SUN VALLEY, Idaho (AP) — While his downhill rivals finish the World Cup season, Aleksander Aamodt Kilde is back in Innsbruck, Austria, with his left arm in a sling and limited to 30-minute walks.
It’s all the fresh air the injured Norwegian ski racing standout can manage as he finishes up a round of antibiotics to fight off potential infection in his shoulder. It’s pretty much all the walking his left hamstring can endure after doctors took a piece of the muscle so they could transplant it into his shoulder.
Kilde, who hasn’t competed since his ski crash on Jan. 13, 2024, is hoping to be back in the starting gate next season. Maybe not at the beginning but optimistically leading into the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics.
It’s just weeks like this that are challenging for him — his friends, competitors and his fiancee, Mikaela Shiffrin, have assembled in Sun Valley for the World Cup finals while he’s at home, recovering.
“It’s something that I really miss right now, being so far away,” Kilde said in a recent video interview with The Associated Press. “I’ve been around (the World Cup races) a little bit this winter, but it’s been so different because when you feel like your body is not capable of doing what you’re used to doing, it seems so far away."
Fourteen months ago, the 32-year-old Kilde crashed near the finish line in a downhill race in Wengen, Switzerland. He had surgery for a severe cut and nerve damage in his right calf, along with two torn ligaments in his shoulder.
Back on skis over the summer, Kilde suffered a setback because of an infection in his shoulder and announced that he wouldn’t compete this season. He said at the time he needed another surgery to attach two of the muscles in his shoulder.
About four weeks ago, a team of three doctors performed what Kilde described as a “very, very complicated surgery.”
To fix his shoulder, Kilde said, doctors needed a strand of his hamstring muscle. So he built up the hamstring in the gym, just to make sure it was nice and strong for his shoulder. The surgeons also took a graft from his lower trapezius muscle and attached them all together.
He’s been in a sling since the surgery with about two more weeks to go. He’s also on antibiotics — four pills, two times a day — to prevent infection.
“At the moment, I actually don’t know how it works,” Kilde said of his shoulder. “The only thing I know is that it’s not painful. It’s smaller than (the other shoulder) but it’s at least in the right position. So that’s a great feeling.
"I have a good gut feel of this being the right thing now. Just crossing the fingers for not any infection or anything to come back. But it looks promising.”
His mom has been in town to help with meals and keep him company.
“I’m good,” said Kilde, who moved to Innsbruck about five years ago. “With the hamstring, it’s very hard to walk uphill. But I’ve been walking outside and getting some fresh air. The sun is shining these days, and it’s kind of springtime here, so it’s nice to be able to be outside and enjoy the sun as much as I can.”
Shiffrin, of course, has been a huge emotional help — and he to her. Shiffrin was sidelined earlier this season after suffering a puncture wound when she fell in a giant slalom race.
They’ve leaned on each other for support.
“A lot of challenges, a lot of pain for both of us," Kilde said. "It’s nice to just have someone to talk to that really knows exactly what to talk about.”
Set a wedding date yet?
“We haven’t,” Kilde said with a laugh. “We will find a date.”
Kilde is a popular figure on the circuit, the charismatic ski racer who is always among the favorites in a downhill or super-G race. He has had many competitors, friends and fans reach out to him to offer support.
It’s meant the world.
“Every time I meet people and they say, ‘You need to fight back, because we need you back in the sport,’ it's just amazing," said Kilde, a two-time Olympic medalist and 2019-20 overall World Cup champion.
While he recovered from his injuries, Kilde enrolled in a real estate program through the London School of Economics. He recently has paused his learning, though, to give returning to health his full attention.
“I’ve used the time wisely, but I’ve also tried to just stay calm and easy and not stress about the situation I’m in,” Kilde said. “It’s been four weeks since my last operation, and honestly, it feels like yesterday.”
He's setting his sights on being ready for next season, but his ultimate goal is to be back for the Olympics. At the 2022 Beijing Games, Kilde won silver in the Alpine combined and bronze in the super-G.
“It’s very good motivation for me to say to myself, ‘This is what I’m going to be 100% ready for,'" Kilde said. "But honestly, I’m going to continue skiing for some more years. So just to be back is my biggest goal — and to be able to be competitive again.”
AP skiing: https://apnews.com/hub/alpine-skiing
FILE - Norway's Aleksander Aamodt Kilde falls during an alpine ski, men's World Cup downhill race, in Wengen, Switzerland, Saturday, Jan. 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Alessandro Trovati, file)
FILE - Norway's Aleksander Aamodt Kilde attends an alpine ski, women's World Cup giant slalom, in Soelden, Austria, Saturday, Oct. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Marco Trovati, file)
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (AP) — Bold decisions to change Major League Baseball’s longstanding rules quickened the pace of games and revived the popularity of stealing bases over the last few years.
A similarly creative move may be needed to help starting pitching regain the relevance it enjoyed as recently as a decade ago.
Only four pitchers (Seattle’s Logan Gilbert, Kansas City’s Seth Lugo, San Francisco’s Logan Webb and Philadelphia’s Zack Wheeler) threw as many as 200 innings last season, down from 34 in 2014.
During that same 2014 season, all 30 major league teams got over 900 innings from their starting pitchers and five had over 1,000. Last year, only four teams had their starters pitch at least 900 innings, led by Seattle with 942 2/3.
While this shift has been years in the making, the numbers themselves provide a cold slap of reality to longtime fans who remember seeing Bob Gibson throw three complete games in the 1967 World Series or Jack Morris pitching 10 shutout innings in Game 7 of the 1991 Fall Classic.
Going back to the days of Cy Young and Walter Johnson, part of the game's beauty was watching a pitcher work his way through a lineup three or four times.
With every team having multiple relievers who can come out of the bullpen and throw in the high 90s, what could prompt teams to let their starters work deeper into games?
Managers and players struggle to come up with a solution.
“Outside of just changing rules to incentivize managers to keep guys in games longer,” Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
Roberts’ Dodgers exemplified the bullpen emphasis during their run to the 2024 World Series title. Their starting pitchers worked as many as six innings in just two of their 16 postseason games.
Texas’ Nathan Eovaldi went 5-0 with five postseason quality starts (defined as going at least six innings while allowing no more than three earned runs) a year earlier while helping the Rangers win their first World Series championship. Yet even he understands how much things have changed for starting pitchers since he made his big-league debut in 2011.
“Bullpens are a lot different now than they were back then,” Eovaldi said. “You’ve got a lot more guys who aren’t just eight- and ninth-inning guys. They can come in, in the sixth or seventh, go multiple innings. They all have multiple pitches now as well. I think that’s one of the fascinating things about the bullpen. You don’t have guys who are just a two-pitch mix anymore. They’ve got three or four pitches coming out, and two of them are really, really elite.”
And that’s why there seems only one way to get starters working more innings.
“Putting in rules that you have to,” San Francisco Giants manager Bob Melvin said. “We’ve created our own monster. It is what it is.”
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred says it’s too early to explore rules changes.
“Our focus right now is training methods, particularly offseason training methods,” Manfred said. “It’s going to be somewhere between education and recommendations. It’s very hard to tell people you can’t do X, Y and Z, right? They’re grown men and there’s no way to monitor it during the offseason.”
One problem is the lack of a clear consensus on what rule changes could work best.
For instance, MLB had the Atlantic League experiment in 2021 and 2023 with a rule change that would force a team to lose its designated hitter if its starting pitcher didn’t finish at least five innings.
Instituting that kind of rule could be a tough sell in the majors, where some of the league’s most bankable stars such as Shohei Ohtani and Bryce Harper have received ample playing time at DH the last few years. Fans paying to see those stars likely wouldn’t be happy to see them get removed as collateral damage from an early pitching change.
MLB hasn’t announced any similar types of rules experimentations in the minors this season.
The maximum number of pitchers allowed on MLB rosters was lowered from 14 to 13 in 2022, though that limit rises to 14 when rosters expand from 26 to 28 on Sept. 1. A more extreme rule change would be to require starters to work at least five or six innings unless they get injured, throw a certain number of pitches or allow a particular number of runs.
Rangers manager Bruce Bochy said he wouldn’t mind seeing the minor leagues try out more rule changes designed at lengthening starting pitchers. He wants those pitching prospects to get accustomed to working deeper into games.
“That’s the way it used to be with starters,” Bochy said. “Now I think the mentality can be, ‘Hey, I’ve done my job. I’ve thrown four or five innings.’ “
Giants pitcher Robbie Ray says the history of the game shows that starters can adapt to longer outings.
“I think starting pitchers are capable of doing it,” said Ray, who won the 2021 AL Cy Young Award with Toronto. “It’s just a matter of kind of training our bodies to do that again because what’s been expected of us has changed over the years.”
A 62-page MLB study released in December showed how the focus on rising velocities and maximum effort on each pitch had resulted in more injuries among pitchers. That study also revealed that starts of five or more innings dropped from 84% to 70% in the majors from 2005-24 and from 68.9% to 36.8% in the minors.
“Because we’re trying to create this engine and this repetitive thought of just pure stuff each and every pitch, yeah, starters are going to fatigue sooner,” Cleveland Guardians pitching coach Carl Willis said. “And at the same time, we’re training them that way. We’re training them to do so.
“Everybody still talks about wanting to go out for the sixth, wanting to go out for the seventh and getting deep into games. I don’t know that we’re training them to do that, and I don’t know how we are kind of teaching nowadays can allow that to happen.”
A change in approach could allow those starters to get that endurance. Right now, it’s the older guys who seem more used to that workload.
The MLB leader in quality starts last season was the 34-year-old Wheeler, who had 26. Lugo, 35, had 22 quality starts to tie for second place.
Even so, the 2024 season did offer some encouraging signs for the future of starting pitching.
MLB pitchers threw 5.22 innings per start last season. That represented the most since 2018, though it was still far off the 2014 average of 5.97.
The 2024 season also featured an MLB average of 85.5 pitches per start, the highest since 2019. Starters haven’t thrown as many as 90 pitches per appearance since 2017.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that the pendulum swing at least a little more toward getting starters to work longer. The recent focus on relievers puts more pressure on them, causing bullpens to break down.
There’s one obvious method to change that.
“I don’t think necessarily the game is going to all of a sudden turn back the other way, but there’s a huge push to understand how you can keep a bullpen healthy,” Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “And one of the biggest ways is those starters getting through that first bulk and getting you into the sixth or seventh.”
Now it’s just a matter of figuring out how those starters can pitch deeper into games more often.
AP Baseball Writer Ronald Blum contributed to this report.
AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb
Texas Rangers manager Bruce Bochy pauses in the dugout during the second inning of a spring training baseball game against the San Francisco Giants, Thursday, March 13, 2025, in Scottsdale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
San Francisco Giants starting pitcher Robbie Ray wraps his pitching arm in the dugout during the fourth inning of a spring training baseball game against the Texas Rangers, Thursday, March 13, 2025, in Scottsdale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
San Francisco Giants starting pitcher Robbie Ray throws against the San Diego Padres during the first inning of a spring training baseball game Tuesday, March 18, 2025, in Scottsdale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts walks on to the field during team introductions before an MLB Tokyo Series baseball game against the Chicago Cubs in Tokyo, Japan, Wednesday, March 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
Texas Rangers pitcher Nathan Eovaldi throws against the Los Angeles Angels during the second inning of a spring training baseball game, Friday, March 21, 2025, in Tempe, Ariz. (AP Photo/Matt York)
Colorado Rockies manager Bud Black (10) takes the ball from starting pitcher Germán Márquez (48) during the third inning of a spring training baseball game against the San Francisco Giants, Monday, March 10, 2025, in Scottsdale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
