From her hospital bed, suffering multiple fractures after a traffic accident that forced her to miss the 2022 Winter Olympics, Brazilian skier Bruna Moura made a promise to herself: get up and compete again. Four years later, she will be at Milan-Cortina d’Ampezzo 2026.
As she counted down the days to her Olympic debut in Beijing 2022, Moura was traveling as a passenger in a van from Austria to Germany, where she would catch a flight to China.
She never arrived.
The vehicle was involved in an accident and the driver died instantly. She was taken by helicopter to a hospital with fractures to three ribs, an arm and her left foot, as well as lung damage.
“From the first days after the accident, I repeated to myself that I would qualify for 2026. It wasn’t arrogance; it was a dream, and I would fight for it”, says Moura, 31 years old, born in Caraguatatuba, on the coast of São Paulo.
“We couldn’t guarantee what would happen over four years, but we could guarantee how much we would fight,” she says in a video call from Nunspeet, a city of 28,000 inhabitants in the Netherlands, where she has lived for four years.
Moura will compete for Brazil in three cross-country skiing events at these Olympics: the individual sprint, the team sprint and the 10 km.
No South American country has ever won a medal in the winter competition.
Pain as a routine
“The feeling I have is of victory, a feeling I didn’t have when I qualified for Beijing. It’s completely different,” she says, smiling. “It’s surreal,” he adds, although he still experiences discomfort in his left foot when skiing.
During the long rehabilitation, even simple things like taking a shower were a challenge.
She returned to competition in 2023, adapting her training methods to the consequences of the accident: “The pain became part of the routine.”
And fate seemed to conspire against her. In 2024, she was diagnosed with toxoplasmosis, lost 25% of the vision in her right eye and had to stop again.
The strategy she developed with her coach, Latvian Olympic skier Baiba Bendika, was to focus on her strong point, sprinting, due to the physical difficulties she faced in long-distance races.
“I always had better results in shorter races, I was always more explosive, but after the accident, I improved even more”, says Moura.
“My coach took everything into consideration. There were times when I wanted to try a little harder, and she held me back. She said, ‘Let’s not go down that path,'” he explains.
“When you have a strong point and a weak point, you usually focus on the weak point to try to balance everything, but we knew that my strong point still had a lot of room to improve,” he insists.
Promise fulfilled
Each obstacle revived the trauma of the accident. Her psychologist, says Moura, always reminded her of the “promise that girl made on her hospital bed.”
“It was very beautiful,” he added.
At the end of 2025, she returned to the trials and won her place in the Olympic Games.
“For more than half my life, I’ve fought to become an Olympian, but I don’t want to just get there and say, ‘I’m an Olympian, I crossed the finish line,'” she says. “I want to give my all for my country, for the people who helped me, for this dream.”
Brazil will have its largest delegation in the history of the Winter Olympic Games in Italy, with 14 athletes.
