After coming out of retirement in 2024, fourty-one year old skier Lindsay Vonn was determined to make a comeback in the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. With a rebuilt right knee and a recently torn ACL in her left leg, she knew this was a risky choice, yet she chose to follow her dreams. However, within a mere thirteen seconds of starting her race, she clipped a gate with her right shoulder and started spiralling down the mountain at a blistering speed before coming to a painful stop. Suddenly, the crowd fell deafeningly silent, not hearing the screams of pain coming from up the mountain. No one knew what had happened. Shortly thereafter, medical personnel arrived, and a bright yellow helicopter lifted Vonn in a gurney up into the air. Everyone was buzzing and wondering if Vonn would be alright. From the helicopter, Vonn was taken to a clinic in Cortina, and then transferred to a larger hospital in Treviso. It was determined that she had a complex fracture in her left tibia, fracture of the fibular head and tibial plateau, along with a broken right ankle. Following this crash, Vonn has undergone five surgeries in Italy and the United States. These surgeries have been crucial, especially an emergency fascionomy which saved her leg from a possible amputation.
Before her competition and after her crash, critics argued that she shouldn’t compete. She had torn her ACL just nine days before the Olympic games, and doctors said that the chance of injury was very high. People also argued that by competing at an older age with such an extreme, pre-existing injury, Vonn was being unfair to healthier, younger team members who could have competed in her place. However, there were no objective, results-based reasons at the time of her selection showing that she wasn’t ready for the race. Vonn stated in an Instagram post that when people called her selfish, it “stung,” but highlighted all of her accomplishments from the past season. As Lindsay Vonn wrote in her post: “Similar to ski racing, we take risks in life. We dream. We love. We jump. And sometimes we fall. Sometimes our hearts are broken. Sometimes we don’t achieve the dreams we know we could have. But that is also the beauty of life; we can try. I tried. I dreamt. I jumped.”
