Time has never seemed to slow the US skiing star down. Entering Sunday’s Olympic downhill medal race, a ‘100% gone’ ACL hasn’t either
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t was all going a little too easy for Lindsey Vonn, wasn’t it? All of the nervous apprehension, the paternalistic concern, the arch skepticism and hushed snickers that had rippled through the sports world when she announced her comeback from a six-year retirement had long since gone silent. A once-unthinkable fairytale ending at the age of 41 on the slopes of Cortina d’Ampezzo was practically within touching distance.
Back in November 2024, having been chased from the sport in 2019 by a battered right knee worn down by a string of gruesome crashes and multiple surgeries, Vonn proposed a return to a high-risk sport where no woman had ever won a race past 34. There’s a history of comebacks like these going brutally wrong and even Vonn’s most dedicated fans were bracing themselves for the worst. Think Louis getting battered through the ropes and on to the ring apron by Marciano. Or Borg returning to the tour in the early 90s with a wooden racket, defiantly flailing through a sport that had moved on without him.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Vonn’s presumptive humiliation. In the first two months, she finished 14th in a super-G at St Moritz, before improving to sixth and fourth in her next two races at St Anton. Then came this Olympic season. Vonn reached the podium in all five World Cup downhill races she entered – two wins, a second place and two thirds – seizing the red bib as the discipline’s season-long leader and reestablishing herself, against all odds, as one of the fastest skiers on the planet. Conspicuously absent were the injuries and surgeries and chronic pain that had become the familiar punctuation of her career. What could go wrong only one week out from the Olympics?
