It was a vacation gone wrong for Chemmy Alcott.
The former Olympic skier suffered a collapsed lung after a failed attempt at a front flip dive into the water while on a trip in Annecy, France, she explained in an Instagram reel Thursday.
Alcott called the whole situation a “very expensive lesson.”
The 44-year-old from Surrey, England realized she wasn’t breathing properly after rotating in the air incorrectly and went to the hospital, where she had to have a chest drain done.
“Most people badly time a front flip off a five-meter platform and get winded,” Alcott said. “I apparently don’t do things by halves. Collapsed lung, chest drain and a very expensive lesson in rotation.”
The Instagram reel shows Alcott landing in the water, leaning forward with one foot ahead of the other, but it quickly flashed to her in a hospital gown with wires attached to her and what is seemingly the chest drain tube under her armpit.
However, Alcott didn’t come to the realization that something was off until after she got out of the water and went back up to jump again in an act of “embarrassment,” she added in an Instagram story.
Alcott jumped off the platform again so she “wasn’t making a big deal of it.”
She later shared a photo of her husband and two kids, Locki and Cooper, at the hospital with her in an Instagram story.
“Turns out 5 metres is quite a long way to discover you’ve got the rotation wrong,” she wrote in the caption of the video. “One badly timed front flip. One very hard landing. One collapsed lung. One chest drain. And a few more hospital overnights than were on the holiday itinerary…I absolutely LOVED Annecy… but I’m not entirely sure it loved me back. 😂”
Former Olympic diver and gold medalist Tom Daley commented on Alcott’s reel, writing “Diving is crazy!”
Lindsey Vonn also reached out to her fellow skier, saying “Damn Chem! Heal up ❤️”
Alcott, who raced with Vonn during her career, held back tears while broadcasting for BBC when the decorated American skier had a gruesome crash 13 seconds into the women’s downhill at the Milan Games in February.
It left Vonn with a severe fracture in her left leg that nearly had to be amputated.
“I feel guilty that I am this emotional. I just never believed it would end in a clump at the side of the piste, not moving,” Alcott said while reporting at the finish of the course in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. “What we saw that the top of the piste is really hard for a fit athlete, she just had her right knee. It is brutal, think about her family, her team and herself. We have to be realistic. The risk was really high, the risk she takes when she falls will double that, her body will not be able to take that. There is clapping and there is hope that she would be okay but they have put up some background music because it is uncomfortable.”
Alcott had a 20-year skiing career and competed in four consecutive Olympics, starting with Salt Lake City in 2002.
Her career best came in a 11th-place finish in downhill (Turin) and super combined (Vancouver).
Alcott retired in March 2014 following the British Alpine championships.
