Sarah Warren will take to the Olympic ice on Sunday. The list of injuries the speed skater overcame to get there is stunning

By Dana O’Neil, CNN

Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy (CNN) — She thought about watching “Miracle,” thinking the story of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team would be the exact sort of motivation she needed.

But then Sarah Warren thought about it a little more. “Miracle,” she realized, had some low points. It was January 5 of this year and later that day, Warren would stand behind the starting line at the Milwaukee skating center where she’d trained since she was a little girl, bend her surgically reconstructed knees and at the sound of the starting gun, try to race her way onto the US Olympic speed skating team.

For that, Warren realized, she needed a straight-up pick me up. She bagged “Miracle” and instead hit play on “Moana.”

“The one thing she has in that movie is belief,” Warren told CNN Sports. “Like, there’s nothing different except in the big moment of the movie, she just believes in herself. And it just hit home to me.”

There has been a lot of talk about belief in these Olympic Games, particularly about what one believes one can do on a damaged knee. There might be no one – including Lindsey Vonn – who can speak to that better than Sarah Warren.

Warren was 13 when she had her first arthroscopic procedure and 28 when she underwent her most recent surgery to repair total meniscal failure. In between, she has had six more surgeries on her knees and one on her ankle. She has torn both of her ACLs (the right in 2016; the left in 2018) and spent the equivalent of four years rehabbing and recovering. Two years ago, she couldn’t balance on one foot and needed to re-learn how to skate.

On Sunday, she will compete for Team USA in the 500m speed skating event. Asked the same question many would like to ask Vonn, as she recovers from a complex fracture of her tibia – why? – Warren shrugs her shoulders.

“To me, it’s always possible,” she said. “You have these setbacks, but to me, you take two steps backwards and three steps forward. Allowing a surgery to take away my dream was equal with giving up.”

Enduring pain after pain

In the written timeline of injuries she provides to CNN Sports, Warren describes her procedures with both the clinical detachment of the future doctor who is currently pursuing her graduate degree in biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University – “lateral meniscectomy, arthroscopic debridement of articular cartilage, posterior horn lateral meniscectomy, suprapatellar pouch release, revision notchplasty, tenolysis of peroneus longus, extensive synovectomy” – and the emotional reality of the patient who has endured them all.

“Lying on the field, I understood that a significant injury had occurred, one that would have a lasting impact on my athletic career. Determined not to miss the season, I opted to brace my knee and continued to participate throughout.

“On the flight home, just stared blankly at the seat in front of me, aware that this injury could be the breaking point and the end. The path ahead no longer seemed obvious, but those close to me reminded me that an unclear path does not mean that I am lost.”

Warren is not here to sugarcoat anything, to even so much as imply that her belief was never shaken and that she herself didn’t wonder more than once if it was worth it. As she was wheeled back for her second ACL surgery, Warren looked at her mother, Katherine, and said, “I don’t think I can do this.”

And in 2024, as she underwent extensive surgery after a previous meniscus surgery failed, she asked herself, “Is this a sign?” And asked her coach, Mike MacDonald, of her Olympic dream, “Do you still see it?”

But to listen to Warren detail her injuries, her surgeries and her inspirations is to get a glimmer of an understanding of what it is to know to be given the gift of athletic excellence and then have to spend a lifetime chasing after it.

There are no linear success stories in sports. Michael Jordan was cut from his eighth-grade basketball team, Muhammad Ali lost to Joe Frazier in the “Fight of the Century,” and Simone Biles suffered the twisties. It is easy for those of us in the mere mortal category to question athletes’ need to persevere and endure, to assume that it’s about some sad chase for self-worth or adrenaline addiction.

What if it’s not that complicated? What if it’s just a true belief that “this is what I’m meant to do?” Almost like a calling, and that the obstacles in the way – the twisties, the losses, the cuts – are viewed as challenges to realize a purpose.

‘This is perfect’

That, at least, is what it is for Warren. She was exhaustively competitive. If her big brother John wanted Warren to fetch something for him, all he had to do was say, “I’ll time you,” and Warren raced to retrieve. She played everything growing up – basketball, soccer, track – but she especially loved the ice. She can’t explain why; it just felt right.

As a kid, she played for an all-boys ice hockey team – easily identifiable by the gigantic bow her mom, Katherine, tied in her hair on the Chicago Blues team picture day. But as the boys got bigger and faster, Warren needed to switch. Her parents signed her up for speed skating at the Petit Center in Milwaukee. She was 10.

“And I remember getting out there on that first day and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I get to go fast and race on the ice,’” Warren said. “It was like this perfect combination.”

Three years later, she had her first surgery to reduce chronic swelling. Warren thought nothing of it, nor did she have reason to. For seven years, she lived a blissfully exceptional athletic life. Warren set high school track records, led her club soccer team to an Illinois state championship, won the US Junior speed skating all-around title, competed in the Winter Youth Olympics in Innsbruck and finished seventh in the 500m at World Juniors.

In 2014, she decided to take a speed skating hiatus and enrolled at Illinois to play soccer and study biomedical engineering (that first surgery inspired her) where she earned a soccer scholarship. It was there, during a practice session in 2016, that everything went south. Warren stepped on the ball with her left leg and fell awkwardly on her right, tearing her ACL and meniscus.

Rightly disappointed, Warren wasn’t entirely terrified. Her brother John tore his ACL in high school, recovered and re-tore it on his first day back at football practice. A senior at the time and determined to earn a scholarship, he braced it and played through, only to tear his other ACL at the final game. He wound up having both knees repaired at the same time. For months, he lived in the family’s basement, the only place with a bathroom on one floor.

“I was like, ‘I have one, what do I have to complain about?’” Warren said. “I knew what it would entail. I had a great team around me. I just thought, ‘OK. I got this.’”

The start of a vicious cycle

Instead, she was just at the beginning of what would be an eight-year vicious cycle through surgeries and recoveries. Warren tore her other ACL at the end of her college soccer career, recovered and relocated to Salt Lake City to commit to speed skating full-time, only to need another surgery a year later to clear up issues from the previous procedure.

By 2024, things finally felt safe enough that Warren allowed herself to dream big dreams. She’d gone five beautiful years surgery free and was starting to see real results on the ice, three times earning a podium finish in World Cup team sprints.

Toward the end of that season, pressure from her skating boot started to cause problems in her ankle. She kept competing and, in the World Championships team sprint, combined with Erin Jackson and Brittany Bowe to win silver, but suffered a complete rupture of all of the ligaments in her ankle.

That was in March 2024. Four months later, she went under the knife again. The stress from the ankle injury increased the pressure on her knees and she needed arthroscopy to relieve it. Warren went back to training in October and, in her first week back on the ice, suffered what she describes as “meniscal failure.”

Her long history of knee injuries finally caught up with her, requiring an extensive rehab period – six to nine months – in which Warren essentially retaught herself how to skate.

Why did she go on? Not because she had to have an Olympic medal. She wasn’t even thinking about the Olympics. Instead, she thought about that moment in 2018, back when she told her mother she wasn’t sure she could recover from another ACL tear. Katherine smiled gently at her and said, “Honey, I don’t think you have a choice.”

“I was at the base of the mountain, trying to figure out the path to get there,” Warren said. “Like you have no option. You have to do the best you can to come through this. You have this big goal, yes, but that’s not what it is about in that moment. It’s recovering, trying to get your quad muscle to fire again, to enjoy the small victories. You have to start small.”

‘I’ve already won’

On January 6 of this year, Warren walked to the starting line on the same ice where she first fell in love with speedskating 19 years earlier. By some beautiful twist of fate, the Petit National Ice Center had been selected to host the 2026 US Olympic Trials. The day before, Warren had positioned herself to make the team by .02 seconds, but to secure her spot, she would have to match or better her time (38.86) and hope that no one else beat it.

She had spent almost all of 2025 recovering from her last surgery. In a strange way, almost having to start from scratch helped. Warren concentrated on technical aspects of speed skating that she often overlooked in her quest to just win and go fast. She was, she believed, an even better skater.

But at 29, she also knew she was at the end of her skating career. There would not, more than likely, be another chance at the Olympics.

And so fueled by the titular Moana, Warren stepped to the line in the most dramatic setup possible – in the final pairing of the 500m trials, with room for just one more skater on the Olympic roster, and the slimmest of .02 margins to hold onto it.

“I kept envisioning little baby Sarah on that ice and how excited she was,” Warren said. “I kept telling myself it was a privilege.”

Warren crossed the finish in 38.66, faster than her previous skate and good enough to make the Olympic roster.

“You know the funny thing is, when I stepped to the line, I thought, ‘I’ve already won,’” Warren said. “I got here. I mean we work our entire lives for that one moment, but it’s 38 seconds and you take solace in the fact that you did everything you could to get there. There were so many times where I could have quit or given up on myself. But I believed, so to me, I had already won.”

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