Lindsey Vonn’s 2026 Olympics journey, despite her crash, is anything but a failure

Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy (CNN) — At 12:09 p.m. on a spectacularly beautiful day amid the breathtaking Dolomites, a yellow helicopter cut through the sky, its yellow-painted body in bold contrast with the perfectly blue sky.

The chopper flew upwards, up beyond the treeline, stopping to idle between the small ragged peak of one mountain and the rocky face of another. At 12:11, a basket dropped from the helicopter and soon went back up with a medic holding onto an orange stretcher.

Three minutes later, the helicopter circled back toward the city of Cortina d’Ampezzo, carting Lindsey Vonn just out of reach of the finish line she never got to cross.

Vonn’s quest to do the impossible, to try for an Olympic medal a mere nine days after tearing her ACL, ended just 13 seconds into her run.

Vonn’s ski pole caught the fourth gate and twisted her body sideways as she went over a jump. She landed hard on her right side before rolling head over heels down the mountain before she finally stopped, her legs splayed and the backs of her skis crossed.

Her left knee, the one with the torn ACL, faced out to the left and her right knee, the one built of titanium, pointed in the exact opposite direction. Vonn rolled her helmeted head back on the snow as medics made their way to attend her.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Vonn’s teammate Bella Wright, who watched the crash from the top of the mountain as she waited for her turn to ski. “Things just happen so quick in this sport. She had incredible speed in that turn and hooked her arm and it’s just over, just like that. After all the preparation, after years of hard work and rehabilitation, all the things.

“It’s the last thing you want to see somebody go through, the last thing you want to see for Lindsey. But she should be really proud of everything she has gone through to get back here. Regardless if she got last today, if she won – she obviously crashed – whatever happened today, she’s an inspiration to all of us and she should be really proud,” Wright added.

“She probably doesn’t feel like that right now, but I hope one day she can recognize that.”

A shocking twist to the fairy tale

The crash was a gutwrenching flip of the emotional switch. As Vonn stepped into the starting gate, gripping and regripping her poles, stomping her right foot and then her left three times in succession, the thousands of spectators roared in excitement.

These fans had started queueing up hours earlier, the lines spilling across the street via a metal pedestrian bridge. They filled the bleachers facing the finish line, packed a standing room pit to the right of the run, and gathered in après-ski finery in the high-end hospitality tent.

When Vonn broke from the gate, it felt like the whole place cheered in unison. And when she crashed, the entire mountain went pin-drop silent.

No one spoke, many of them unable to as their mittened hands covered their mouths. No one’s phone buzzed. Nothing save the muted drum beats of the electronic music that seconds earlier had blasted from the speakers and the sound of the chopper blades whipping overhead. “Deafening silence” is what Johan Eliasch, the president of the International Ski Federation, later called it.

Hours later when the 36 skiers eventually finished, the final standings showed the impossible high and low of skiing.

Breezy Johnson – who four years ago crashed on this very mountain, ending her chance to compete at the 2022 Games in Beijing – stood atop the leaderboard, the first American woman to win a downhill gold medal in almost 16 years. The name of the last American who won the Olympic title? Lindsey Vonn, who sat at the bottom of the finishers with a DNF (did not finish) on Sunday.

“That’s the beauty and the madness of this sport,” Johnson said. “The madness that it can hurt your body so badly, but you keep coming back to it.”

Understanding the impossible

This is the part that people – ordinary people who don’t spend their lives blazing down a sheet of snowy ice – can possibly comprehend.

In the dangerous vacuum of time between Vonn’s Tuesday press conference – when she announced she had completely torn her ACL but intended to ski anyway – and her race on Sunday, armchair doctors and psychologists carped and crowed about what Vonn should and shouldn’t do.

One doctor on X posited that perhaps her ACL wasn’t 100 percent torn – maybe more like 80 percent – which sounds a bit like being just a touch pregnant considering you have to perform at the peak of human capacity to compete at that level. A man who bills himself as a mental performance and leadership coach opined in a USA Today column that Vonn skied because all of her self-worth was tied up into it.

Vonn clapped back on both, assuring the doctor that her ACL was, in fact, fully torn and the mental performance coach that her life was quite full, thank you very much.

More critics will slink out of the woodwork now, eager to 20/20 hindsight their way into Vonn’s decision. She crashed, so this was a harebrained idea. Had she medaled or won? Well, everyone would have known it would work out all along.

Except Vonn did not crash because her knees failed her; she crashed because this is how she skis: fearlessly and aggressively.

You do not get to be Lindsey Vonn – arguably the greatest speed skier in history, man or woman – by playing it safe. She attacks the mountain with a singular focus and the narrowest of pursuits, purposefully carving her path as close to the gates as she can to shave precious nanoseconds away in a sport where a sliver of a clock tick makes all the difference.

That approach has earned Vonn 84 World Cup wins, three Olympic medals (including that aforementioned gold) and a career that stretches across three different decades. Vonn made her Games debut at the age of 17 in 2002 and entered the starting gates here at 41.

She was never supposed to be here. Vonn retired in 2019, finally listening to a body that kept screaming to stop. Her right knee ailed so much she limped when she walked. But in April 2024, a South Florida doctor crafted a 3D image of her knee and made her the bionic woman. Her titanium right knee worked so well that Vonn realized that maybe – just maybe – she could ski again.

So began a comeback journey hailed as triumphant and inspirational. Vonn welcomed the weight placed on her shoulders, gladly serving as an example that a woman’s athletic career need not dry up with age – or through injuries. She understood that what she was doing was abnormal but hoped that, in doing so, people might find a new normal for themselves.

By December 2025, she won her 44th career World Cup downhill race – the oldest skier to do so – and in January, she won another. Had she not crashed in Switzerland, people would have considered her a favorite to medal here, reconstructed knee and age be damned.

Yet as she wrapped a brace around her knee to essentially hold it in place, it never occurred to Vonn that things had changed.

“As long as there’s a chance, I’ll try,” she said. She went ahead this week as only she can: full steam ahead. She posted pictures of her working out with heavy weights, in a pool, and she zipped through her two official training runs on Friday and Saturday with little to no issue.

Vonn opted not to speak with reporters after her training runs, asking to allow more time instead to recover. Her coach, Aksel Lund Svindal, graciously stood in her place.

On Saturday, he spent 10 minutes or so in the mixed zone, sharing his confidence in Vonn’s chances. Asked how to describe her physical strength, Svindal smiled: “Good enough to win this race.”

As he turned to walk away, Svindal looked back over his shoulder. “Hopefully, you’re talking to somebody else tomorrow,” he said with a grin.

It didn’t go that way, of course. But really what more is there to say?

Even though she flew beyond the finish line instead of crossing it, Lindsey Vonn already has said and done it all, exhibiting the spirit of the Olympic Games the entire way.

The-CNN-Wire
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