Sofia Goggia, the 2018 Olympic downhill gold medalist from Italy, was in tears four months ago, believing her Alpine skiing career was over.
Then on Sunday, she won the Stifel Birds of Prey World Cup super-G at Beaver Creek, Colorado.
It could be a propelling victory for the 32-year-old Goggia, 14 months out from the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics in her home country.
Last February, she fractured her right tibia and tibial malleolus in her foot and ankle in a giant slalom training crash.
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She underwent season-ending surgery, had a plate and seven screws inserted and was off skis for eight months. She had another surgery to remove the hardware in September and returned to competition this weekend.
“I think back to that day in February, when I was still crawling on the snow, looking at that blue sky, feeling that I no longer had a foot,” she wrote on Instagram last week, according to a translation, “but the only pain that warned me, sharp as a dagger, was that of my heart, whose dreams were shattering.”
On Saturday, she was runner-up in a downhill to Austrian Cornelia Hütter in her first race back.
“I thank (my team) even more just for being there in the darkest days: none of us will ever forget that day at the Stelvio in August when I cried with you because, no managing to ski with the plate, I thought I was finished my career,” Goggia posted afterward.
Goggia earned her 25th World Cup victory Sunday, her seventh in super-G to go along with 18 in downhill. She had been the World Cup downhill season champion three years running before the February crash.
In 2022, Goggia came back from a Jan. 23 super-G crash -- where she suffered a minor fibula fracture, a partially torn ACL and a sprained left knee -- to win Olympic downhill silver that Feb. 15.
She also missed the 2014 Sochi Games after tearing an ACL in December 2013. By her mid-20s, she already had three surgeries on her right knee and one on her left.
“I know it’s a comeback race, but it feels like it’s not a comeback race,” she said Saturday of the Beaver Creek downhill. “I mean, this is my job. This is my passion. It’s a lot of years I’m doing this. Today, I felt like I never left for the injury, but at the same time I knew exactly what I had to pass and been through this summer. I was really close to quit.”
The women’s Alpine skiing World Cup moves next weekend to St. Moritz, Switzerland, for two super-Gs.
Lindsey Vonn is expected to race there, marking her first World Cup starts since retiring in February 2019.
