Mikaela Shiffrin says she pierced her abdomen during her dramatic crash over the weekend.
“I have a stab wound, basically. We’re just not totally sure how I got punctured,” Shiffrin, 29, said Dec. 1 in an interview with NBC Sports.
Shiffrin was taken to the hospital on Nov. 30 after she hit two gates and crashed into a fence while competing in the giant slalom event at the Stifel Killington Cup in Killington, Vermont.
The Olympic gold medalist said the puncture wound in her oblique muscle is “fairly thin” and that she and her medical team are “not totally sure on the depth of it.”
“Oh my goodness. What an angle, you guys,” she told NBC Sports as she watched footage of her accident. “This is stunning.”
She added that during the crash, she felt like she had “12 different legs.”
“I think I hit the fence at actually a pretty opportune angle, so my skis didn’t really get caught in the fence. They just kind of bounced off of it,” she said, adding that she considered herself “quite lucky.”
The U.S. Ski & Snowboard Team gave an update on Shiffrin’s condition in an X post on Dec. 1, noting there was “no ligament damage assessed” and that the skier’s “bones and internal organs look OK.”
“There is a puncture wound into the right side of her abdomen and severe muscle trauma,” the team added. “Her return to snow is TBD and more information will be forthcoming.”
Shiffrin isn’t sure how soon she might return to the slopes.
“I want to be optimistic, but just looking at the timeline of other injuries I’ve sustained — muscle strains and spasms and things of that nature — it’s taken two weeks to feel like I could ski uninhibited,” she told NBC Sports.
She added that because her most recent injury involved muscle tearing, which she described as “the most severe kind of muscle spasm you could imagine,” she suspects her recovery will take longer than two weeks.
Due to the extent of her injuries, Shiffrin said it’s unlikely she will race at a World Cup event in Beaver Creek, Colorado, later this month.
“Right now, I’m pretty limited in doing anything,” she said. “But we’ll see how it goes the next couple days.”
In January 2023, an Olympics.com article described Shiffrin as the “most successful female alpine skier in World Cup history” after she secured her 83rd World Cup victory in Kronplatz, Italy.
She currently holds 99 World Cup wins and had been eyeing her 100th victory at the Stifel Killington Cup.
Shiffrin is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, winning gold in slalom at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and in giant slalom at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.