Chemmy Alcott suffered a collapsed lung after a badly timed five-metre front flip into Lake Annecy in France. The Ski Sunday presenter and former GB Olympic skier ended up in hospital after the landing, then described the episode as a very expensive lesson in rotation.
Alcott, 44, wrote that the jump off a five metre platform left her with “Collapsed lung, chest drain and a very expensive lesson in rotation.” She also said the landing brought “a few more hospital overnights than were on the holiday itinerary,” turning a holiday clip into a medical problem in a matter of moments.
Lake Annecy and the hospital stay
Alcott posted the incident on Instagram, including the caption “this didn't end well,” and later shared images of herself in hospital with tubes and wires sticking out of her body. She said, “One badly timed front flip. One very hard landing. One collapsed lung. One chest drain. And a few more hospital overnights than were on the holiday itinerary...”
The injury was not a cold-water issue. Lake Annecy in the French Alps reaches 25C to 27C in the summer, and the damage came from her chest slamming into the water, more like blunt trauma than a lake-swim problem. By the time she hit the water, she was probably travelling at around 20mph.
Chemmy Alcott on the landing
Alcott said she initially went back to jump again out of embarrassment, then realised she could not breathe properly and should probably get it checked out. That sequence tells the real story here: the first mistake was the rotation, but the second was ignoring what the body was saying after the impact.
The NHS says a collapsed lung is medically known as a pneumothorax, and Alcott’s account matches the kind of injury that needs a chest drain and hospital observation rather than a quick reset. “I absolutely loved Annecy… but I'm not entirely sure it loved me back,” she wrote, and that reads less like a joke than a blunt verdict on how fast a holiday moment turned into treatment.
