Michelle Gisin retires: double Olympic champion chooses a new chapter after injury battle

Michelle Gisin has announced her immediate retirement from Alpine ski racing, ending a career that brought two Olympic titles, five major-championship medals and World Cup podium finishes across every discipline. The 32-year-old made her decision public on Tuesday, 3 November, at a press conference on the Titlis above her home town of Engelberg.

Her announcement comes 327 days after the downhill training crash in St Moritz that left her with serious neck, knee and wrist injuries and ruled her out of the Milano Cortina Olympics. After months of rehabilitation, Gisin had recently returned to skiing. She has now decided not to pursue the further year—or potentially two years—she believes a World Cup comeback would require.

“It was a long process that took place alongside my rehabilitation, but also in the years before,” she said in a Swiss-Ski statement, adding that she was now very happy with her decision and looking forward to the future.

The distinction matters: this was not simply a retirement announced from a treatment room. Gisin wanted to stand on skis again before deciding how to end her competitive career. She achieved that return, enjoyed the snow—and chose a different future.

A decision made on skis

As recently as August, Gisin had remained determined to give herself the opportunity to assess a comeback.

“I want to decide on skis and not end such an incredibly beautiful, successful career on the physio couch,” she said at the time.

That ambition followed a prolonged recovery from her crash on the Corviglia course on 11 December 2025. Her injuries included torn cruciate and medial knee ligaments, damage to her wrist and a serious cervical-spine injury. Multiple operations followed, and the accident ended her hopes of competing at the 2026 Winter Games.

Rehabilitation eventually brought a return to strength training and then to snow. But being able to ski again and being ready to race a World Cup downhill are very different thresholds.

At Tuesday’s press conference, Gisin said she felt considerable gratitude for the years she had been able to compete at the highest level. The decision nevertheless involved emotional weeks and extensive conversations with those closest to her.

“I’m glad that in future I’ll be able to choose the pistes myself and ski where I feel like it,” she said.

"Over the past two weeks, I've spoken with many of the people who have supported me throughout these years: longtime teammates, coaches, physiotherapists, ski instructors, and many others," she adds. "These exchanges have brought back a myriad of wonderful memories. I'm extremely grateful to everyone who has supported and accompanied me throughout my career."

The freedom to choose a slope, rather than prepare for the demands of a race calendar, now forms part of the appeal of retirement.

Two Olympic titles that defined her career

Gisin’s greatest results came in Alpine combined, the event that demanded speed in downhill and precision in slalom. She won gold at Pyeongchang in 2018, ahead of Mikaela Shiffrin, before successfully defending the title at Beijing in 2022.

At the Beijing Games she also took super-G bronze, leaving with medals in both a multi-discipline event and a standalone speed race. Together, those results capture the versatility that distinguished her career.

Her major-championship record also includes two World Championship combined medals, won in 2017 and 2021. Across Olympics and Worlds, she therefore retires with five medals, including those two Olympic golds.

For an athlete who competed across the Alpine programme, combined was a particularly fitting stage: success required her to bring different skills together on the same day rather than excel in only one specialist discipline.

More than a championship specialist

Gisin’s World Cup record was broader than her single individual victory might initially suggest.

She made 291 World Cup starts and reached the podium 21 times, with top-three finishes across all disciplines. Her only individual World Cup win came in the Semmering slalom in December 2020—the same venue where she had made her circuit debut eight years earlier.

Her participation illustrates the breadth of her racing. SRF records 103 slalom starts, 60 in giant slalom, 59 in downhill and 58 in super-G, alongside her appearances in the remaining formats. Few careers can be understood adequately through one discipline alone; Gisin’s certainly cannot.

Her strongest overall season came in 2020/21, when she finished third in the World Cup standings behind Petra Vlhová and Swiss team-mate Lara Gut-Behrami. That result rewarded consistency across the winter, providing a different measure of her ability from the concentrated pressure of an Olympic competition.

The combination of Olympic titles, an overall podium and success across the event programme gives her a distinctive place among the leading Swiss racers of her generation.

Her last race came before anyone knew it was the last

Gisin’s final World Cup appearance was the super-G at Sun Valley on 23 March 2025, where she finished 17th. Her December training crash meant she never returned to competition during the following season.

The retirement announcement therefore closes a chapter that had remained unresolved for almost a year. Until now, rehabilitation could still be viewed as preparation for another start. Gisin had even considered a return in the winter after the 2027 home World Championships in Crans-Montana.

Instead, she has concluded that the time and work required to regain World Cup readiness are not the next chapter she wants.

That should not be mistaken for abandoning skiing itself. Her comments describe pleasure in being back on snow, alongside a decision to leave elite competition. The sport remains part of her life, but no longer determines every element of it.

Crans-Montana offers a different finish-area role

Gisin will still be visible at the 2027 World Championships, scheduled for 1–14 February in Crans-Montana. An official event ambassador since 2023, she will take on duties that include interviewing racers in the finish area and participating in the evening programme.

It is a significant transition: the skier who twice handled the pressure of an Olympic gold-medal race will now help others explain their own performances.

She also looks forward to supporting her partner, Italian giant slalom racer Luca de Aliprandini, at World Cup events. Those plans allow her to remain connected to the racing community without organising her life around her own return to competition.

Her recovery will receive further attention later this month through SRF’s three-part documentary, Michelle Gisin: Stärker als der Sturz—“Stronger Than the Fall”—scheduled for broadcast on 26 November.

An ending that belongs to her

The injury inevitably frames Gisin’s departure, but it does not fully explain either her career or her decision. She described retirement as the outcome of a process that had begun before the crash, while her eventual return to snow gave her the opportunity to make that choice with greater clarity.

She leaves with two Olympic titles in the event that most clearly expressed her range, a third Olympic medal in super-G and a World Cup record spanning the full spectrum of Alpine racing.

There will be no final competitive run to mark the occasion. Instead, Gisin’s last important return was to skiing itself: enough to rediscover the enjoyment, assess the demands of another comeback and decide that her future could remain in the mountains without remaining on the World Cup start list.