US skiing star Lindsey Vonn poses after the podium ceremony of the World Cup women’s downhill event in Tarvisio, Italy, on January 17.
Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images)
Lindsey Vonn, swaddled in her Team USA parka, sat down in front of a microphone in a press room in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, and calmly detailed how, a few days earlier, she had obliterated her left knee.
“I completely ruptured my ACL. I also have bone bruising, which is a common injury when you tear your ACL, plus some meniscal damage,’’ she said with near clinical detachment.
And then with equal deliberateness and calm, Vonn explained how she intends to ski in Sunday’s Olympic downhill competition – on a left knee with a severed ligament, and a right knee reconstructed in titanium.
The two things do not go together. Or should not go together. Torquing and turning down a mountain at 85 miles per hour without an ACL – its sole anatomical purpose is to connect the femur to the tibia and protect the bones from shifting – is, at best, not recommended and, at worst, slightly reckless.
Except to express surprise that the 2010 Olympic gold medalist is even considering this would be to misunderstand Lindsey Vonn in her entirety. She has made a career of taking risks and defying logic, her shredded body the victim of her determination.
Vonn being airlifted to a hospital after sustaining an injury following a crash during her run at Crans-Montana on January 30. Denis Balibouse/Reuters
This is not her first ACL tear. It is her third, to go along with a fractured ankle, knee, humerus, microfractures in her forearm, tibial fractures in her leg, a torn LCL, two torn MCLs and an acute facet dysfunction of her back – better known as debilitating spasms brought on by trauma.
Since she first popped her boots into a pair of bindings, Vonn has known one speed: Go.
She is not about to stop now.
“I’m not letting this slip through my fingers,’’ she said. “I’m gonna do it, end of story. I’m not letting myself go down that path. I’m not crying. My head is high. I’m standing tall and I’m gonna do my best, whatever the result is, that’s what it is, but I’ll never say I didn’t try.’’
The comeback
Vonn isn’t supposed to be here in the first place.
She is 41 years old, a lifetime removed from the 17-year-old who made her Olympic debut in 2002. In 2019, when she announced her retirement, she used the word “delaminated” in her Instagram post. That’s how familiar Vonn had become with injury. A delamination occurs when cartilage separates from the bone, which had happened to Vonn after a 2018 crash. She didn’t tell anyone. Just had surgery and skied on, largely because she wanted to honor her late grandfather, Don Kildow, a Korean War veteran, by making it to the 2018 Games.
Vonn during a women’s downhill race at the Alpine Ski World Championships on February 8. Gabriele Facciotti/AP
It was Kildow, an avid skier, who first took her to a ski slope, sending her on her way near his home in Wisconsin. Kildow died before the Games, but Vonn, who won bronze in the downhill, scattered his ashes near the slope in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
That was in February 2018. Nine months later, Vonn crashed again. She thought she could recover from the three fractures and a torn LCL. She tried to but finally, in February 2019, Vonn reluctantly announced her retirement.
“My body is broken beyond repair and it isn’t letting me have the final season I dreamed of,’’ she wrote. “My body is screaming at me to STOP and it’s time for me to listen.’’
She then went out and had a life. She co-directed a documentary, launched a skiwear line and invested in women’s professional soccer. She tried E-foiling and did some wakeboarding.
The one thing she didn’t do for the first time since her father coaxed his three-year-old daughter down the Buck Hill Ski and Snowboard in Minnesota was ski. Largely because she couldn’t.
Vonn after a crash in the World Cup women’s super-G on February 27, 2016, in Soldeu, Andorra. Alexis Boichard/Agence Zoom/Getty Images
Her knees shot from nine surgeries and her hips aching from those same worn-down knees – Vonn decided enough was enough. Walking was hard. Wearing high heels impossible. Skiing was over.
Watching the sport go on without her wasn’t easy, but she had made her choice and made peace with it as well. When Dr. Martin Roche, a Florida-based surgeon, crafted a 3D version of her knee to use as a model for her titanium replacement, it wasn’t about returning to skiing. It was about living a life without pain.
But she felt so good – better than she had in decades – and well, she is who she is. Doctors agreed to let her compete, adding the caveat that they had no idea how it would work. World Cup skiers don’t roll out like bionic women.
This season, Vonn historically won two more downhill races – becoming the oldest World Cup race winner ever – and leads the season World Cup standings in the discipline.
‘I’m a little bit crazy’
There is a beautifully cruel irony that comes with age. It grants you perspective and an appreciation of all that you’ve accomplished. Except ordinarily it arrives a little too late, when there is nothing left to do but reflect.
Vonn realized she’d been handed a gift. Having spent a lifetime chasing after her goals but taking little time to enjoy the fruits of her labor, she enjoyed and pursued simultaneously.
Vonn in the women’s downhill at the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games. Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images
Hers was not a quest to satiate a life unfulfilled. She has fulfillment in abundance – 84 World Cup wins across three decades and a permanent spot among the pantheon of alpine skiing. It was simply to see what else is out there.
Vonn’s first career, the one that lasted until 2019, went the traditional route – a prodigy finds her skill set and sets off on a single-minded mission to realize her talent. Skiing at three, racing by seven, winning immediately – usually against older kids – and training nonstop to make sure she always got better.
On school days, Vonn tackled 400 slalom gates a day and doubled that on the weekends, riding the rope tow to the top of Buck Hill long into the night. At nine, she was in Austria, skiing on a glacier with her coach, Erich Sailer.
Soon, the entire family – mom, dad and four siblings – was relocating to Colorado so Vonn could get the training she needed. “That was the first time I realized just how far we were willing to go so I could be a ski racer,’’ Vonn told The New York Times in 2010. “We uprooted everyone. I never did get to say goodbye to anyone in Minnesota.’’
The exchange is never easy to weigh – how to balance a childhood against sporting success – but Vonn enjoyed the rarity; she actually lived up to her early expectations.
She qualified for her first Olympics in 2002 at just 17, hit a World Cup podium for the first time at 19 and in 2008, won her first World Cup overall title. By 2010, Sports Illustrated put her on the cover, tagging Vonn as “America’s Best Woman Skier Ever.’’
Somewhere along her frequent podium moments, Vonn crossed over from the anonymity of a skiing champion and into the public consciousness. She dated Tiger Woods, won an ESPY, posed for pictures with Justin Bieber and made it back inside the pages of SI, this time for its swimsuit edition.
Vonn celebrating second place in the women’s super-G at the World Cup finals at Sun Valley Resort on March 23, 2025. Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images
It came with the requisite costs. Vonn’s parents divorced early in her career and she and her father, Alan, were estranged for years. Her own early marriage to Thomas Vonn, a former Olympic skier, ended in divorce in 2011 after four years.
And then there were the physical debts paid: an ACL tear (2007); microfractures to her forearm (2010); MCL and ACL tears and fractured tibial plateau (2013); another ACL and MCL tear (2014); a fractured ankle (2015); knee fracture (2016); fractured humerus (2016); acute facet dysfunction of her back (2017); torn LCL and three tibial fractures (2018-19). She had to be airlifted to a hospital in 2016 during the Turin Games and again in 2018, when she shredded her knee.
But she came back again and again. No one pushed her to do it. She wanted to. The freedom she got from skiing, the adrenaline rush it brought her, nothing else matched it.
“I’m a little bit crazy, but I’m accepting of that,’’ she said. “I’m willing to risk everything. That’s why I’ve won as many times as I have in downhill. It takes a certain level of courage and willingness to throw yourself down the mountain.’’
Vonn said that back in October, before rupturing her knee yet again. Yet the same reasoning holds true. No one would blame Vonn if she walked away. Her resume is complete. She has nothing to prove and no one to answer to.
Except herself.
“I like risk. I like going fast. I like pushing myself to the limit,’’ Vonn said this week. “I’ve been retired and I know that I’m lucky to even get this chance one more time. So fear has not really been in the equation for me in my life.”
‘Today is another great day’
As a kid, Vonn used to tape messages to her skis. Little tips to help her self-correct her common errors. She doesn’t need the direction anymore.
Instead, her message now is written on her helmet – D.S.F.B.L.L.E. – one for each of the “guardian angels” she’s lost since retirement.
Vonn after the World Cup women’s downhill on December 13 in St Moritz, Switzerland. Alain Grosclaude/Agence Zoom/Getty Images Europe/Getty Images
D is for her grandfather Don and S is for his wife, Shirley, who died in 2022 at the age of 90 who loved nothing more than to host “garage parties, bonfires, concerts, golf cart rides, egg hunts, blanket forts – if her grandkids wanted it,” as remembered in her obituary. F is for her uncle Frank, who battled multiple myeloma and inspired his niece’s involvement in the cause. B and L are for her dogs: Bear, a rescue, and Lucy, a Cavalier King Charles that traveled the world with her. The E is for Sailer, her coach.
The other L? That’s for her mother.
Linda Krohn was diagnosed with ALS in 2021. Her life had never been easy. In 1984, as she was giving birth to Vonn, she suffered a stroke. Though she went on to have four more kids – including triplets, no less – it left her with lifelong physical disabilities. As she schlepped Vonn to all of those skiing sessions, Linda herself could never actually ski.
ALS is cruel in its diminishment, robbing people of their bodies bit by bit, turning every day actions into personal triumphs. As she struggled against its inevitable decline, Linda clung to a piece of wisdom someone had passed onto her – that so long as she could raise her arms above her head, the disease hadn’t taken over.
“And so she would raise her arms every day and say, ‘Today is another great day,’’’ Vonn said of her mother.
Maybe after one of this week’s three training runs, Vonn’s knee will defy her. Maybe she will feel it shift or sense its strength ebbing. Maybe the brace won’t offer enough stability and maybe in the end she’ll have no choice but to walk away.
But as of right now, Lindsey Vonn can ski. That’s why she is going to ski. Because she can. Because she, like her mother, wants to raise her arms in equal parts defiance and celebration to welcome another great day.
“I don’t want to have any regrets, you know?” she said. “I’m here. I’m still here. I think I’m still able to fight. I think I’m still able to try. And I will as long as I have the ability. I will not go home regretting not trying. I will do everything in my power to be in that starting gate.’’
