Brown shrugs off dislocated shoulder to skate to bronze

Sky Brown is an Olympic medallist again, and this time she did it the hard way.

- LAWRENCE OSTLERE

She was in hospital the day she arrived at these Olympic Games, getting an MRI scan on her dislocated shoulder. Then, in qualifying here in the searing Parisian heat on Tuesday, the bone briefly popped out of its socket again when she fell.

“I ran down to her and she said, ‘Daddy, it’s come out’,” said her father, Stuart Brown, who is by her side at every competition. “As we were getting out she said, ‘I think it’s gone back in’. She didn’t want to show [pain] because she was so afraid of being pulled out of the contest [by competition doctors].”

While her competitors practised and refuelled, Brown spent the two hours before this skateboard park final with Team GB physios who massaged her shoulder and worked her arm, then iced it and taped it back up so it wouldn’t yield. She will need surgery when she returns home to Los Angeles.

Given all that, and having torn the medial collateral ligament in her knee in May while filming an advert for her new shoe (Nike SB Sky Brown Zoom Pogo Plus Skate Shoes, RRP £79.95), it is all the more remarkable that she not only competed here at La Concorde but won an accomplished bronze to go with the bronze she won in Tokyo, when she was only 13.

Brown held the silver medal position in the last round before Japan’s Cocona Hiraki pinched it with the very last run of the competition. Above them on the scoreboard, the new women’s Olympic champion is the pioneering 13-year-old Arisa Trew, an Australian prodigy who has been landing groundbreaking tricks for a year now.