This snowboarder was days from reaching a childhood dream. Now she’s in Anchorage regrouping.

Sitting on a bench in a South Anchorage gym recently, Rosie Mancari picked up marbles with her toes, lifting the glass balls one by one and dropping them into a plastic bag.

It's amazing, she said, how quickly a person can go from being an athlete on the grandest stage to such a tiny physical-therapy task.

Mancari, a U.S. Olympic snowboarder, is recovering from ankle injuries that ended her first Winter Olympics before she could compete. Now back home, she goes to physical therapy appointments three times week and works out her upper body most days.

Just last month, Mancari stood with hundreds of the world's best winter athletes, preparing to walk in the opening ceremony in Pyeongchang, South Korea, a moment she had dreamed about since she was young. It was only two weeks earlier that she found out she was selected for Olympic competition, a discretionary choice of the coaching staff, she said.

"It lots of times feels like unreachable. So for me to actually get there, it kind of really justified all of the time and work and everything I've put into it," she said.

It was on Feb. 13, the first of two training days for snowboard cross, that she was hurt. Training runs are key because the course's features – ramps, hills and banked turns – are different at every venue. Competitors must get familiar with the layout before they race head-to-head, six at a time.

Mancari successfully rode the Phoenix Snow Park course in Pyeongchang twice that day. On her third run, she fell before she took flight off a ramp, spun in the air and landed face down.

"I just came in with more speed than I anticipated," she said. "Which usually is a good thing."

Falling isn't unusual, she said. In fact, she said she's gotten good at it. Over the years she has learned to pull in her arms, protect her head and roll.

But on this spill, she slid feet first toward a set of rolling hills.

"When my toe edge dug in, it caused really fast, extreme dorsiflexion and overstretched my Achilles," she said.

It took a moment for the extent of the injuries to sink in. Experience has taught her to move out of the way immediately after a fall in case other riders are on course behind her.

"I popped right up and I couldn't feel my feet, so my immediate thought was that I shattered my ankles," she said. "Then I leaned forward to try to turn, and basically my feet didn't respond to my body."

She asked course workers for help. A Team USA doctor arrived within minutes, and a snowmachine transported her to an ambulance below.

At the hospital, doctors diagnosed completely ruptured Achilles tendons in both ankles and recommended she travel back to the United States the next day for surgery. Mancari put the brakes on that idea, insisting that she stay long enough to watch her teammates race. If she couldn't get to the venue on crutches, perhaps she could find a bobsledder to carry her, she joked.

"I was like, 'Oh, no. Unless this is like an emergency surgery, I have to stay and cheer on my team. This is their dream, too,' " she said. She watched both the men's and women's snowboard cross races from the finish area.

Six days after her crash, Mancari had surgery in Vail, Colorado, to reattach the tendons to her calf muscles, then spent the night at the orthopedic center resting and watching the Olympics on television. On March 3 she returned to Anchorage, where she's been surprised, even a bit embarrassed, by the attention she's gotten.

"The amount of support was overwhelming for sure," she said. "I don't know, I'm just a girl that likes to snowboard, and then everybody made it such a big deal."

Mancari has been invited to speak at an elementary school and plans to visit others. Earlier this month she lent a hand at a Special Olympics event at Hilltop Ski Area.

And she's in good company as she heals. Mancari said two friends in Anchorage are recovering from knee injuries.

"As unfortunate as it is that we all are hurt, it's also kind of cool that we have a little gimp gang, that we can sit around and enjoy each other's company, like while our other friends are out skiing and snowboarding," she said. "We're all down and out together."

It's too early to speculate when she'll be ready to compete again, she said, but this isn't the first time she has had to bounce back. Her history of injuries includes a torn ACL, a dislocated shoulder and a broken wrist.

Mancari has her eye on participating in the 2019 World Championships next March in Utah. Whether or not that happens, she's confident she will fully recover and will have a shot at returning to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

For now, she said, she's grateful the injury wasn't more severe and she takes pride in knowing she belonged in Pyeongchang, one of four women who made the U.S. team for snowboard cross, even if she didn't get to race.

"I could kind of leave justified knowing that I made it to that level," she said. "I compete at that level. It wasn't just a miracle that I was there. And I will be back."