Austrian Alpine skier Hannes Reichelt kept winning races after returning from several severe knee and back injuries that hampered his career.
The 2015 World champion’s latest setback, however, was one too many.
The 40-year-old Reichelt said Wednesday he will retire at this week’s World Cup Finals in Lenzerheide, Switzerland.
The announcement came six years after the Austrian won the biggest prize of his two-decade-long career — super-G gold at the world championships in Beaver Creek, Colorado.
“I’ve got the feeling that after 20 years on the World Cup the time has come to leave,” Reichelt said.
He failed to get back to the top level after damaging his right knee in a downhill crash in December 2019 and didn’t make the Austrian team for the worlds in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, last month.
“In races I was struggling more and more to get to the limit. To me it was clear: I race to the fullest or not at all,” Reichelt said.
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Reichelt did not qualify for this season’s World Cup Finals but was planning to ski down the super-G course on a farewell run as one of the forerunners ahead of Thursday’s race.
Reichelt has won 13 World Cup races, including the classic downhill in Kitzbühel, and had 44 podium results.
The Austrian won his home race in January 2014 while suffering from back pains. He could barely stand straight after finishing and needed surgery for a herniated disk the following day, ruling him out for the Sochi Olympics.
Another of his wins came in a super-G in 2005, only nine months after tearing an ACL.
Reichelt is also known for earning one the most unlikely discipline title wins in the 54-year history of the World Cup.
In 2008, he arrived at the Finals in Bormio, Italy, trailing leader Didier Cuche by 99 points in the super-G standings. Reichelt won the race to earn 100 points, and Cuche was ultimately bumped into 16th place by his Swiss teammate Daniel Albrecht — with only the top 15 earning World Cup points.
It would be the only crystal globe award for Reichelt, who also won super-G silver at the 2011 Worlds.
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Speed skater Jordan Stolz capped his breakout year by lowering his own American record on Saturday, then winning a World Cup race on Sunday in Calgary.
Stolz, who last February became the third-youngest U.S. Olympic male speed skater in history, has already this season become the youngest man to win a speed skating World Cup and lowered personal bests in the 500m, 1000m, 1500m and 5000m.
On Saturday, the 18-year-old broke his own American record in the 500m — from 34.11 seconds to 34.08 — and placed second in the World Cup race. South Korea’s Kim Jun-Ho beat him by one hundredth, preventing Stolz from becoming the first U.S. man to win a World Cup 500m since Tucker Fredricks in 2013.
On Sunday, Stolz won the 1000m in 1:06.72 — three tenths shy of Shani Davis‘ American record from 2009 — beating a field that included all three Olympic medalists. Stolz, who has been coached by Davis, placed 14th in the Olympic 1000m.
Stolz earned his first World Cup victory last month by taking a 1500m by a massive margin.
Stolz was inspired to speed skate by watching Apolo Ohno in short track at the 2010 Vancouver Games. Stolz’s dad then shoveled off space to skate on the pond behind the family house north of Milwaukee.
The next speed skating World Cup stop is in February in Poland.
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Kaillie Humphries earned her 30th bobsled World Cup victory, reuniting with Olympic brakewoman Kaysha Love and winning in Lake Placid, N.Y., on Sunday.
Humphries, a three-time Olympic champion, and Love won by 12 hundredths of a second over reigning Olympic champion Laura Nolte of Germany, combining times from two runs.
Humphries picked up her first two-woman bobsled World Cup win since Dec. 5, 2021. Her six-race winless drought in two-woman World Cups was her longest in more than seven years.
Humphries is up to 29 two-woman World Cup victories. Monobob, which made its Olympic debut last February, was upgraded to a World Cup discipline this season. Humphries won a monobob World Cup in Park City, Utah, two weeks ago.
Retired German Sandra Kiriasis holds the female record of 46 World Cup wins.
Humphries has made the podium in all three two-woman World Cups so far this season and is second in the overall standings behind German Kim Kalicki.
Humphries, 37, has said since February’s Olympics that she planned to take time off in this four-year cycle to start a family, then return in time for the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Games. Humphries, who can become the first female Olympic bobsledder in her 40s, shared her experiences with IVF in the offseason on her social media.
“We’ve pushed pause so that I could go and compete this season, maintain my world ranking to be able to still work towards my 2026 goals, and we’ll go back in March to do the implantation of the embryos that we did retrieve,” she said, according to TeamUSA.org.
Humphries’ longtime rival, five-time Olympic medalist Elana Meyers Taylor, plans to return to competition from her second childbirth later in this Olympic cycle and can also break the record of oldest female Olympic bobsledder.
Love, 25, converted from sprinting to bobsled in 2020 and made the Olympic team less than two years later. After placing seventh with Humphries in the Olympic two-woman event, she began competing as a driver on the lower-level North American Cup this fall.
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