Lara Gut-Behrami is retiring — for good this time.

Lara Gut-Behrami is retiring from professional ski racing — for good this time. The 35-year-old from Ticino confirmed on Wednesday that she will not return to World Cup competition, closing the book on one of the most decorated careers in modern alpine skiing after a serious training crash left her final season in doubt for months.

"After careful consideration," she told Swiss broadcasters Blue and RSI, she doesn't want to return to the ski World Cup. It's a quieter, more improvised ending than the one she had planned.

A Farewell Season That Never Really Happened

Gut-Behrami had mapped out her exit more than a year in advance. She confirmed in the summer of 2025 that she would end her career after the 2025-26 season, with the move driven partly by her husband Valon Behrami's new role as technical director at English club Watford FC, prompting the family's relocation to England. The Olympic Winter Games in Milano-Cortina were meant to be the last great highlight of her career, ruling out a home World Championships appearance in Crans-Montana in 2027.

It didn't go to plan. On November 20, 2025, Gut-Behrami crashed hard during super-G training at Copper Mountain, Colorado, alongside rival and friend Mikaela Shiffrin. HEAD race director Rainer Salzgeber described how she caught a gate with her hand going over a bump, lost her balance, and somersaulted. The diagnosis, confirmed days later, was brutal: a torn anterior cruciate ligament, plus damage to the medial collateral ligament and meniscus in her left knee. The injury ended her Olympic hopes outright — she would miss the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy entirely, the very Games she had chosen as her send-off.

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At the time, Gut-Behrami refused to frame it as tragedy. In a statement referencing recent fatal training accidents in the sport, she said a knee injury, however complex, could not be considered a tragedy, and stressed her goal was simply to recover fully before deciding anything about her future. Tellingly, she did not formally end her career at that point, choosing instead to wait and see what the future held after the injury healed.

That left her window open through the winter. As the SRF and other Swiss outlets have now reported, the possibility of delaying retirement and even targeting the 2027 home World Championships in Crans-Montana became a live topic of speculation. In the end, though, she chose not to prolong things. Her actual last competitive appearance turns out to have been the giant slalom season-opener in Sölden last October — a race she finished third, unknowingly closing her career on the podium.

An All-Time Great of Swiss Skiing

Whichever way it ended, Gut-Behrami leaves as one of the most complete skiers of her generation. Across nearly two decades on the World Cup circuit — she made her debut at just 16 — she collected three Olympic medals, including super-G gold at Beijing 2022 plus bronzes in downhill (Sochi 2014) and giant slalom (Beijing 2022), two world titles won in a single, dazzling fortnight at the 2021 Cortina World Championships, and two overall World Cup crystal globes, in 2015-16 and 2023-24.

Her defining discipline was always super-G. She racked up 24 World Cup wins in the event, the second-most among women in history behind Lindsey Vonn's 28, and became the only woman to win six Super-G Crystal Globes, a record she set by beating out five-time winners Katja Seizinger and Vonn herself. That sixth globe came in dramatic fashion in March 2025, when she overturned a points deficit to win by 1.29 seconds at the World Cup Finals in Sun Valley, prompting rival Federica Brignone to call her the best super-G skier she had ever seen.

Longevity was as much a hallmark as raw talent. Gut-Behrami overcame a career-threatening ACL tear at the 2017 World Championships to return to the top, and as recently as the 2023-24 season — at 32 — she became the oldest woman to win an overall World Cup title, a stretch that also included a giant slalom discipline crown. Even amid last season's injury layoff, her body of work already placed her among the most prolific racers of all time, with 48 career World Cup victories, fifth on the all-time women's list.

What Comes Next

Off the slopes, Gut-Behrami has made clear that retirement doesn't mean stepping back from life in the public eye — just changing its shape. She and Valon Behrami are relocating to London, where he has taken up his post at Watford FC. Asked what she'd do next, she offered characteristic dry humor: "I certainly won't be a cleaning lady," she said last year, while hinting at a desire to start a family.

For Swiss alpine skiing, her departure marks the end of an era. For nearly two decades she was the sport's most consistent presence from Ticino, a fixture on podiums across three disciplines and a leader of the national team through generational change. Her career now closes not with a farewell run in Cortina, as she'd once envisioned, but with a third-place finish in Sölden last October — fitting testimony to a racer who, even in what turned out to be her final act, was still standing on the box.