Norwegian Alpine skier Aleksander Aamodt Kilde will miss the 2024-25 season as he continues to work his way back from a downhill race crash in January.
Kilde, the World Cup downhill season champion in 2021-22 and 22-23, plans to undergo another surgery in the near future on his left shoulder, which he dislocated in the Jan. 13 crash. Kilde also suffered a severe right leg laceration in the crash.
Kilde underwent surgery on the shoulder on Jan. 18 to repair two torn ligaments and was back skiing by June.
Then in July, an infection was found in the shoulder, so he had rinse out surgeries in Colorado and again in Austria.
“The issue here is that the infection was so aggressive and was there in my shoulder for a long time, so it was eating on my bone, and that meaning that all the hardware and everything that was in my shoulder need to go out,” he said in a video posted Wednesday. “So two of the muscles is still not attached at this moment, which means I need to do another surgery and reconstruct everything again.”
Kilde, 32, said he needs three to four months of shoulder rehab after this upcoming surgery.
“He’s incredible, his mentality, his patience with the process,” Mikaela Shiffrin, Kilde’s fiancée, said earlier this month. “He’ll have bad days, but his bad day for other people would be like a death spiral crisis. He handles it. He takes it in stride.”
In addition to being the world’s top downhiller before the crash, Kilde won the World Cup overall title in 2019-20, two Olympic medals in 2022 and two world championships medals in 2023.
“I’m fully committed to my rehab and working towards a strong comeback,” Kilde said in a press release.
The World Cup season begins this Saturday and Sunday with women’s and men’s giant slaloms in Sölden, Austria, live on Peacock.
