Anyone know what the recovery time for a figure skater is for that type of injury?
*an interesting note that they said the second spot has yet to be announced for Worlds, is there some reason to suggest that Lipnitskaia might not be going?
I had a torn ankle ligament back in my skating days - also done by a silly fall doing nothing. I think that's probably the likeliest way to incur that injury on skates, since you're not really prepared to fall like that and sometimes the blade catches in the ice sideways while the rest of you keeps rotating weirdly. I wore a cast for about 2 months and needed maybe another 6 weeks or 2 months of off-ice rehab before getting back on the ice, and then taking some time before getting back into jumping. For me it was easily the hardest injury to recover from - I had some broken bones, strains, stress fractures, etc., but never any knee problems, so can't comment on how it rates compared to ACL, etc. I imagine not as bad. It wasn't terribly painful, but the weak and unstable feeling of the ankle made it hard to trust jumping for a good while (mine, like Liza's, was on my landing leg). It probably set me back about a year in terms of skating progress, and to this day never quite regained that ankle strength. But that was a long time ago and hopefully Liza has good access to physical therapy, etc. It also depends a lot on how bad the tear was; if it's small it might be a much easier recovery than that. In any case it'll help if she takes her time getting back; maybe she could even use it to her advantage by spending a lot of time working on stroking before getting back to the jumps.