympic Games