On Sunday, February 8, American downhill skier Lindsey Vonn crashed during the women’s downhill final of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympic Games. She broke her left leg and was airlifted off the slope to a nearby hospital.
An incredibly accomplished skier, Vonn won gold in the downhill at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, as well as a bronze medal in the Super-G in Vancouver and the downhill in Pyeongchang in 2018. She holds 81 World Cup wins, third only to teammate Mikaela Shiffrin, with 108 wins, and Swedish athlete Ingemar Stenmark, with 86. Vonn retired in 2019 before returning to the sport in 2024, a shock to many. At age 41, she was attempting to become the oldest alpine skier in history to win an Olympic medal.
Vonn is known for being very resilient: since her ski racing career started at age 17, she has battled many serious leg injuries, including a partial knee replacement. Just two weeks before the Olympics, she tore her ACL at a World Cup race in the Swiss Alps, sparking doubt as to whether she would be able to compete in the Olympics. However, Vonn decided to participate anyway, successfully completing her training runs while wearing a knee brace.
A mere 13.4 seconds into the 1.6-mile course of the Olympic final, Vonn’s right arm caught a gate during a jump, twisting her body and making her tumble down the slope. Footage of the accident shows her come to a halt and screaming in pain as medics rushed to her aid. She was airlifted off the slope in a helicopter and taken to a nearby hospital.
Vonn suffered a “complex tibia fracture,” as she wrote in a social media post after her leg was stabilized. The skier can be seen in the accompanying photo with an external fixator on her left leg to hold together the broken bones. She described in the post that the crash had nothing to do with her torn ACL: rather, she was simply off her line by 5 inches, causing her to catch the gate.
Vonn has already undergone three surgeries, and the injury will likely take many months of recovery to fully heal. Although the prognosis is grim, she says she has no regrets about her decision to ski in the Olympic event, which her teammate Breezy Johnson won. Despite her resilience, this crash could very well mark the end of Lindsey Vonn’s career.
