From Coma to Olympic Podium: One Snowboarder’s Miraculous Journey to 2026 Bronze

Published: February 20, 2026

By Mallory Mattingly

American snowboarder Jake Canter won the bronze medal at the 2026 Winter Olympics, the culmination of an incredible comeback story.

When Canter was 13 years old, “practicing on trampolines at Woodward at Copper Mountain Resort, he suffered a severe head injury that nearly claimed his life. Doctors gave him just a 20 percent chance of survival as he lay in a medically induced coma,” Team USA shared in the athlete’s bio.

According to PEOPLE, Canter suffered a “fractured skull and a brain bleed during the accident.” The very next year in 2017, he returned to snowboarding, however challenges still plagued the young snowboarder.

“Canter said spinal fluid was leaking due to the injury. The leakage, he said, led to bacterial meningitis. He and his family first realized something was wrong when a terrible two-week-long ear ache left Canter vomiting and then unconscious in his bedroom,” the Summit Daily reported in 2019. Upon arriving at a local Denver hospital, he was put into a medically-induced coma.

“I had no clue until I woke up and I thought I was dead,” Canter said at the time.

“We almost lost him,” his mother, Trischa, told The New York Times.

The trauma left Canter permanently deaf in his right ear, and he had to relearn how to walk. But he was determined to snowboard again.

“He kept pushing and pushing and pushing us to let him,” Trischa said. “It’s just always been hard to hold him back…it was through snowboarding he actually rehabbed himself.”

Months later, Canter would return to the slopes to chase his dreams.

His first competition was the halfpipe where he won Junior Jam title at the 2018 U.S. Open. Shortly after, Canter realized his heart was set on slopestyle, which features bigger jumps and more air time.

At just 15 years old, Canter “received a last-minute invitation from his childhood idol Mark McMorris to compete in the inaugural 2019 Knuckle Huck at X Games Aspen. Canter delivered a standout performance with a backside 1080 from the knuckle, earning a silver medal,” Team USA wrote.

From then on, the young snowboarder continued building his trophy collection, earning a “bronze medal at the 2022 Laax Open, his first FIS World Cup podium in slopestyle. He represented Team USA at the 2023 FIS Snowboard World Championships in Bakuriani, Georgia, finishing 11th in his world championship debut.”

On Feb. 18, Canter, now 22, secured the bronze medal in Milan, Italy, in the men’s snowboard slopestyle event with a 79.36 on his final run.