Liensberger to miss Olympics after latest serious skiing accident | Winter Olympics News

Austrian Katharina Liensberger will miss the Milan Cortina Winter Games after injuring her knee during alpine skiing training.

Austria’s Katharina Liensberger, the 2022 Olympic slalom silver medalist, will miss the Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina after suffering a serious knee injury in a fall in training.

The Austrian Ski Association announced that Liensberger would undergo surgery on Friday after medical tests revealed a fractured tibial plateau, a torn meniscus and an injury to the medial collateral ligament in her right knee.

Austrian media said the 28-year-old slalom specialist’s season was over after the accident in St Michael, a month before the start of the Olympics in Italy.

Liensberger won team gold and silver in slalom in Beijing and was world slalom champion in 2021. She won a bronze medal in slalom at last year’s championships on snow at home in Saalbach.

In Cortina, she would have faced 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 race in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, this weekend with a giant slalom on Saturday and a slalom on Sunday.

Liensberger was added to the list of top female skiers who suffered serious injuries heading into the Olympics.

Three Swiss Olympic champions – Michelle GisinLara Gut-Behrami and Corinne Suter – were sidelined during training incidents, with the former two ruled out of the Games.

After the death of Italian skier Matteo Franzoso in a training accident in Chile in Septemberconcerns have been raised, mainly about how to limit risks in speed sport.

Shiffrin added to the debate at the start of the Olympic ski season a month later, saying: “We often train in conditions where there are just too many variables to control and sometimes you have to decide: is this unreasonably dangerous?”