MILAN — If a torn ACL hasn’t stopped Lindsey Vonn’s pursuit of an Olympic gold medal at age 41, can the world’s best skiers?
It’s the question on the mind of every spectator of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics as the women’s downhill final begins Sunday.
The downhill was already one of the signature events of Alpine skiing, as women carve down mountains, around curves and over jumps, pushing 80 mph. And Vonn was already, without hyperbole, the biggest star of these Olympics. Yet Sunday’s competition in Cortina, Italy, has drawn even more intrigue than is typical as the world awaits the answer to whether Vonn can somehow medal only nine days after she crashed and ruptured a ligament crucial to stabilizing her left knee.
Vonn will now attempt to win the downhill 16 years after she did it at the Vancouver Olympics. She has won two Olympic bronze medals in her career, as well, in downhill in 2018 and super-G in 2010.
When Vonn announced she was coming out of retirement in 2024, she was already facing the twin challenges of health and rust; injuries had driven her into retirement five years earlier. Yet a surgically replaced right knee and a new coach had given Vonn a surge of confidence and what she called her most consistently healthy season in a decade. Both helped her finish on the podium in all five World Cup races she competed in this season, including two victories, making her the oldest ever to win on the prestigious skiing circuit. Those performances seemed to put an end to questions about whether her ambitions for a medal in Cortina were real or a quixotic quest.
But her crash in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, late last month, which required an airlift, cast doubt on her ability to again topple the world’s best skiers.
Vonn did not undergo surgery, however, and has worn a brace while going through two successful tests of the knee during training runs Friday and Saturday, when she reached 78 mph to finish with the third-fastest time of the day until poor weather shut down training about halfway through the field.
In the final, Vonn will have the advantage of familiarity. She has called Cortina’s course her favorite to race and a major factor why she wanted to mount the comeback for the Olympics at all. Of her 84 World Cup victories, 12 have come in Cortina.
Yet Vonn will also have to push her knee further than in either of her two training runs, when she could be seen pulling back around some turns so as not to exert too much strain before the main event. One of her top competitors for a medal could be her compatriot, the American Breezy Johnson, who had Saturday’s top time in training.
ACL injuries have long been among the most devastating in sports, typically requiring at least six months of strenuous recovery. That she could compete in an Olympics just over a week after a tear had drawn some incredulity, such as from a doctor known for his social media account analyzing sports injuries.
“My ACL was fully functioning until last Friday,” Vonn responded Saturday. “Just because it seems impossible to you doesn’t mean it’s not possible. And yes, my ACL is 100% ruptured. Not 80% or 50%. It’s 100% gone.”
But not her hopes of gold.