Olympic ski champion Gut-Behrami suffers knee injury

Reigning Olympic Super-G champion Lara Gut-Behrami of Switzerland suffered a potentially serious knee injury while training in Copper Mountain, Colorado, Swiss Ski said on Friday.

The 34-year-old has indicated this will be the final season of her career with a focus on the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina.

“The first examinations on site suggest an injury to the left knee,” the Swiss federation added.

It said Gut-Behrami, who won gold in the Super-G at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, would return to Switzerland “to undergo more extensive medical tests” following the fall on Thursday.

But the concern is all the greater as Gut-Behrami suffered a similiar knee injury at the 2017 world championships in St. Moritz when she was world number one. It took her more than two years to return to her top level.

“I saw a video of the crash. It was violent,” Rainer Salzgeber, race director for her equipment supplier Head, told the Swiss media outlet Blick.

Salzgeber said that in poor visibility, Gut-Behrami caught a gate with her hand on a bump before rolling over.

According to Blick, the Swiss champion is suffering from concussion, as well as a possible torn cruciate ligament and a torn meniscus, a diagnosis not yet confirmed by Swiss Ski, which will communicate “as soon as the medical results are available”. 

A two-time overall World Cup champion in 2016 and 2024, the Swiss skier finished last season second in the overall standings behind Italy’s Federica Brignone, who suffered a double fracture of her left tibia and fibula in April and has not yet returned to skiing.

Gut-Behrami had high hopes of success on the Olympic slopes of Cortina from February 6 to 22 where she had already secured two world titles in 2021 — in giant slalom and super-G — as well as four World Cup victories. 

After a flawless summer preparation, the Lugano native began her season with a third-place finish in late October in the Solden giant slalom, marking her 101st World Cup podium.