Wojtek Wolski was lying in a hospital bed with a broken neck after having crashed headfirst into the boards early in the 2016-17 hockey season.
He did not know whether he would heal or what his life would look like. He certainly did not expect to be on skates, at the Winter Olympics, 13 months later.
On Jan. 11, when he was named to the Canadian Olympic men’s hockey team, Wolski said he looked back at a photo of himself wearing a neck brace “and cried like a baby.”
“For a lot of us, this wasn’t even a possibility a couple of months ago, a couple of years ago,” said Wolski, 31, who plays for Metallurg Magnitogorsk in the Russia-based Kontinental Hockey League.