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Nicole Schmidhofer knows this very well: “I was very lucky.” What the 31-year-old speed specialist from Austria means is clear. On Friday’s descent from Val d’Isère, he fell so hard into the net that he was cut by the edges of the ski. His fall to more than 100 km / h caused the worst to be feared and brought back memories of Silvano Beltrametti, who in 2001 crossed the nets a little further up the same route and ended up in a wheelchair with paraplegia.
In a virtual media round, Schmidhofer says directly from his hospital bed in Graz: “I still remember that I was training at the Kreischberg on the day of the Beltrametti accident. So I didn’t notice his accident right away, but shortly afterwards there was great excitement. In comparison, I’m lucky because you can straighten a knee, but not your spine. I could have gone very wrong. “
Like the magician Copperfield
Schmidhofer will have to fight for his return for so long. Because: She suffered a sprained fracture in her left knee joint, all her ligaments were torn. The 2017 Super G World Champion will have to endure various operations. But she doesn’t think about giving up. “I want to ski again in eight, maybe ten months. That’s my pressure on the doctors, ”he says.
Schmidhofer shows that he has not lost his sense of humor. He even says, “It was how it used to be with David Copperfield. At first I was still in the TV picture and then suddenly I went with the next cut. Really cool.”
