Lara Gut-Behrami retires from competition after twenty years

Lara Gut-Behrami announced her retirement from competition on Wednesday evening. The news had been reported first by RSI in the late afternoon.

The decision follows the serious injury she suffered last November. The accident forced her to end the season early and to withdraw from the Cortina Olympics, where she had wanted to close a twenty-year career.

The Ticino skier, born in 1991, retires with a record few Swiss athletes come close to. She won three Olympic medals, one of them gold, and nine world championship medals, two of them gold. She took the overall World Cup title twice and seven discipline titles.

Forty-eight wins and the podiums missed by a little

The race tally says more about her consistency than the titles do. Since her debut in December 2007 she recorded 48 World Cup victories, 28 second places and 25 third places.

Her podium total therefore passes a hundred, spread across almost two decades of competition. The figure carries particular weight given the sequence of serious injuries that took whole periods of racing away from her.

That sequence is as much part of her career as the wins. Several heavy crashes kept her off the slopes for months, and each return required a complete physical rebuild.

The last injury, however, allowed no comeback. The Olympic season ended before it began, and the Cortina appointment, which should have been her last, did not happen.

For sport in Ticino this closes by far the most visible competitive story of the past twenty years. Gut-Behrami was for a long time the only athlete from Italian-speaking Switzerland at the very top of a winter Olympic discipline, in a canton with few ski facilities.