The traveling circus that is the World Cup Alpine ski circuit sets up its tent on American snow this week just as Lindsey Vonn is celebrating Thanksgiving with family down the road from the races at Copper Mountain. She moved on from nearby Vail, Colorado, years ago. Her brother and father still live there. It still feels like home.
Vonn is entering an unprecedented final season in which she only skis Alpine’s fastest disciplines, downhill and super-G. Those won’t be staged for women this weekend. So even with the holiday, she lamented not being able to ski in front of American fans one last time.
“But,” she said, after some thought, “I also don’t mind ending my U.S. racing career at Sun Valley.”
Vonn was referencing her second-place finish at the World Cup finals in March. She is thinking about the season that stretches out before her, one that will begin for her in early December in Switzerland and, fingers crossed, will include the Milan-Cortina Olympics in less than three months.
She is 41. She is hurling herself back down mountains at 80 mph. She is focused and happy. This is not normal.
Think about it. With a Winter Games barreling at her 24 years after she made her Olympic debut, she represents more than what she did back when she was a teenager full of potential. By now, Vonn has been a sports star for more than two decades. A legendary career already established, what she’s doing at 41 transcends sports.
“One thing that’s been really amazing about this journey is I’ve kind of reached a different group of people that don’t know skiing and that want me to succeed because they want me to show the world what women are capable of,” Vonn said. “… I think that’s what I’m honestly most proud of. And this comeback is definitely different in that way. I’ve reached a totally new group of people.”
These people now come up to her in airports and encourage her, she said, a rarity even in her prime. She is a celebrity more than ever, someone who travels in circles that would have seemed unapproachable even when she brought home Olympic gold in the downhill in 2010. Vonn now can count actresses Mariska Hargitay and Reese Witherspoon among her friends. Competing into middle age will attract only more attention.
“Jennifer Aniston knows who I am and that I’m coming back to the Olympics,” Vonn said. “That’s insane.”
Let’s back up a bit and retrace how she even got here. Back in 2019, in another phone conversation — this one from Are, Sweden, during the world championships — Vonn was resigned about her impending retirement. In Are, she crashed in the super-G. She was committed to one final downhill race. Damned if she didn’t finish third, another medal, another podium. But after all the wipeouts and all the punishment — not to mention all the surgeries — she just could not do this anymore.
“When I talked to you in 2019, I was a complete mess,” Vonn said. “At that time, I had no LCL in my left leg. I had three tibial plateau fractures. My right leg had a bone bruise. I was skiing with two knee braces. I couldn’t even fully extend my right leg — not even close — or bend it past like 90 degrees.
“I could barely do a normal recovery, spin or workout. I was limping to the finish line, and the fact that I still got on the podium was a miracle in and of itself. But my body was completely broken, and that was not an exaggeration. It’s probably understated.”
At 34, she was done. She dived into off-snow endeavors, traveling and serving on the boards of a variety of businesses, spearheading her foundation. But last April, she had a partial knee replacement — not to ski again, just to live life. Almost immediately, her body felt better. Almost immediately, her competitive mind grew itchy. Over the summer, she stealthily traveled to Austria to train on a glacier and to New Zealand, where it was winter. By November, she announced an official comeback. If her career originally ended before she was ready, maybe this was a chance to go out on her own terms.
It wasn’t going to be a straight line. After finishing sixth in a World Cup downhill and fourth in a super-G, Vonn went through a string of results that didn’t match her standard, regardless of age. For nine straight races, she finished outside the top 10. At the world championships — Alpine’s biggest non-Olympic competition — she crashed out of the super-G and finished 15th in the downhill.
Logically, she knew it would take time. Emotionally, it was draining. She had to figure out how to allow herself some grace.
“I hadn’t raced World Cup in six years,” Vonn said. “I knew there was going to be a learning curve because I really had limited time to prepare from a physical standpoint and from an equipment standpoint. So I basically used last year as a test, a way to figure out what I needed to fix in order to be competitive this year. … It wasn’t my standard, and there were definitely moments in the season last year where I was really frustrated and pretty down about how things were going. But I knew my skiing was there.”
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Which is why Sun Valley, Idaho, was important. Though Vonn is one of the few skiers who have won races across all of alpine’s disciplines, her comeback has focused on downhill and super-G, always her best, in which she achieved 71 or her 82 World Cup victories. In the Sun Valley super-G — contested in difficult flat light and deteriorating conditions — Vonn blitzed her way to a second-place finish. A result that once would have felt routine was transformative.
“It proved to myself and to everyone that I could still compete with the best,” Vonn said. “It was also very challenging conditions, and no one really expected me to be able to ski at my age in conditions like that. But that’s also the benefit of being older, that I have the experience to be able to compete in the tough conditions in a difficult course set in flat light. That’s my skill set. And that hasn’t gone away. … You can’t measure the confidence that I got from that race.”
So at 41, she is refreshed. She enters this season with a complete offseason of training and full assurance that her equipment, her body and her mind are in the right place. Training and recovery are easier than they used to be. “I don’t have to deal with my knee every single day,” she said.
She already has pushed boundaries. The bronze she won in the downhill at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics made her, at 33, the oldest female Olympic Alpine medalist. Before Sun Valley, the oldest World Cup podium finisher among women was 34 and change. She’s blowing those standards away.
The Olympics, then, are the target. She knows the schedule in Cortina by heart: women’s downhill on Feb. 8, women’s super-G on Feb. 12. Beyond that?
“February 12 will be my last race,” she said, with the caveat that if she were in contention for one of the season-long titles, she would push through to finish the World Cup season.
Then, retirement. For real this time.
“I’ve already been through the process of retirement,” she said. “I did therapy. I really am happy with where I am in life. I don’t need to be ski racing. I’m not doing this comeback because I feel like I have to do it or I need to do it or I have this hole in my life. My life is complete. I’m not searching for meaning. I know who I am.”
Who Lindsey Vonn is now is who she always was: a badass competitor who always gets up when she’s knocked down. She’s just doing it at 41 — with more eyeballs on her than ever before.
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