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Coomber competed with broken arm Posted: Friday March 01, 2002 8:52 AMLONDON (AP) -- Olympic skeleton bronze medalist Alex Coomber said Friday she hid her suspected broken arm from her coaches so she could compete in Salt Lake City. Coomber's left arm was put in a plaster cast Thursday after X-rays in England confirmed a break near the wrist. Coomber said she thought she had broken her arm after a training mishap on Feb. 2, but did not get it checked out thoroughly because she wanted to compete. Coomber, 28, said she took painkillers to cope. "I just put up with it and thought I would wait until I got home," Coomber said. "It was not so much stiff upper lip as I wanted to race and my coaches would not have let me race if we'd known it was a break." Coomber will have the plaster cast on for four weeks. "I thought it was broken. On the first day of training in Calgary I had a bad hit on the second run and it didn't improve. I kept hitting it quite a few times - you do when you do a bob skeleton run," she said. "Every run it was always hurting quite a bit because you have to use it to steer but I only noticed the pain when I got to the bottom after the run. "I took painkillers, but by February 20, when I won my medal, the pain was the same." Coomber said she was glad to be home in the Somerset village of Dean, in southwest England, to catch up on "the mundane things like car insurance" with her husband Eric and their dog, Fogarty, after what she said had been a "very long season". Coomber won Britain's first medal of the games in the skeleton. The women's curling team won gold and Alain Baxter won bronze in the men's slalom to help Britain to its most successful Winter Olympics in 66 years.
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