Ski world mourns for Cavagnoud

Cavagnoud was the reigning super-G world champion Keystone Archive

Switzerland's alpine skiers have been among those paying tribute to French star Régine Cavagnoud who died on Wednesday after a training accident in Austria.

“I have been in regular contact with Régine’s team-mate Carole Montillet so I knew that things were very bad,” Swiss speed specialist Corinne Rey-Bellet said. “But I was still shocked when I heard the news of her death. On Saturday I was congratulating her on coming third in the giant slalom and now she is dead.”

Rey-Bellet added that it would be difficult for her fellow skiers to put the tragic events out of their minds. “As top sportswomen we must try, though,” she said.

After sharing the podium in Sölden with Cavagnoud, Switzerland’s top skier Sonja Nef also recalled how happy the Frenchwoman had been with her start to the season.

“Just on Saturday, she was saying to me how delighted she was to have come third after missing out on more than four weeks of training,” the Swiss giant slalom world champion said.

Presidential tribute

Tributes also flooded in from the French political world with president Jacques Chirac, prime minister Lionel Jospin and sports minister Marie-George Buffet all paying their respects.

“Her immense talent was realised last season in the most wonderful way when she won a gold at the world championships,” Chirac said in a letter to Cavagnoud’s family. “She had become the pride of a region and of a whole nation.”

The 31-year-old world super-G champion sustained severe brain damage and internal injuries during her crash on Monday when she rammed into a member of the German training team at high speed. After carrying out a number of operations on the French skier, doctors at Innsbruck hospital found themselves unable to save her life.

The German trainer is still in a critical condition.

Safety questions

The nature of Monday’s accident, which came about when members of the French and German ski teams were sharing the same section of piste, has also raised safety questions about training methods.

“If the reason for Régine’s death comes down to a communications problem, it is of course very tragic,” said Swiss downhill trainer Marie-Therese Nadig. “Whatever the cause, we must make sure that in the future teams from different countries aren’t co-ordinating their training sessions on the same radio frequencies.”

Gian-Franco Kasper, the Swiss president of skiing’s international federation said the organisation could only remind the teams of the need for safety.

“All we can do is ask associations to try and observe more safety in training,” the Swiss IOC member told Reuters news agency. “If there are teams together they should have a co-ordinator. But this is not official training, really it is free skiing and we cannot control what skiers do on their own.”

swissinfo with agencies