Shiffrin saw Kilde’s run. She then witnessed him crash. The racers on screen turned aside in horror. She saw a chopper approach and airlift him from the mountainside. She scrambled to figure out how to get to him. 9 hours on the road? A flight? With a race ahead?
All of that — the anxiety, the night spent sleeping on pillows on Kilde’s hospital room floor — is past.
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 stated by phone last month. ” ‘But we haven’t discussed it. “I haven’t processed it.”
There was — and is — a lot to process. Kilde’s collision during the terrifying downhill at Wengen was significant, raising worries not only about whether or not he could continue his sporting career, but also about his survival.
“It was 100% a life-threatening crash,” Shiffrin stated.
If gory details are not your thing, stop reading right now. They are crucial to share, Shiffrin and Kilde believe, because they are the only way to explain Kilde’s awful situation. They best reflect the challenges he faces in returning to his past form as one of the world’s finest speed racers, 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 stated. “My first goal was to just get on my feet.”
He’s there now. There is a lot ahead.
The video is difficult to view. Kilde is a powerful skier. He was reduced to a rag doll. In the Lauberhorn, racers reach speeds of up to 100 mph. Kilde was thrown into a catch barrier. His left ski came off and flew into his right leg. Race ski edges are as sharp as knife blades. The ski tore a piece out of his leg.
Kilde awoke to severe shoulder discomfort when emergency personnel arrived. Then he looked down.
“The blood was just — ugh — shooting out of my leg like in the movies and pulsing,” Kilde stated. “I just had to lay my head back down and keep breathing.”
But his shoulder. The agony in his shoulder was unbearable.
“Excuse the vulgarity, but he completely tore his arm off,” claimed Shiffrin. “It was hanging on by the skin. His rotator cuff was totally torn.
“And this was probably the most energy-consuming thing for me for the balance of the season: communicating to the rest of the world how terrible his injuries were. Because others were like, “Oh, he got cut and dislocated his shoulder.” “Oh my God, no.”
Kilde’s crash was, in some ways, an isolated incident affecting a single athlete. However, it fits into a bigger conversation in the ski racing world following a season in which injuries nearly eclipsed success. Shiffrin missed the five weeks after injuring her left knee on a downhill in Italy.
Her main rival, Slovakia’s Petra Vlhova, tore knee ligaments in a January giant slalom and missed the rest of the season.
The list goes on. Sofia Goggia, an Italian downhill champion, injured her right leg during a training accident. Alexis Pinturault, a Frenchman, tore knee ligaments in Wengen the day before Kilde crashed. Corinne Suter of Switzerland, the defending Olympic downhill gold medalist, tore her knee ligaments in January and was out for the year.
There’s more. You understand the point.
“The athletes, we’re advocating for fewer races across the board,” Shiffrin stated. “… You’d assume that having more athletes perform at their peak levels more consistently throughout the season would result in a better spectacle that would be more appealing to all stakeholders.
And barely a week and a half later, Kilde’s problems extended beyond negotiating life in a wheelchair and gradually getting back on his feet. They included wanting to assist Shiffrin following her own injury, but finding it difficult.
“I didn’t have the energy to give her the full support,” Kilde stated. “Things were quite complicated for both of us. It was a life lesson, I’d say, and it made us realize how fortunate we are to be able to do what we enjoy and do it together.”
Even if the future is a little uncertain. Shiffrin returned to competition in March, winning the last two races of the season. (“It’s in her blood,” Kilde explained.
“It’s in her mentality to never give up and to keep going.” ) She traveled to Innsbruck at the end of the year, where Kilde had settled into his new apartment. He quietly asked his relatives to bring down the engagement ring from Norway. After a season of tumult, he desired peace.
“I wanted it to be a special day,” Kilde remarked. “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 currently have no wedding date.
“It’s a little farther off in the distance with everything else we have going on,” Shiffrin commented.
Kilde aspires to return to the snow in August, not for training, but to feel the skis under his feet. Beyond that, no guesses. A summer, hopefully with some travel, awaits. As does the digesting of all the two of them—and their sport—have gone through.
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