Her season has been called a comeback, but that is insufficient. Consider: Vonn was 34 when she retired, old for an Alpine ski racer, and she was damaged. Then she was in retirement for five years, walking red carpets and F1 starting grids, an exciting life that does not overlap with ski racing. She had moved on, and that time off alone should have slammed the door on any return. And now she races with titanium and plastic having replaced the mottled bone and lost cartilage on the outside of her right knee, far out in the medical wilderness. She has been so good that it all seems normal, but it is not. It is mind-boggling.
All of that changed last Friday in Crans-Montana, one of the most challenging slopes on the women’s circuit. Vonn was the sixth skier down the course — two of the first five had failed to finish. Nevertheless, Vonn was incautious; in the first 12 seconds of the race, her split was more than half a second faster than any of the five racers who preceded, a small but telling sample. It was probably too fast. High on the course, a jump leads to an aggressive right turn; Vonn landed on the tails of her skis, tumbled downhill and then sideways into the nets. Two-time U.S. Olympic gold medalist Ted Ligety, who will do analysis on Olympic Alpine events for NBC, described the crash in an interview: “She was inside and off-balance on takeoff from the jump so she landed inside and on edge and locked on edge, but on the opposite edge she needed to be on to make the turn, so her body’s momentum was thrown down the hill against the direction of her skis.”
The race was cancelled after Vonn’s crash. This created controversy. Many of the remaining skiers wanted a downhill run before the Olympics and said the hill and the conditions — slightly foggy — were not unsafe. U.S. racer Breezy Johnson was caught on a hot mic at the top of the hill saying, “What the f—?” (And later apologized). Italian Sofia Goggia, a gold-medal threat in both downhill and super-G, and a good friend of Vonn’s, said, “Some athletes count more than others,” presumed to be a reference to Vonn, who has always been an outsized presence on the circuit, because of her success, her popularity, and her aggressive off-snow marketing. This is all prickly. The Olympics come once every four years and there are only three medals. There are surely some racers who resent Vonn for overstaying her welcome.
(Vonn said Tuesday that criticism stung, but that many competitors had apologized. Also: She’s experienced enough to absorb whatever drama comes her way, even to utilize it).
These will be Vonn’s fifth Olympics; if she gets to the start house on Sunday, she will be the first female Alpine skier to compete in five Games. However: She was only healthy for the first, as a 17-year-old at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, when she finished 6th in the combined event. In 2006 in Torino, she stubbornly raced downhill (8th) and super-G (7th) after an action-movie crash in downhill training that should have ended her participation. But it did not. She won the downhill gold in 2010 in Vancouver (the first and only downhill gold by an American woman), but only after a tenuous week in which severe shin bruises (“shin bang”) almost kept her out of the race. She missed Sochi 2014 altogether with a second right ACL tear, and in 2018 in PyeongChang, she won a bronze medal in the downhill as that same right knee deteriorated further.
