Austria’s Katharina Liensberger will miss the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics after injuring her knee during fall alpine ski training.
Published January 2, 2026
Austria’s 2022 Olympic slalom silver medalist Katharina Liensberger will miss the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics after sustaining a serious knee injury in a training accident.
The Austrian Ski Association announced that Liensberger will undergo surgery on Friday after a medical examination revealed a fracture of the tibial plateau, a torn meniscus and damage to the medial collateral ligament of his right knee.
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Austrian media said the 28-year-old slalom specialist’s season was over following the crash in St. Michael’s, a month before the Olympics began in Italy.
Liensberger won team gold and slalom silver in Beijing and became slalom world champion in 2021. She won bronze in the slalom at last year’s Saalbach Championships on home snow.
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 slalom races and has won five times this season.
The women will compete this weekend in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, with a giant slalom on Saturday and a slalom on Sunday.
Liensberger joins a growing list of top female skiers with serious injuries in the run-up to the Olympics.
Three Swiss Olympic champions – Michel Gysin, Lara Gut-Behrami and Corinne Suter – were absent due to training accidents, and the first two were excluded from the competition.
After Italian skier Matteo Franzoso died in a training accident in Chile in September, concerns were raised about how to limit risks in primarily high-speed sports.
Shiffrin weighed in a month later at the start of the Olympic ski season, saying, “We often train in situations where there are too many variables that we can’t control, and sometimes we have to make decisions. Isn’t this unreasonably dangerous?”
