(COLORADO) — The torch from the 2024 Paris Olympics has barely cooled, but athletes are already looking forward to their next chance to shine on the world stage, including Katie Bone from Erie, Colorado. The 18-year-old is an American Ninja Warrior Champion and a professional climber on the U.S. Elite National Team. She is hoping to make the 2028 Olympic team for speed climbing but she’s having to build up both physical and mental strength after a major injury.
Bone said she tried climbing for the first time about 10 years ago in an effort to keep up with her older brother. Turns out, a sibling rivalry can reveal great things. “My first season competing in bouldering, I made nationals,” Bone said. “If I hadn’t got injured, I would have been able to compete at the Olympic Qualifying Series last year.”
Sport climbing made its Olympic Games debut in 2020 in Toyko and Bone intended to compete in this year’s games. But as quickly as she can scale a wall, her Olympic dreams came crashing down. “So I was at the U.S. team trials, on the last bouldering qualifiers I kind of spun off and took a wrong fall and I heard four pops in my knee.”
“I kind of rotated when I fell and I knew it was bad,” Bone said. “I didn’t know to what extent.” Bone had torn her ACL and done other damage to her knee.
After meeting with several surgeons in several states, Bone decided to go with Dr. Jay Albright, Surgical Director of the Sports Medicine Center at Children’s Hospital Colorado. Dr. Albright is an ACL expert and has helped hundreds of young athletes return to their sport. “ACL reconstruction, ACL surgery in the youth population has been one of my passions for my entire career,” Albright said.
Instead of using a graft from the patient’s hamstrings to reconstruct the ACL, Albright prefers to use a tendon from the patient’s quadriceps.
“Hamstrings in a young female is very, very important,” Albright said. “So if you take out one or two of those hamstrings, it can conceivably weaken the hamstrings and will weaken the hamstrings permanently. So if that was already an issue and one of the reasons why a young woman had that injury in the first place, weakening them may be counterintuitive to good success or predictability after surgery.”
Albright was the first surgeon to use the quadriceps patellar bone autograft for pediatric patients regularly and with high volumes, leading the way for other pediatric orthopedic sports surgeons. “We’ve shown at Children’s that we have one of the highest success rates, in other words, the lowest retear rates in the country for this age group,” Albright said.
Bone liked those odds.
“I heard from a lot of different people that the quad can be harder on the front end but stronger on the back end,” Bone said.
Six months after surgery, she was back competing at World Cups in China. “Fast would be an understatement, yeah, she returned amazingly soon,” Albright said.
Bone’s return to sport has been fast, but it hasn’t been easy. “For that first six to nine months, I was having panic attacks at every single training session,” Bone said. “I was so terrified of just climbing again and being on the wall.”
Bone has found her way back to the top but it looks a little different now.
“I feel like I’m a new version of me. I don’t think I’ll ever be the person I was before for a lot of reasons,” Bone said. “The person I am now and becoming isn’t necessarily a bad version of that, it’s just different.”
One thing that hasn’t changed though is her desire to prove people wrong and win.
“I know how it feels to lose all of it,” Bone said. “And I think that helps with the motivation of like working as hard as I possibly can to be the best version of myself.”
Bone is also a Type 1 Diabetic, a story she shared during her first season on American Ninja Warrior where she won the women’s championship. She recently received a call back for Season 17.
