Lindsey Vonn always knew that it would take just one slight catch of an edge to turn her from the reigning empress of alpine skiing into a broken figure in the snow. That’s the nature of the Olympic downhill. It was no use for the scolds and skeptics to warn an athlete like Vonn, who, at 41, had one rebuilt knee and a torn ACL on the other, that she might hurt herself. Exactly what did they think downhilling was if not a dangerous flirtation with crack-up, a headlong battle against not only the race clock but also the one that, over years, erodes your bones and joints? This was Vonn saying No thank you. I’d rather do a number on myself than let that bastard Time do it to me.
She crashed fewer than 14 seconds into her final downhill Olympics run at Cortina d’Ampezzo, and the cosmic joke was that her left knee, on which she was racing despite a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament, wasn’t to blame. Seeking to attack on a sidehill line, Vonn caught the fourth gate with her ski pole. As she sailed into an angled turn, the caught pole yanked her back by the arm, and her skis canted dead sideways, giving her no chance to recover. The mountain rose up. Her skis sprayed geysers of snow, and she cartwheeled.
Down at the finish line, her American teammate Breezy Johnson, the eventual gold medalist, immediately put a hand over her eyes. The snow-muffled silence of shock made Vonn’s cries of pain (“Oh my God!”) audible. Her blue racing skins stood out vividly as she lay unmoving on the slope. The emergency sled was red. The rescue helicopter was yellow, dangling her in the air over the jagged white Dolomites. They were primary colors, like children’s paint, but they signaled that Vonn’s epic, extended youth might finally be over.
Only five hours after the crash did the U.S. ski team post an update about Vonn’s condition, writing on X that she “sustained an injury, but is in stable condition and in good hands” with a team of doctors. Whether Vonn is capable of skiing again in the Olympics or this season was uncertain. But there was no question at all of regret. She had said so much in the days leading up to the race. “I’ve always pushed the limits and in downhill, it’s a very dangerous sport and anything can happen. Because I push the limits, I crash,” she said earlier in the week. She added, “and I’ve been injured more times than I would like to admit, to myself even.”
From the beginning of her career, when she burst onto the Olympic scene at the age of 17, Vonn has been unafraid to risk her entire frame chasing speed—all grit, white-blond hair, and high emotion. Initially inconsistent, she closely studied her responses to pressure, and when she realized her father was exerting too much of it, she found the strength to distance herself from him for a time. She dealt with fear almost clinically: In an interview with me for The Washington Post at the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, she told me she thought “it would be interesting to take a blood test right in the starting gate” to know more about the adrenals pumping inside a skier standing before a steeply pitched sheet that demanded speeds of 80 miles an hour in nothing but a nylon skin. After winning a race in 2005, she’d been offered the choice of a winner’s check of 5,000 euros or a cow. She took the cow. She named her Olympe and kept her on a farm in France, where she visited her for a sense of calm. “She’s very serene,” she told me in Turin.. A couple of days later, Vonn crashed badly in training and suffered severe back and hip contusions. She competed anyway and finished eighth in the downhill race.
[Read: A lesson in false limits]
In 2019, worsening knee injuries forced Vonn to retire; she could not even hike without pain. Five years later, she had her right knee partially replaced with titanium components; the surgery was so successful that she resumed professional skiing in late 2024. The former Olympic champion Michaela Dorfmeister was among the loudest in a chorus of disapproving voices, saying that skiing on a replaced knee was too risky; Vonn “should see a psychologist,” Dorfmeister said, and asked, “Does she want to kill herself?”
Vonn answered with an extraordinary performance early this season, making the medal podium in seven of her recent eight races, winning twice, to become the Olympic favorite. Having won a gold in 2014 and a bronze in 2018, she was now competing to be the oldest person ever to win an Olympic medal in downhill skiing.
And then less than two weeks ago came the total rupture of her ACL in a race in Crans-Montana. Cortina now represented a new frontier, even for Vonn. Her fearless mind had to contend with the reality of her breakable body. But in her last training run Saturday on her torn-up right knee, facing the course that defeated her today, she clocked the third-fastest time.
How was it even possible for Vonn to ski—at all—days after such an injury? That was a matter of the quirkiness of the knee, according to orthopedists. The ACL is an internal ligament between the femur and the tibia that acts as a stabilizer for pivoting motions. But it’s just one of four major stabilizers, and you can run without it, as long as you aren’t stopping short. In more straight-line activities, it’s not of the “utmost importance” if the rest of the knee is healthy, Vehniah K. Tjong, an associate professor of medicine at Northwestern and a team doctor for the U.S.A. national women’s soccer team, told me yesterday. At the Super Bowl this week, the New England Patriots receiver Stefon Diggs, who tore his ACL last year, remarked about Vonn, “People can run. People can do whatever they need to do once they get the swelling out. So, it’s kind of a weird injury.”
Perhaps just as significant: Athletes are built differently from you or me, mechanically and mentally. Vonn was in such superb shape that she was able to do box jumps and weighted squats with the ruptured ligament as she prepared to race in Cortina, suggesting that her other ligaments were strong enough to compensate. A leg brace also gave her added stability. “The amount of muscular development and body control that she has is exceptional and different from most other people,” Christopher C. Annunziata, the team orthopedist for the NFL’s Washington Commanders, told me before the crash. As for pain tolerance, Annunziata believes elite athletes are on not just another level but a different planet. He often leaves the Commanders locker room joking that it’s “time to return to the real world.”
[Read: The man who broke physics]
Even among this subset of humanity, Vonn was unusually experienced at competing—and medaling—with preexisting injuries. In the 2019 World Championships, her last race before her initial retirement, she took a bronze despite a tear in another ligament, her LCL, and three tibial-plateau fractures in her right knee. “This is not unknown for me; I’ve done this before,” she said at a press conference this week in Milan.
Some critics nevertheless suggested that Vonn was taking up a spot that a younger, healthier U.S. skier could have occupied. When the mental-performance coach Greg Graber opined in USA Today that maybe she couldn’t let go of competing because she is prone to “overidentify” with being an athlete, she shot back on X, “This ageism stuff is getting really old.”
Vonn was adamant that she would be in the starting gate, and her body of work—45 World Cup downhill victories, the record for women—suggested that she had earned the right to at least try. “As many times as I’ve crashed, I’ve always gotten back up, and as many times as I’ve failed, I’ve always won,” she pointed out.
But today was all crashing, and no getting up.
The post Lindsey Vonn Was Never Going to Play it Safe appeared first on The Atlantic.
