Five skiers, including two World Cup season champions, crashed into the same area of fencing in a women’s downhill in Val d’Isere, France, on Friday.
In the first World Cup speed race of the season, Austrian Nicole Schmidhofer lost control in a compression near the bottom of the course and skied directly into red fencing at high speed, going through one set of fencing and piercing the next.
Schmidhofer, the 2019 World Cup downhill season champion, is suspected to have suffered a rupture of the ACL and LCL in her left knee, according to the International Ski Federation (FIS), citing Austria’s federation.