Bormio (Italy) (AFP) - At the end of September, Ana Alonso, Olympic bronze medalist this Thursday in the Milan-Cortina ski mountaineering sprint, believed that her Olympic Games were disappearing: while she was training with her bicycle in her native Granada, a car hit her and caused serious injuries that took her to the operating room.

First modification: 02/19/2026 - 14:55 Last modification: 02/19/2026 - 20:40

His left side was badly damaged, from head to toe, and above all he suffered a rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee, an accident that seemed fatal less than five months before his sport had its Olympic premiere.

"They have been very hard months, especially the first month and a half. I have been dependent on almost everything a person has to do. It was hard to see that everyone was already training for this and for me it was difficult to think about the Olympic Games when I couldn't walk. It was impossible, as if I were thinking about flying," he admitted this week when remembering what happened.

Her recovery against the clock had an important moment when earlier this month she placed second alongside Oriol Cardona in the mixed relay of the World Cup stage of her sport, skimo, in Boí Taüll (Catalonia).

She could not help but cry from the emotion of what the ordeal of the Olympic set-up had meant for her, in a story with a happy ending that she now crowns with this bronze.

Loss of his father

But if Ana Alonso (31 years old) has shown anything, it is that she knows how to recover from life's blows.

Since she was a child, her parents instilled in her a love for the mountains and especially for the Sierra Nevada, the emblematic place for winter sports in the south of Spain, in the province of Granada.

Ana started cross-country skiing when she was seven years old and in principle that was going to be her destiny.

His father Gerardo, a guide in that natural place in Andalusia, was one of the pioneers of what is now known as skimo in Spain, but his story was cut short by an accident in the mountains in 2010, which cost him his life.

Ana was a teenager at the time and remembers it as the worst moment of her life.

His arrival to mountain skiing came after the death of his father, but he feels that in some way it was Gerardo who taught him.

"I started mountain skiing with my father's friends and my father had taught them, so I feel that in some way a circle like this was closed," he said in an interview with the Spanish Olympic Committee (COE).

health problems

In 2018, health slowed him down. A serious tibia-fibula injury was followed by two interventions for heart rhythm problems.

After these bad health experiences, she went one summer to work as a waitress in Mallorca to isolate herself for a few weeks from her daily life.

With his health and motivation restored, he made an increasingly important name in skimo, first in Spain and then in Europe, the place where they are the main competitors in this sport.

At the European Championships in Flaine (France) in 2024, she was champion in the mixed relay with Cardona and runner-up in the individual sprint event.

A year later, at the World Championships in Morgins (Switzerland), she won silver again in the relay, with her Catalan teammate again, and touched the podium in the individual sprint, being fourth.

Now this Thursday's medal is the greatest success of his career, the reward for his battles against adversity and one of the most beautiful stories of improvement of this Olympic fortnight in Italy.

© 2026 AFP

The content you requested does not exist or is no longer available.