No surgery, but:

ÖSV up-and-comer has to end her season before the start

Leonie Lussnig (center) impressed straight away in her first season as a ski cross racer and celebrated her first victories.

(Bild: zVg)

There's no such thing! Austria's ski crossers are anything but lucky at the moment. After Mathias Graf and Daniel Traxler announced their retirement and it is unclear when Sonja Gigler will be able to make a comeback after her cruciate ligament rupture, another ÖSV lady is now out for the entire World Championship season.

"After the pain is gone, I won't have an operation either," explains Leonie Lussnig. The 18-year-old was diagnosed with a slipped disc at the end of August. "After I wrote my sports science exam at the ski high school in Stams on Tuesday, I was admitted to the Kettenbrücke Sanatorium in Innsbruck on Wednesday, where Doctor Gabl should have operated on me on Thursday." Should have! After her slipped disc, Lussnig stopped training. The result: the pain was gone after two weeks. "And if there's no pain, there's no operation."

But what happens next? "We'll try to treat it conservatively," says the Kästle skier, who only switched from alpine skiing to ski cross in the summer of 2023 and won three FIS races in her first full season and twice finished third on the podium in a European Cup race. "The treatment will last until December and then we will decide after another MRI scan whether or not she needs an operation."

Good news in itself. "I'm already happy that I don't need an operation now," admits the Oberland native, whose brother Nicolas is also in the ÖSV B squad and is hoping for a breakthrough in the World Cup this year. "However, it's also clear that I won't be competing in any races this season." But Lussnig is also trying to take something positive out of this situation: "This means I can concentrate fully on my A-levels and start preparing for the 2025/26 Olympic season now."