French Ski Racer’s Season Is Over Before It Started After Knee Injury in Ushuaia

The 2026-27 season of French ski racer Camille Cerutti has ended before it has started. The French speed specialist tore ligaments in her left knee during a training camp in Ushuaia, Argentina, and will miss the entire World Cup season, including the 2027 World Championships in Crans-Montana, Switzerland.

The 27-year-old French speed specialist was hurt landing off a jump, she wrote on Instagram, with no fall involved. She was flown back to France for further examinations, which point to a likely tear of the anterior cruciate ligament. It is a bitter echo of her Olympic debut: four years ago at the Beijing Games, she suffered the same injury in her right knee. This time it’s the left.

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According to Cerutti’s social media post, the athlete was injured during the French team’s preseason camp in Ushuaia. Located at the southern tip of Argentina, Ushuaia is a popular early-season training stop for European speed skiers chasing snow in the Southern Hemisphere winter. Cerutti has been ruled out for the full 2026-27 World Cup campaign, which opens in Soelden, Austria in late October, as well as the World Championships in Crans-Montana next February.

Cerutti broke the news herself in an Instagram post, translated here from French: “Not really the post I wanted to make. I would have liked to post these photos with good news, but my knee decided otherwise, and I hurt myself. Four days ago, I hurt my knee landing off a bump. No fall, just that feeling I know so well and already went through four years ago. This time it’s the left knee, so at least I’ll be balanced. It’s not easy to accept, but I know the road ahead. I will give everything to come back as quickly and as strong as possible.”

She added that she had not planned to announce the injury publicly so soon, but chose to share the news from the plane home. “I still can’t quite believe my season is already over, especially after skiing 10 days this summer,” she wrote, thanking her team and family for their support and adding, “There are still dreams to live.”

This is the second major knee injury of Cerutti’s career. She tore ligaments in her right knee crashing in the downhill at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, an injury that required surgery and sidelined her for the rest of that season. She returned to racing in January 2023 and won the downhill at the Europa Cup Finals that year.

Cerutti, born in Marseille, has been a fixture of the French speed team since her teens, winning French junior titles in giant slalom in 2014 and super-G in 2016. She made her World Cup debut in January 2020 in the combined event at Altenmarkt-Zauchensee, Austria, and claimed the French national super-G title in 2021.

The 2025-26 season was the best of her career. Cerutti picked up her first World Cup top-ten finish with a fifth-place result in the super-G at Val d’Isere, then earned selection to her second Olympic team for the Milano Cortina Games. There, she finished 8th in the super-G, one of the strongest results by a French speed skier at those Games, along with 12th in the team combined and 23rd in the downhill.

Sadly, that momentum is now on hold. Cerutti has not given a firm return timeline, saying only that she plans to update fans once she has had time to process the diagnosis and begin treatment.