With World Cup in her backyard, Mikaela Shiffrin and Aleksander Kilde — skiing’s golden couple — focus on recovery

This wasn’t the way alpine skiing aficionados drew it up when they scheduled men’s and women’s speed races on the famed Birds of Prey course in Beaver Creek, Colo., on back-to-back weekends this month.

They figured the events held major potential for a celebration of the sport’s golden couple: American Mikaela Shiffrin, who might be closing in on her record 100th World Cup win, and her fiancé, Aleksander Aamodt Kilde of Norway, arguably the best speed skier in the world, both making the podium just a few miles from Shiffrin’s home down the road in Edwards.

That was Plan A. Not happening as Kilde announced in October he’d miss the entire World Cup season due to injuries sustained in a January crash.

On the bright side, Shiffrin is up on her feet and walking again after a crash of her own over Thanksgiving weekend in a World Cup giant slalom race in Vermont that left her banged and cut up and with a significant puncture wound in her abdomen. She is sidelined indefinitely, though she expects to be back before too long. Last weekend, she shot a video while walking carefully outside her home.

“I got my trusty little wound vacuum, we got it put in yesterday,” she said, showing off the gadget that can accelerate healing by decreasing air pressure over a wound, pulling out fluid and dead tissue and reducing swelling. “This is where I’m at,” she added with a look of reluctant acceptance as she stepped gingerly on an icy mountain street.

An update from Mikaela Shiffrin about her injury from the Killington World Cup race. pic.twitter.com/jTUIqyeZ12

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) December 7, 2024

Shiffrin’s latest injury also killed Plan B, which was for Kilde, who has spent nearly a year recovering from the major crash 11 months ago in Switzerland, to help coach Shiffrin this weekend on Beaver Creek’s Birds of Prey track — where he won three years ago and where she had never competed. Instead, he’s been coaching her in the art of patience and recovery.

Kilde has had to become an expert in that, unfortunately. The January crash wrecked his left shoulder, ripping muscles from the joint. It also left a deep gash in his right calf, courtesy of one of his skis. Then, in July, out of nowhere, an infection raged through his surgically repaired shoulder. He was on the edge of sepsis, a potentially life-threatening condition that occurs when the body’s immune system overreacts to an infection, damaging the body’s tissues and organs.

His heart racing, his shoulder swelling, his fever spiking, he went to the emergency room during a visit with Shiffrin in Colorado. Doctors took one look at him and told him he wasn’t going anywhere for a while.

There are few sports that test an athlete’s ability to manage injuries the way alpine skiing does. It has basically a 100 percent injury rate. So many of its top performers have missed full seasons or more to recover from ghastly bone breaks, torn ligaments, ruptured joints, concussions and everything else that can happen during high-speed crashes on ice while clamped into long, sharp-edged carbon boards. Skiers are good at doing the thumbs-up Instagram post from their hospital bed, but recovery and rehabilitation is anything but a happy process.

Shiffrin, 29, has been pretty lucky so far during her storied career, though last season she missed six weeks while recovering from damage to her knee ligaments that she suffered during a downhill race on the Olympia delle Tofane course in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, where the 2026 women’s Olympic competition will take place. She returned in time to capture another season slalom title, but the experience taxed her brain as much as her body.

“When you’re injured, whether it’s for nine months or eight weeks, you’re watching the world carry on without you being in a space where you are supposed to be, and that’s frustrating,” she said during an interview this fall before the start of the season. “There are so many moments of doubt when you feel pain or weakness, when it’s like, ‘I don’t know that I can do that.’”

That’s basically been Kilde’s life since his January crash.

The damage to both his shoulder and his leg left him wheelchair-bound for weeks, since he couldn’t use crutches. Kilde has been called “the Arnold Schwarzenegger of skiing” for his strength. His being too weak to get out of a wheelchair is a difficult image to conjure.

The gash in his calf severed nerves. For months, he could not make his foot and toes move the way he wanted them to. Sometimes his toes would just hang like appendages. Only in late spring did he begin to think that his foot would eventually work properly again, though he still hasn’t regained much feeling in the toes.

For months he felt like he had no purpose in his life.

“You lose your job and you’re injured, you can’t even do anything,” he said. “I can’t work on my shoulder which needed to be worked on. I can’t work on my leg which needed to be worked on. I can’t even be in the sun because of antibiotics. I had to be indoors. Just a really, really boring life, honestly.”

A few weeks in, he realized he needed to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning, especially since this recovery was going to take a while. So he looked into finding some way to stimulate his mind.

Kilde may be a two-time Olympic medalist with 48 World Cup podiums, but by some measures he is the black sheep of his very educated family. His father is an engineer. His mother is a nurse. His brother is a finance executive. He has a high school education, and for the last couple of years, he has largely focused on being outdoors and his athletic career. It had been a long time since he had to study. And even longer since he was interested in studying.

He does have an interest in real estate, though. So he signed up for an eight-week online course in real estate and finance through the London School of Economics. There were a series of modules to complete each week, plus assignments and tasks, a final project and a certificate at the end.

The course description said the work would take up roughly 10 hours each week. He said it took him at least 20. He hadn’t worked with mathematical formulas in 15 years.

He said he learned plenty about his investments, but more than that, he learned something about himself.

“Reading and learning is really something that can give you a lot of energy,” he said. “I never thought of it like that before. I felt like I didn’t need it. But I think now, just always strive to learn. It’s really something that is good for you. Not only for your mental capacity but also for your mental health. It’s very nice to know things.”

It will be nice to ski again, too. He’s been cleared to get back on snow, but just for free skiing. He can’t go fast. He can’t crash. He needs another operation on his shoulder since doctors had to remove a lot of the work that had been done when they were trying to rid his body of the infection.

The next surgery will be the one that will make a comeback possible. For now, he can basically live a normal life. He just can’t ski race. To set himself up for that, he’s been paying close attention to his diet, cutting out alcohol and most sugar, making sure to eat quality meats and other proteins, biding his time for the opportunity to be able to do the thing that he has dedicated most of his life to. And if he needs his speed rush, he’s got a nice Audi that can go from zero to 60 pretty fast.

“And that’s fine,” he said.

His fiancée still has to work on her patience as she manages through her latest injury. She can be a little less zen than him at times, especially when she is on the sidelines, waiting to be healthy enough to get back into the starting hut at the top of the hill.

Then again, this one’s a little different.

“I’ve been impaled,” she announced in a video she posted on social media days after her crash.

You don’t get to say that every day. Not even when you’re an alpine skier.

GO DEEPER

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(Top photo of Aleksander Kilde and Mikaela Shiffrin: Alain Grosclaude / Agence Zoom / Getty Images)