Sofia Goggia, words that make your hands shake: “I speak slowly, and I have excruciating pain”
During the Italian Winter Sports Federation’s media day in Milan, Sofia Goggia recounted her ordeal: her words were enough to make one’s hands shake—fortunately, the worst is behind her, and the Bergamo native appeared to be in good shape. “I couldn’t even go down the stairs anymore. I was shaking so much; it was as if I’d completely lost my coordination. On top of that, I had excruciating pain even just from turning over in bed at night—it left me debilitated; it was quite debilitating. But whenever I felt that pain, it was as if my bones were crumbling. I couldn’t put any weight on my body,” the champion recounted.
The ordeal, however, wasn’t over upon her return to Italy—quite the contrary: “Once I got back, I realized that something wasn’t right in another way, too. My speech was slurred; I had to enunciate my sentences differently, and I was shaking a lot. I was very worried, especially because of the pain I was experiencing.”
The clinical picture was clarified by in-depth tests conducted at the La Madonnina Clinic and the IRCCS San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, with essential specialist support from the Regional Center for Infectious Diseases (CeReMI) in Pavia. The diagnosis revealed the presence of two distinct viral infections which, overlapping with one another, had produced amplified physical effects, causing a severe state of debilitation. A virus described by Goggia herself as “uncommon among adults,” for which, as the champion explained at the Trento Sports Festival, “there was no cure.”
The uniqueness of this situation compared to the numerous injuries she has faced throughout her career has not escaped Goggia herself, who emphasized at the FISI Media Day that this time, willpower alone is not enough: “Let’s just say that throughout my career I’ve had to practice the art of patience quite a few times, but the situation I find myself in now is a bit unique—different from the ones I’ve had to deal with due to my many injuries. In this case, however, even all my willpower isn’t enough to rush the process—there’s a biological healing timeline.” Her stated priority, therefore, is to restore her nervous system before anything else: “My goal right now is to recover, especially on a nervous system level. Then, once I’m feeling well, I know the path ahead because I’ve built my career by patching things up here and there after injuries time and again.”
The recovery process has begun under the supervision of the FISI Medical Commission, chaired by Dr. Andrea Panzeri. In recent weeks, Goggia had moved to Favignana, in Sicily, where she had gradually resumed training at CrossFit Egadi alongside her longtime strength and conditioning coach, Matteo Artina. The champion herself described those first sessions as “a first glimpse of training after a month of inactivity,” a sign of a necessarily cautious but encouraging restart.
Meanwhile, the countdown to her competitive events is underway. The World Cup season kicked off on October 24 with the traditional giant slalom in Sölden, while the first speed events are scheduled for Beaver Creek in December, with the downhill races on the 11th and 12th and the Super-G on the 13th. The highlight of the 2026–2027 season, however, will be the World Championships in Crans-Montana, scheduled for February 1–14, 2027: a goal that, in Sofia Goggia’s words and gaze at the Media Day in Milan, already seems to be emerging as the driving force behind her patience in facing this battle unlike any other.
