“I think that if everything had gone perfectly and the hematoma had been able to be drained correctly, we were almost sure that we would be able to resume the season,” she told specialist media Ski Racing on Tuesday. But, from now on, “everything will depend on how I heal over the coming weeks and months,” she added, leaving the door open to an early end to the season.
A few seconds away from securing a 100th World Cup victory, Shiffrin, aged 29, fell during the Killington giant at the end of November. Initially, she had affirmed that there was “no real reason to worry”, while specifying “that something had stabbed (her), a priori without seriousness, at the level of the left hip.
The next day, the American Ski Federation, however, mentioned a “severe muscle injury” and a “deep” wound in the stomach. And, last week, Shiffrin posted a video on Instagram from a hospital bed where she explained that she had to have surgery due to a “small cavity deeper than the wound that was filled with old hematoma and which was not draining properly.
During the fall, the skier’s oblique abdominal muscles were in fact perforated by an as yet unidentified object (she is perhaps referring to the attachment of a safety net or the post of a door), he said. -she explained on her networks.
“There are not many precedents for this type of injury (to the obliques) in our sport,” she said again in her interview with the media Ski Racing, considering herself “lucky” not to be being injured more seriously, the puncture not having passed far from his colon.
“We can see oblique tears in baseball or hockey, but less so in skiing. And when we know the intensity required of the muscles during a giant turn, it’s difficult to know what the muscle will be able to withstand when restarting, she explained. We’ll wait a few weeks to see what happens. I think we will have an increasingly clear vision of the future,” she added.
