It is springtime, and the World Cup ski season has been over for more than a month. Mikaela Shiffrin won her final race of the season, extending her record to 97 victories.

She put behind a crash that messed up her knee and cost her five weeks of the season and a chance for the coveted World Cup overall title. She got engaged to her boyfriend of more than three years, Norwegian Alpine racer Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, who, like Shiffrin, has won Olympic medals and a World Cup overall championship.

So much has happened. And yet in some ways, she can’t shake the January day when she was eating lunch with her mother, brother and sister-in-law in an Austrian restaurant, watching the men’s downhill race from Wengen, Switzerland, on television.

Shiffrin watched Kilde’s run. She then saw him crash. The racers on the screen looked away in horror. She watched a helicopter arrive to airlift him from the mountainside. She scrambled to see how to get to him. Nine hours on the road? A flight? With a race ahead?

All that – the anxiousness, the night sleeping on pillows on Kilde’s hospital room floor – is over.

She couldn’t shake it.

“I said to Aleks: ‘I know this feels like a weird thing to say because you’re the one who crashed and you’re the one who’s dealing with the aftermath still,’” Shiffrin said by phone last month. “‘But we haven’t talked about it. I haven’t processed it.’”

There was – and is – a lot to process. Kilde’s crash during the harrowing downhill in Wengen was serious and carried with it questions not just about if and when his skiing career could continue, but whether he could survive.

“It was 100 percent a life-threatening crash,” Shiffrin said.

If gory details aren’t your thing, stop reading now. They’re important to share, Shiffrin and Kilde believe, because they’re the only way to convey the dire nature of what Kilde went through. They best convey the obstacles that remain if he’s to return to his previous form as one of the best speed racers in the world, a former World Cup overall champion and Olympic medalist.

“I was so weak in my body, and my whole body was just working so hard to recover, my mind just went to a place where I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this; I don’t know if I’m able to live off skiing again,’” Kilde said. “My first goal was to just get on my feet.”

He is there now. There is much ahead.

The downhill at Wengen – known as the Lauberhorn – is among the most challenging in the world. At 2.7 miles from top to bottom, it is the longest race on the World Cup calendar. In 1991, the course took the life of Austrian racer Gernot Reinstadler, who crashed in the final S-shaped turn just above the finish. It is that turn into which Kilde hurled himself, roughly 2 minutes and 10 seconds after starting an exhausting run. He was racing for the third straight day. He was a bit under the weather. And then …

“I just basically collapsed,” he said by phone from Innsbruck, Austria. “I couldn’t stand the pressure in the last couple turns.”

The video is hard to watch. Kilde is a powerful skier. He was reduced to a rag doll. In the Lauberhorn, racers reach speeds approaching 100 mph. Kilde was flung into a catch fence. His left ski fell off and flew into his right leg. Race skis are so sharp, the edges are essentially knife blades. The ski tore a chunk from his calf.

When he came to, after emergency workers had arrived, Kilde felt tremendous pain in his shoulder. Then he looked down and saw blood.

“I just had to lay my head back down and keep breathing,” Kilde said.

But his shoulder. The pain in his shoulder was unspeakable.

“Excuse the vulgarity, but he completely tore his arm off,” Shiffrin said. “It was hanging on by skin. His rotator cuff was completely torn.

“And this is something that probably was the most energy-consuming thing for me for the rest of the season – trying to convey to the rest of the world how severe his injuries were. Because people were like, ‘Oh, he got cut, and he dislocated his shoulder.’ Oh, my God, no!”

Kilde’s crash was in some ways an isolated event that affects one athlete. But it fits into a larger discussion in the ski racing community after a season in which injuries almost overshadowed accomplishments. Shiffrin missed five weeks after injuring her left knee in a downhill in Italy. Her chief rival, Slovakia’s Petra Vlhova, tore knee ligaments in a January giant slalom and missed the rest of the season.

The list goes on. Italian downhill champion Sofia Goggia broke her right leg in a training accident. Frenchman Alexis Pinturault tore knee ligaments in Wengen a day before Kilde’s crash. Corinne Suter of Switzerland, the reigning Olympic downhill gold medalist, tore knee ligaments in January and was done for the year.

There are more. You get the point.

“The athletes, we’re advocating for fewer races across the board,” Shiffrin said. “… You would think that, ideally, more athletes performing at their highest level more consistently throughout the season would be a better show that would be of more interest for all the different stakeholders.

“In my mind, it’s black and white. But I suppose it’s a little bit naive to just say that because there’s money involved.”

Those are the problems for the entire sport. Shiffrin and Kilde, they had – and have – their own problems. For Shiffrin, it was returning to race as she worried about Kilde, which she did two days after leaving his bedside. (She won a slalom in Flachau, Austria. “In my mind, I just thought if I’m not staying with Aleks,” she said, “then I’m winning this race.”)

And just a week and a half later, Kilde’s issues not only included navigating life in a wheelchair and slowly getting back on his feet. They included wanting to help Shiffrin after her own accident – but finding it difficult.

“I didn’t have the energy to give her the full support,” Kilde said. “Things were just super complicated for both of us. It was a life lesson, I’d say, and gave us an eye-opener to how lucky we are to be able to do what we love and to do it together.”

Even if the future is a little cloudy. Shiffrin returned to competition in March and won her final two races of the season. (“It’s in her blood,” Kilde said. “It’s in her mentality to never give up and to keep going.”) With the year concluded, she headed to Innsbruck, Austria, where Kilde had moved into the new apartment he bought. Quietly, he had his family bring down the engagement ring from Norway. After a season of chaos, he wanted calm.

“I wanted it to be a special day,” Kilde said. “And then I decided to just get down on my knee, which I physically could at the time – so that was a plus.”

She said yes. They have no wedding date at the moment.

“It’s a little farther off in the distance with everything else we have going on,” Shiffrin said.

That includes getting Kilde back on snow, which he hopes will be in August – not training yet, but at least feeling the skis under his feet. Beyond that, no predictions. A summer, hopefully featuring some travel, awaits. As does the processing of everything the two of them – and their sport – have been through.

Copy the Story Link

« Previous

Panthers-Bruins series gets feisty, and it should carry over to Game 3

Next »

Celtics assistant Charles Lee hired by Hornets as next head coach