2-time overall World Cup champion Katie Uhlaender doesn’t want achy knee to hold her back

Uhlaender says time is right to regain form

All season long, U.S. skeleton racer Katie Uhlaender has held a little bit back, making sure not to overextend her surgically rebuilt left kneecap.

No more.

With only one World Cup race remaining until the Olympics and her place on the Vancouver-bound roster secure, Uhlaender says it’s time let ‘er fly. So this weekend, when the international skeleton series wraps up in Austria, Uhlaender is planning to do something she hadn’t been willing to try this season — go all-out with hopes of reclaiming what had become a customary spot on the medal stand.

“Everything is starting to come together,” said Uhlaender, who was sixth at her first Olympic Games four years ago at Turin. “I’d like to end the season on a positive note. Finally, I think I’m ready.”

Her chance to show that comes Friday morning at Igls, Austria, where she was a silver medalist in 2007.

If all goes according to plan, she’ll be able to go into a full sprint — which Uhlaender has avoided this season — at the start, hop onto her sled with no fears or concerns, then make her way headfirst down the 1,220-meter track without aches and pains, all with hopes of getting her first medal of the season.

“I think right now I’m probably about 85 percent,” Uhlaender said. “I’m really close. I still have a lot of trouble off the (starting) block and some pain trying to get into the proper positions, but luckily I have the natural genetics and footspeed to get the sled moving. It’s been a long process.”

Uhlaender is one of two women on the U.S. Olympic skeleton roster, Noelle Pikus-Pace being the other. For the 2006 Olympic season, Pikus-Pace was the one with a shattered leg, a horrible break that came 114 days before the Turin Games when a bobsled didn’t stop in time before exiting the track in Calgary during a training run and smacked into the side of her body.

This time, it was Uhlaender with the injury drama.

And she vowed from the get-go that she wouldn’t miss Vancouver.

It wasn’t an ideal season for the two-time overall World Cup champion; she’s only eighth in the 2009-10 rankings, with a fifth-place showing at Cesana her top finish, and she’s been no better than 12th in three of the seven stops on the circuit so far. (For some perspective, entering this season, Uhlaender had been out of the top 10 in a World Cup race only once since January 2006.)

But she feels stronger each day.

“With four weeks to go until the games, I have no doubt that I’ll be 100 percent,” Uhlaender said.

A few months ago, there was plenty of doubt about that.

Uhlaender’s kneecap broke into nine pieces in a snowmobile crash in the spring, and she broke it again later in the offseason. At least three surgeries have been needed on the joint, along with an exhausting rehab regimen, not to mention a nasty scar.

Admittedly not a patient person, having to hold back on effort this season was, at times, almost too much for her to take.

“If you know me, you know it’s pretty much the hardest thing for me to do,” Uhlaender said.

Then again, overcoming big challenges is something that Uhlaender has had to get used to in the past year.

She remains profoundly affected by the death of her father, former Major League Baseball player Ted Uhlaender, who died after a cancer fight last February on the same day she won a World Cup silver medal in Park City, Utah. Uhlaender went on to slide in the world championships later that month, heart still broken, because she insisted her father would have wanted it that way.

Then came the snowmobile crash, and suddenly, the 2010 Olympic bid was in jeopardy.

“It’s been really difficult,” Uhlaender said. “I think I’ve been a bit of a pain in the butt for the coaches, because I constantly ask, ‘How do I get faster?’ It’s really difficult when you’re not 100 percent.”

Uhlaender overcame it all, and the two-time world championship medalist thinks the time is right to get back to her old form.

And with Vancouver looming, not a moment too soon.