Survived a horror fall two years ago
Ski star: “I thought I was dying”
01/17/2026 – 8:22 a.mReading time: 2 minutes
Two years after his serious fall, Aleksander Aamodt Kilde is skipping the traditional World Cup in Wengen. For good reasons, as he said.
The images of his fall in Wengen two years ago are probably still with many people – now Aleksander Aamodt Kilde has spoken openly about the dramatic consequences. The injuries the Norwegian suffered on the Lauberhorn descent were serious: his left shoulder was almost completely broken, and his own ski severed 80 percent of his calf muscles. But that wasn’t enough, as blood poisoning later put the 33-year-old’s life in danger.
Kilde summarized the drama of the whole thing in an interview with “Kicker”: “What I can tell you exactly is that 80 percent of my calf muscles were separated. A little deeper and my ski would have hit my shin bone too.”
And further: “You have to know: Our edges are razor-sharp. My calf was opened with a scalpel like an operation. Ratchet! The flesh was already showing out. I never want to see anything like that again, believe me.” But his shoulder was even worse off, as Kilde explains. The only thing that was still whole were the bones.
The ski star: “Everything else was – with a car you would say a total loss – torn, torn. So tendons, muscles, nerves.” Nevertheless, everything seemed to be healing well at first, until the setback came: an infection. “This stupid inflammation was already attacking my bones. The bacteria literally ate into my bones,” says Kilde. Only his fiancée, the American ski racer Mikaela Shiffrin, realized the seriousness of the situation.
“I went to Doc Miller. He looked at my shoulder. At that point it was already red, warm and swollen. It didn’t get any better when he showed me the X-rays: ‘Aleks, that’s really bad!'” remembers Kilde. “Normally the bones are straight and smooth, like a dog’s bone. Mine, on the other hand, were jagged, they looked like the rocky peaks in the Grand Canyon. So I didn’t have food poisoning, but a terrible infection in my entire shoulder. They immediately gave me the antibiotic intravenously.”
The Norwegian was given antibiotics for three months – a “never-ending nightmare” for him. “I’ve never had such pain before. I thought I was dying. There were days during all this long suffering when I wanted to tear my arm off,” said Aleksander Aamodt Kilde.
