Photo

In the weeks and months after the champion snowboarder Kevin Pearce sustained a traumatic brain injury while training on a halfpipe, and even while he was in a coma in a Utah hospital nearly two years ago, his friends and fans provided support through a simple slogan: I Ride for Kevin.

Next week, those people will be able to ride with Kevin.

For the first time since Pearce’s life-altering accident, he will strap on a snowboard and glide down a mountain. He plans to ride Tuesday afternoon at Breckenridge, Colo., surrounded by friends in the snowboarding community and anyone else who wants to tag along.

“I want to get everybody to come and ride with me,” Pearce said in a phone interview.

Pearce, a favorite to make the 2010 United States snowboarding team, was practicing a particularly difficult trick in Park City, Utah, on Dec. 31, 2009, when he fell and hit his head on the icy wall of the halfpipe. He spent four months in hospitals in Utah and Colorado, missing the Olympics, and emerged with an unsteady walk, blurry vision and a diminished memory.

His high-flying snowboarding career, his burgeoning rivalry with Shaun White, was over. A long, quiet road of rehabilitation loomed.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

But Pearce had a goal all along: to ride again. No tricks. No big air. No spins or double corks. No halfpipe. Just ride.