LIVIGNO, Italy — Nobody could blame the doctors for telling 13-year-old Jake Canter he should never step on a snowboard again.

Nobody could blame 22-year-old Jake Canter for ignoring them.

Nine years after enduring a traumatic brain injury, the result of getting kicked in the head in a freak accident on a trampoline at an action-sports camp, that 22-year-old U.S. rider won the Olympic bronze medal in his sport’s trick-filled trip down the hill — slopestyle.

That third-place finish Wednesday stamped an exclamation point on one of those only-at-the-Olympics kind of stories. It also exposed the flaw in all those dire diagnoses back then: The doctors were looking at Canter’s brain when they should have checked his heart.

“I really just hope I made 13-year-old me lying in that hospital bed proud,” Canter said. “This is for him, and everyone who supported me.”

The accident fractured Canter’s skull in four places. He ended up in a coma for four days. He lost hearing in his right ear. Six months later, after therapy, some of it on a snowboard, was beginning to help him regain his bearings, Canter felt an earache come on. That was the first symptom of meningitis.

Another coma followed, again for four days. In the end, he needed surgery in which doctors put bone cement in his skull and his right ear, gutting his equilibrium and forcing him to relearn how to walk, how to talk.

But how to snowboard?

“There were only so many people who believed I could go do the stuff I was doing prior to everything,” Canter said. “I wanted to prove every doctor wrong that told me I couldn’t do this. That’s a big part of this.”

Canter’s bronze medal did not come on the prettiest day for snowboarding, or for slopestyle.