Piggyback ride

Olympic gold medalwinning freeskier Nico Porteous has lifted the lid on the ‘‘freak’’ injury that will keep him off the mountain until at least January and has him heading to Austria today to start an exhaustive rehab process in Austria.

In an interview with Stuff as part of the New Zealand snow sports celebration tour, the 20-year-old, who made history for his country at the recent Winter Olympics in Beijing when he won the second of two gold medals, revealed that he had ruptured his ACL by, of all things, piggybacking a friend down the mountain at a resort in Austria.

The injury occurred in March, around a month after winning gold in the men’s freeski halfpipe at the Games, when Porteous was skiing with friends just out of Innsbruck. He also revealed that as ruptured ACLS go, it was the not the worst.

‘‘I did my knee piggybacking someone on skis – a friend down from a day’s skiing,’’ the Wanaka-based champion told Stuff. ‘‘That friend happened to be a nonskier. It was one of those freak things: I ended up blowing my ACL and having surgery about two months ago, so the process is well and truly under way.’’

Porteous revealed he was set for a 9-10-month recovery period which would be the longest consecutive period he had spent off the mountain since he became a fulltime skier. It put an early halt on a historic year that had seen him achieve the coveted X-games-olympics double and play a leading role in the finest season New Zealand has experienced in alpine sports.

‘‘I knew it had gone,’’ Porteous said of an accident that saw him ‘‘down in the dumps’’ for about a fortnight when the reality set in. ‘‘I half did it after the last Olympics and it had been hanging on for the past four years. We knew it was going to go at any time and it was really lucky it happened after the Games, to be honest.

‘‘Now is the perfect time, if such a thing can be a perfect time, to repair the knee and get it back on track.’’

Porteous said the surgery, performed about two months ago by Dr Mark Clatworthy in Auckland, had gone as well as could be hoped, with damage restricted to the anterior