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Died at age 29 from a spinal cord injury that led to a TBI.
SG

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The doctors used electrodiagnostic tests and imaging studies to figure out that she had irreversible brain damage due to her being deprived of oxygen for so long.
SG

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The artery was damaged very badly and doctors went in to repair it and did so successfully, but tests afterwards showed that her brain went so long without oxygen that there was very little brain activity, this resulted in them eventually taking her off life support, and her dying.
SG

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Brain stem controls your heart beat and breathing so when an artery to the brain stem was torn her heart lost its ability to beat.

CM

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The doctors put her into hypothermia. It would cool down her entire body and brain to see if it would show signs of recovery.

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Brain stem

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there are four major blood vessels (vertebral arteries) that go to the brain
two are in the back of the head that connect to the brain stem
CM

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TORONTO (AP) - The Ontario government is honoring the late Sarah Burke by dedicating a highway to the freestyle skiing pioneer.

Highway 93 will be known as the Sarah Burke Memorial Highway.

It runs for 15 miles through Simcoe County, the region where Burke was born and raised.

The 29-year-old native of Barrie, Ontario, died after a training accident in Utah in January 2012.
LEGACY: Burke in the hearts of freeskiers
Burke was a four-time X Games champion and a driving force behind the inclusion of halfpipe and slopestyle in the Olympics.

The events made their Olympic debut last month in Sochi.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Burke's teammates honored her in Sochi by spreading her ashes on the Olympic halfpipe, high on a mountain above it and near the Olympic rings in the athletes' village.

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Ontario naming highway after skier Sarah Burke

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TORONTO (AP) - The Ontario government is honoring the late Sarah Burke by dedicating a highway to the freestyle skiing pioneer. Highway 93 will be known as the Sarah Burke Memorial Highway. It runs for 15 miles through Simcoe County, the region where Burke was born and raised.

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SALT LAKE CITY -- Canadian freeskier Sarah Burke died Thursday, nine days after crashing at the bottom of the superpipe during a training run in Utah.

Burke, who lived near Whistler in British Columbia, was 29. She was injured Jan. 10 while training at a personal sponsor event at the Park City Mountain resort.

Tests revealed Burke suffered "irreversible damage to her brain due to lack of oxygen and blood after cardiac arrest," according to a statement released by Burke's publicist, Nicole Wool.

A six-time Winter X Games champion, Burke crashed on the same halfpipe where snowboarder Kevin Pearce suffered a traumatic brain injury during a training accident Dec. 31, 2009.

As a result of her fall, Burke's vertebral artery was torn, which led to severe bleeding on the brain, causing her to go into cardiac arrest. CPR was performed on the scene, according to the statement.

Burke's organs and tissues were donated, as she had
requested before the accident, Wool said.

"The family expresses their heartfelt gratitude for the international outpouring of support they have received from all the people Sarah touched," the statement said.

Burke will be remembered for the legacy she left for women in superpipe skiing, a sister sport to the more popular snowboarding brand that has turned Shaun White, Hannah Teter and others into stars.

Aware of the big role the Olympics played in pushing the Whites of the world from the fringes into the mainstream, Burke lobbied to add superpipe skiing to the Winter Games program, noting that no new infrastructure would be needed.

Her arguments won over Olympic officials, and the discipline will debut at the Sochi Games in 2014, where she likely would have been the gold-medal favorite.

"Sarah, in many ways, defines the sport," Canadian Freestyle CEO Peter Judge said before her death. "She's been involved since the very, very early days as one of the first people to bring skis into the pipe. She's also been very dedicated in trying to define her sport but not define herself by winning. For her, it's been about making herself the best she can be rather than comparing herself to other people."

She was, Judge said, as committed to the grass roots of the sport -- holding clinics for youngsters and working with up-and-coming competitors -- as performing at the top levels.

"She was a great, positive person for the whole team, the whole sport," said David Mirota, the Canadian team's high performance director. "She enlightens the room, and she's great."

News of Burke's death spread quickly through the action-sports
world, where the Winter X Games are set to start next week in
Aspen, Colo., without one of their biggest and most-beloved stars.

"She's probably one of the nicest people I've known in my life,
and that's about the only thing I have to say about it," said
American superpipe skier Simon Dumont, a multiple X Games medalist.

Jeremy Forster, the program director for U.S. Freeskiing and
U.S. Snowboarding, said freeskiers would remember Burke "first, as
a friend, and then as a competitor who constantly inspired them to
do greater things."

"She was a leader in her sport, and it's a huge loss for the
freeskiing community," Forster said.

"Shocked and saddened," former freestyle Olympian Jeremy Bloom
said on Twitter. "Sarah was a true champion in everything that she
did."

Her popularity transcended winter sports. Burke met New York Knicks forward Amare Stoudemire at an ESPN The Magazine shoot, and Stoudemire tweeted Thursday: "The world lost a great athlete and innovator today, Prayers go out to her family."

Burke's death is also sure to re-ignite the debate over safety on the halfpipe.

Pearce's injury -- he has since recovered and is back to riding on snow -- was a jarring reminder of the dangers posed to these athletes who often market themselves as devil-may-care thrillseekers but know they make their living in a far more serious profession.

The sport's leaders defend the record, saying mandatory helmets and air bags used on the sides of pipes during practice and better pipe-building technology have made it a safer sport, even though the walls of the pipes have risen significantly in the past decade. They now stand at 22 feet high.

Some of the movement to the halfpipe decades ago came because racing down the mountain, the way they do in snowboardcross and skicross, was considered even more dangerous -- the conditions more unpredictable and the athletes less concerned with each other's safety.

But there are few consistent, hard-and-fast guidelines when it comes to limiting the difficulty of the tricks in the halfpipe, and as the money and fame available in the sport grew, so did the tricks. In 2010, snowboarding pioneer Jake Burton told The Associated Press that much of this was self-policed by athletes who knew where to draw the line.

"If the sport got to the point where halfpipe riding became really dangerous, I think riders would do something about it," Burton said. "It wouldn't be cool anymore."

His opinion is shared by many.

"There are inherent risks in everything," Judge said. "Certainly, freestyle skiing has one of the greatest safety records of almost any sport. Freestyle is a very safe sport in large part because we had to build a safe sport in order to get into the Olympics."

In 2009, Burke broke a vertebra in her back after landing awkwardly while competing in slopestyle at the X Games. It was her lobbying that helped get the X Games to include women's slopestyle -- where riders shoot down the mountain and over "features" including bumps and rails.

It wasn't her best event, but she felt compelled to compete because she pushed for it. She came to terms with her injury quickly.

"I've been doing this for long time, 11 years," she said in a 2010 interview. "I've been very lucky with the injuries I've had. It's part of the game. Everybody gets hurt. Looking back on it, I'd probably do the exact same thing again."

She returned a year after that injury and kept going at the highest level, trying the toughest tricks and winning the biggest prizes.

A native of Midland, Ontario, Burke won the ESPY in 2007 as female action sports athlete of the year.

"Sarah was a wonderful, spirited person and loved by everyone who had the pleasure of knowing her. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Sarah's husband, Rory, her mother Jan Thelan, her father Gord Burke and to the entire Burke family," ESPN said in a statement.

In 2010, she married another freestyle skier, Rory Bushfield,
and they were headliners in a documentary film project on the Ski
Channel called "Winter."

In her interview with AP two years ago, Burke reflected on the niche she'd carved in the action-sports world.

"I think we're all doing this, first off, because we love it and want to be the best," she said. "But I also think it would've been a great opportunity, huge for myself and for skiing and for everyone, if we could've gotten into the [Vancouver] Olympics. It's sad. I mean, I'm super lucky to be where I am, but that would've been pretty awesome."
Information from The Associated Press was included in this report.

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Freeskier Burke, 29, dies from crash injuries

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SALT LAKE CITY -- Canadian freeskier Sarah Burke died Thursday, nine days after crashing at the bottom of the superpipe during a training run in Utah. Burke, who lived near Whistler in British Columbia, was 29. She was injured Jan. 10 while training at a personal sponsor event at the Park City Mountain resort.

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Sarah Burke, Freestyle Skier, Dies From Injuries in Training (Published 2012)

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The 2014 Olympic favorite from Canada died from injuries sustained last week in a fall during a training run in a 22-foot halfpipe at Park City Mountain Resort in Utah.

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A training accident that tore her vertebral artery that caused her brain to bleed and her to go into cardiac arrest
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TORONTO - The artery that ruptured when freestyle skier Sarah Burke fell during a training run is one of the most critical blood vessels in the body, feeding oxygen-rich blood to the brain stem, neurosurgeons say.

Burke, 29, died Thursday of her injuries in the University of Utah Hospital, nine days after the accident at the Park City Mountain Resort.

It's the brain stem, located at the bottom of the brain and tucked inside the back of the skull, that controls breathing and heart function.

"Basically there are four major blood vessels that bring blood to the brain, and two are at the back of the head, come up from the back," explained Dr. Michael Cusimano, a neurosurgeon at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

"They're called the vertebral arteries because they come through the bones of the neck and then get to the brain," he said. The two other major arteries, called the carotids, run up the front of the neck.

It was one of her vertebral arteries that Burke tore when she crashed at the training site, causing what's called a massive intercranial hemorrhage, in which blood poured into her brain.

Doctors say the severe brain injury caused Burke to go into cardiac arrest. In other words, her heart stopped beating and she was no longer breathing on her own, resulting in a lack of oxygen to the brain.

"So right on the scene of this mountain where she was on, where she was training, her heart stopped," said Cusimano. "And so it was probably that the artery was partly torn and that led to this bleeding that her heart stopped."

Paramedics at the scene gave Burke CPR and she was transferred to the Utah Hospital emergency department, where she was put on a ventilator, or breathing machine, and a procedure called therapeutic hypothermia was initiated to control swelling of the brain tissues.

"They purposely put her into what's called hypothermia," Cusimano said. "When the brain's been damaged, one of the ways of treating it is by cooling the body, and cooling the brain to protect the brain. So they were hoping to try to protect her brain so that it might show some recovery."

The next day, surgeons were able to successfully repair her torn vertebral artery, a tricky operation that Ottawa pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Vassilyadi said demands a lot of skill. "It's very difficult to do."

But tests following the operation, including numerous neurological examinations, electrodiagnostic tests and imaging studies, revealed that the skier had sustained grave and irreversible brain damage caused by the lack of oxygen after her cardiac arrest. The condition is called hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy.

"In general, any decreased perfusion (of blood) to the brain can cause what we call ischemia because with the blood you have oxygen," said Vassilyadi of Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario. "You have less blood, less oxygen to the brain. And then you could get a stroke as a result of the decreased oxygenation to the brain."

Following Burke's death Thursday, her organs and tissues were donated for transplantation, according to her wishes, said a statement from her publicist.

"I think it's a tragic thing," Cusimano said of Burke's death.

"It happened and it's one of the risks. I don't know what else to say. It just tells us how fragile our lives are and how things can change in an instant. What can you say? She probably loved skiing and loved doing the things she was doing."
Also on HuffPost

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Sarah Burke Dead: Irreversible Brain Damage Was Result Of Heart Stopping, Say Doctors

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TORONTO - The artery that ruptured when freestyle skier Sarah Burke fell during a training run is one of the most critical blood vessels in the body, feeding oxygen-rich blood to the brain stem, neurosurgeons say. Burke, 29, died Thursday of her injuries in the University of Utah Hospital, nine days after the accident at the Park City Mountain Resort.