Austria’s Katharina Liensberger to miss Milano Cortina Winter Games after knee injury in alpine skiing training fall.
Austria’s 2022 Olympic slalom silver medallist Katharina Liensberger will miss the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics after suffering a serious knee injury in a training crash.
The Austrian Ski Association said Liensberger would have surgery on Friday after medical examinations revealed a fracture of the tibial plateau, a torn meniscus and a medial collateral ligament injury in her right knee.
Austrian media said the 28-year-old slalom specialist’s season was over after the crash in St Michael a month before the Olympics start in Italy.
Liensberger won a team gold and slalom silver in Beijing and was slalom world champion in 2021. She won a slalom bronze at last year’s championships on home snow in Saalbach.
At Cortina, she would have been up against American great Mikaela Shiffrin, the most successful World Cup skier of all time. She has won the last six World Cup slaloms and five this season.
The women are racing in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, this weekend with a giant slalom on Saturday and slalom on Sunday.
Liensberger has been added to a list of top women’s skiers to have suffered serious injuries in the run-up to the Olympics.
Three Swiss Olympic champions – Michelle Gisin, Lara Gut-Behrami and Corinne Suter – have been sidelined in training incidents with the first two ruled out of the Games.
After the death of Italian skier Matteo Franzoso in a training accident in Chile in September, concerns were raised, primarily about how to limit risks in the high-speed sport.
Shiffrin added to the debate at the start of the Olympic ski season a month later, stating: “We are often training in conditions where the variables are just too many to control and you have to decide sometimes: Is this unreasonably dangerous?”
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