Orem's Noelle Pikus-Pace is about to step up and turn in a miracle act on the world sled stage.

Too bad few, if any, officials in her sport are stepping up for Pikus-Pace, the defending women's World Cup skeleton champion, the first American woman to win the overall competition a year ago.

Five weeks ago, I saw Pikus-Pace in the lobby of a local LDS ward building. She sat there with her husband, Janson. Her right leg was stretched out on a chair, and you could see the freshly sutured wounds and scars from an operation. The lower scars were where a compound fracture of the fibula and tibia broke the skin. The stitches near her kneecap were where Dr. Kirt Kimball cut and inserted a titanium rod down through her leg bone.

This was just weeks after she was hit by a runaway four-man bobsled in Calgary on Oct. 19. The impact knocked Pikus-Pace off a safety platform where she flipped head over heels twice, 15 feet in the air, and landed in a parking lot. Somebody somehow let a heavy bobsled with an inexperienced brakeman go down a track that wasn't properly prepared for the bobsled — right in the middle of the women's skeleton competition.

Pikus-Pace saw the out-of-control bobsled coming too late to move. Her first reaction was to save her skeleton sled. She failed and it got busted, just like she did.

That day in the church, Pikus-Pace, 23, wore a giant smile. Positive vibes beamed from her that day. She spoke of faith. She said she would recover, not only in time to walk but to run and push a sled in the 2006 Olympics in Torino, Italy, in February.

I was impressed. But as I stood there and looked at her leg, my thoughts were "right, tough luck, kid."

Last week in Igls, Austria, just seven weeks after Calgary, Pikus-Pace ran down the skeleton track. She finished 20th on the same track she took first on a year ago.

This week, she is racing in Latvia. Monday, she called her father and excitedly told him she was back — she could do this. "I've never heard her so excited," said Lee Pikus.

In Pikus-Pace's first practice run Monday, she rode her smashed-up sled that took the hit in Calgary last October. She was 1.5 seconds off. People have tried to fix it, straightening up the runners, but the frame is fatigued and unstable. On Monday, she borrowed a sled from another American who was out of the competition, a sled not tailored to her body weight and height, and ran a time equal to any woman in the competition.

Thus the phone call to her dad.

But here's the rub in this deal.