Shiffrin sore but relieved after avoiding serious injury in crash
After one of the scariest crashes of her career, Mikaela Shiffrin is relieved it wasn't worse.
The American skier with a record 95 World Cup wins is “pretty sore,” her coach said, but doesn't appear to have any ligament damage in her left knee. She won't race again this weekend, though, and it's unclear when she'll return.
“She's actually quite good," U.S. team coach Paul Kristofic said after Shiffrin slammed into the safety nets at high speed during a World Cup downhill on Friday.
“She's positive and in a certain way relieved,” Kristofic told The Associated Press. "Because it could have been worse. But she's pretty sore, as you are for most speed crashes. But she was quite upbeat about things.”
Shiffrin lost control while landing a jump in a patch of soft snow on the upper portion of the Olympia delle Tofane course that will be used for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics. Then she slammed into the net at high speed.
Medics tended to Shiffrin immediately and she limped off the course with her left boot raised off the snow. As per the protocol in Cortina, Shiffrin was loaded into a helicopter and taken halfway down the mountain to a landing area for further evaluations. Then she was transported by ambulance to a hospital in Cortina.
"Initial analysis shows the ACL and PCL seem intact,” Shiffrin's team said in a statement.
Shiffrin wrote later on Instagram, “Very thankful it's not worse, but I'm pretty sore at the moment.”
She fell about 20 seconds into her run just before the narrow Tofana schuss — or chute — through walls of rock, which is the most characteristic feature of the biggest women's race of the season.
“It's tricky there," Kristofic said, "because you're landing it and it's a left-footed turn that has a pretty sharp drop. And she was carrying more speed than she did in the training run. And then she probably trimmed a little more line than she should have. And it pushed her about a meter too far left. And that's where the terrain change is quite abrupt.”