Two year break: Aleksander Aamodt Kilde can be happy to be back on skis (Wengen, January 13, 2024)
Alpine skiing is a dangerous sport, that’s nothing new. Just last September, 25-year-old Italian downhill skier Matteo Franzoso died while training in Chile. Norwegian speed star Aleksander Aamodt Kilde had to take a break for almost two years after a terrible crash in Wengen in January 2024. It remains to be seen whether the 31-year-old Frenchman Cyprien Sarrazin will ever race again. As one of the world’s best downhill skiers at the time, he fell badly in Bormio in December 2024 and was in a coma for several days. On the occasion of his departure from Kitzbühel a week ago, he said as a visitor: “It’s crazy that I’m here. Living is a dream.«
Fortunately, the most extreme cases remain the exception. However, non-life-threatening injuries affect all racers. The ligaments in particular are affected; during fast swings, enormous centrifugal forces act on the joints, especially the knees. And the injuries are piling up. In the past 25 years they have doubled among the top athletes. Most common: cruciate ligament rupture.
The German Ski Association registered 36 cruciate ligament tears among athletes in its elite squad in the past five years. Every year there are high-profile failures in the World Cup. This year, for example, the two-time overall World Cup winner Lara Gut-Behrami, who tore a cruciate ligament during Super-G training in the USA in November 2025, is missing. At the age of 34, this can mean the end of your career. The 41-year-old American Lindsey Vonn, winner of 84 World Cup races, is currently celebrating a sensational comeback after a five-year absence – with a partial titanium prosthesis in her right knee.
In many cases, cruciate ligaments tear without causing a fall. In December 2024, a video of a training ride by eight-time Austrian overall World Cup winner Marcel Hirscher, who was working on his comeback, made the rounds. The video is not very spectacular. Hirscher swings through a few goals, then a brief slip, a scream, that’s it. Similar with Marco Schwarz. In December 2023, the Austrian was the last person to be able to challenge the Swiss Marco Odermatt in the fight for the overall World Cup. The two were tied in the points standings when Schwarz suddenly lay down in the snow on the descent in Bormio. When he went diagonally, his skis fell off and his cruciate ligament was torn off.
Almost half of all racers active in the Alpine Ski World Cup have had at least one cruciate ligament tear. There are athletes like the 31-year-old Austrian giant slalom specialist Stephanie Brunner whose cruciate ligament has already worn out three times. When Brunner was asked by an Austrian journalist on her last return in 2020 what she would do if she injured herself like that a fourth time, she said: “If the cruciate ligament tears, then it just tears.”
Defiance may have spoken here above all else. In December 2025 in Bavarian Radio broadcast documentary »Young. Female. Cruciate ligament rupture,” Maria Riesch, one of the most successful German ski racers of all time, commented on the cruciate ligament tear that made her participation in the 2006 Olympic Games in Turin impossible: “The emotional pain was very great.”
Cruciate ligament tears are particularly common among women. This is no different than in football. There are several reasons given for this in skiing. First, the anatomy: Women have less mass and muscle to stabilize the cruciate ligament. A slight X position of the legs, which occurs more often in women than in men, is also said to increase the pressure on the knees. According to some studies, the cycle also plays a role. Cycle-related fluctuations apparently have an influence on the elasticity of the cruciate ligaments.
Of course, social realities should not be neglected. Far more young athletes’ bodies are prepared for a professional sports career than young female athletes. In football, the imbalance in cruciate ligament tears between men and women has greatly reduced since great progress has been made in women’s youth training.
Of course, injuries in the youth squads of alpine skiers are less noticed than among the World Cup stars. But they are just as common there, destroying dreams and careers and presenting entire families with major challenges. Racers who tear a cruciate ligament at age 16 are almost 50 percent likely to tear one again later in their career.
Experts have several explanations for why injuries have increased in recent years. The slopes are getting harder, the speed is getting faster, and the material allows for ever narrower radii. With the binding plates used today and the extreme sharpness of edges, the smallest mistake can have major consequences. In addition, there is an increasingly tight racing program that leaves runners little time to regenerate. This problem is also well known from football.
In the meantime, ski racing can also make a comeback within six months after cruciate ligament tears. Whether that is wise is another question. There are examples of runners who immediately tore their cruciate ligament in the first race after taking a break from competition. Profitability makes the quick return to work possible. Professional athletes can fully concentrate on rehab. That’s why miracle cures still don’t happen.
Solutions? Are not quite in sight. The slopes will remain hard because, given climate change, preparation with frozen water is essential. The ski industry is resisting decisive material changes. The course setting is most likely negotiable in order to avoid radiuses that are too narrow. At the same time, the races must remain exciting for television audiences.
The star surgeon Christian Fink, in whose private clinic in Innsbruck dozens of World Cup stars have already gone under the knife, told the Austrian daily newspaper The standard: »The bottom line is that in racing, as in competitive sports in general, health is not necessarily the priority. It’s a ski company’s job to produce the fastest ski, not the safest. And it’s not the healthiest athlete who earns the most, but the one who wins the most.
