Weeks After Winter Cup, Brody Malone Opens Up About Injury, Road to Recovery and More

In the recently concluded Winter Cup, Brody Malone showcased his ultimate prowess on the pommel horse, still rings, and parallel bars. The overall fetched score in Kentucky has sent him to the National team bound for the US Gymnastics Championships. But a few months ago, those participation chances were under a dark cloud as Brody Malone was spending his valuable time bed-ridden, depending on crutches. The situation reached a point where the 10x NCAA gymnastics champion found no hope of seeing himself donning the national color again.

Brody Malone’s recovery journey was unspoken a few days ago as the gymnast kept a zip on it. However, in a recent podcast with John Shibley, the 24-year-old Stanford University student shed light on many things, including his excruciating experience dealing with the injury in Germany. 

Brody Malone’s past days on rods and crutches 

In episode 338 of Last in Line, Brody Malone justified the episode title, “Don’t call it a comeback” by describing his utter comeback journey on the gymnastics mat again. The able-bodied gymnast has gone down memory lane when he narrated the exact situation of him facing the accident. “I was competing in Germany. Slipped off on my … landed really bad, dislocated my knee, fractured my… the head of my tibia. So the knee joint … basically, just chipped a whole piece of my tibia off,” he lamented. But being an ultimate winner, he did not bow out to the situation. 

 “…rushed to the hospital there, and had surgery, that night put an external fixator on my leg… they put two rods in my tibia and two in my femur. That was sticking out of leg and that they connected all with some metal. Pretty …pretty crazy look,” Brody added in the conversation with Shibley. The next circumstances were all about more operations on his leg and more days away from the practice schedule. However, the recovery process took a lot of time for the 2022 world champion. 

The steady but painful way of gaining

Brody Malone found his obvious solace after returning to Stanford following the primary fixating in Germany. But upon returning to the gymnastics home, he had to learn about a meniscus tear, resulting from that high bar dismount in Germany. So eventually, the doctors needed to perform multiple surgeries to fix all those ruptures. In the podcast, he revealed, “They repaired the meniscus tear and they used nine screws and two plates to repair the tibia fracture.”

Read more: Gymnastics Winter Cup 2024: Brody Malone Makes Spectacular Near-Perfect Comeback on Parallel Bars

Eventually, after spending six weeks on crutches, the 2x USA all-around champion had to undergo another surgery. This time, it was to fix his torn LCL and posterior lateral. In a gaffe tone, Brody Malone described the situation as “I relearned how to walk again.” So, from that tumbling to earning the coveted place in the national team- Brody Malone has covered a much more distance than he could have ever imagined. 

Also read: Trinity Thomas’s Comeback Story – Recovery, Training, and Future Hopes Ahead of Winter Cup