Manuel Feller Is Back on Snow — After a Setback That Nearly Derailed His Season Before It Started

For Manuel Feller, the first day back on snow looked almost ordinary — turns on the Pitztal Glacier, photos posted by the Austrian Ski Federation (ÖSV), a characteristically dry caption on Instagram: "First day back in the office." For a skier who'd spent months unable to train at all, it was anything but.

A second blow to the same injury

The 33-year-old Tyrolean's preparation for this season went off plan almost immediately. After back surgery and what the Austrian federation has described as a renewed herniated disc, Feller was forced to cancel a training camp altogether — a setback serious enough that a planned trip to Chile for early-season snow training was never realistic, the pain simply too severe through September.

That timeline matters because it pushed him roughly a month behind his original training schedule, with no second operation but months of rehabilitation work instead, focused on getting his body, in his words, "back in shape." Feller was candid about the terms on which he's continuing in the sport at all: "I want to stay in the sport for another year or two, but the condition is that it has to be fun — and it only is fun when you're not in pain."

What Monday's session actually means

The Pitztal Glacier session doesn't put Feller back on the World Cup start list — Austrian outlets covering the return were clear that when he'll next race remains open. What it represents is the first concrete step in that direction after a stretch where on-snow training wasn't happening at all. Images released by the ÖSV showed the technical specialist working through his first runs of the preparation period, a milestone significant enough that it prompted a round of Austrian ski-media coverage built almost entirely around relief that it had finally happened.

Why it matters for Austria

Feller isn't a fringe name working his way back from obscurity. He won his first World Cup discipline title, the slalom Crystal Globe, in 2024, clinching it after a rain-cancelled race in Kranjska Gora left him with an unassailable points lead, having won four of nine slaloms that season — Austria's first men's slalom globe since Marco Schwarz in 2020-21 and the country's eighth in twelve seasons. He's also a 2017 world silver medallist in the discipline and the owner of one of his career's signature results: a Kitzbühel slalom win last season, by his own account among the highlights of his career. He competed at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics earlier this year.

Given that résumé, a lost month of snow training during Olympic-cycle preparation isn't a minor inconvenience — it's exactly the kind of disruption that reshapes a technical skier's early-season form, since slalom and GS performance depend heavily on accumulated hours on snow rather than fitness alone.

The road ahead

No firm return date to World Cup competition has been set. What's changed is that Feller is training on snow again, laying down what Austrian coverage described as important foundational work for the coming season, after a preparation period defined almost entirely by setbacks. His own stated bar for continuing — that skiing has to be fun, and that it can only be fun pain-free — suggests his team will manage his build-up conservatively rather than rush him back onto the circuit. For now, Austria's technical squad has its slalom title-holder back on his skis. Whether he's back on a start list by the World Cup's early slalom stops is the next thing to watch.