Veronica Paulsen Updates Fans After Kings & Queens Crash

Paulsen sped into the kicker built for Kings & Queens of Corbet’s, floated through the air, and crashed into the snow, eventually coming to a stop. She laid on her side and didn’t move, leaving fans worried that she might’ve hurt herself.

Paulsen later revealed in a social media post that she’d suffered relatively minor injuries, including a fractured sternum, which resulted from her knee hitting her chest when she landed. She also had whiplash.

“It’s a bummer to put in all that work and not come away with the stomp, but everything gets put into perspective when you’re facing an injury,” she wrote.

Paulsen’s journey towards landing the double backflip into Corbet’s has spanned years.
 
In the summers, she lifted weights, jumped on trampolines, and hit water ramps in preparation. Despite all the work that went into the attempt, though, the crash at the Kings and Queens didn’t mark a failure for Paulsen.

It was “just another learning moment in my career and my journey,” she wrote. “The real failure would have been to walk away and never tried.”

“Thank you everyone, thank you skiing, I’ll be back in no time,” her post concluded.

Paulsen’s focused efforts in pursuit of the record-breaking trick haven’t gone unnoticed by the broader professional skiing community.
 
Fellow professional skier Griffin Post, in a post shared after her crash, called double backflipping into Corbet’s Couloir “objectively scary and gnarly as hell,” adding that there isn’t an adequate comparison to trying a challenging trick in ever-changing mountain terrain.

“It’d be like a diver perfecting a dive but not knowing how springy the board was nor how long the drop was when it came time to do it,” he wrote.

Paulsen, in a conversation with the Jackson Hole News & Guide, said that she expects her fracture will heal in four to six weeks, but she may be able to ski before then.