Why she crashed out of the downhill.

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This is part of Slate’s 2026 Olympics coverage. Read more here.

On Sunday in Cortina, atop one of the most challenging downhill slopes in all of Alpine skiing, the biggest American story of these still-young Olympic Games stood poised in the starting gates, 90 seconds away from a storybook ending. “That moment that this entire world has awaited has finally now arrived for Lindsey Vonn,” said NBC’s Dan Hicks, as the American skier breathed deeply in advance of her run. “Her family, her father, her sisters, her brother—all assembled down at the bottom of the hill, wondering if Lindsey can pull off the improbable one more time.”

Improbable was selling her story short. Vonn, 41, is one of the greatest skiers of all time, with three Olympic medals and 84 World Cup victories to her name. But she stopped skiing competitively in 2019, and though she was included in the Beijing Winter Games in 2022, she was there providing commentary for NBC. In the fall of 2024, though, flexing a newly replaced right knee, Vonn announced she would return to competitive skiing in advance of the 2026 Winter Games. She was hoping to end her career with a medal in Cortina, on a slope she knows as well as any skier on earth.

Then, less than two weeks ago, disaster struck: Vonn crashed in the last World Cup race before the Olympics, tearing her left ACL and seemingly killing her chances of racing for gold at Milan Cortina. Undaunted, she announced that, ACL be damned, she would compete at the Winter Games anyway. Hubris? Maybe. But Vonn came in third in Saturday’s training run, proving once and for all that ligaments are overrated.

As Vonn left the gate on Sunday, NBC analyst Steve Porino said, “I just know after the years of watching her, she will ski at her limit.” He then added, “The tone is set right here.”

Porino’s comment turned out to be prescient. Right then, approximately 13 seconds into the race, with her entire body airborne after coming off a turn into a jump, Vonn clipped a gate. With no way to stabilize herself, her body twisted and she hit the ground in a cloud of snow. Vonn tumbled down the slope, coming to rest in a tangle of skis and limbs. “Oh my goodness! No!” cried the NBC announcers, speaking for everyone watching, at home and on site.

In the end, it seemed, there would be no poetic, storybook ending to Vonn’s comeback story: just a medevac helicopter carrying the skier’s prone body into the sky.

Vonn has skied that same slope countless times, that same turn, that same jump. “She won the World Cup downhill at Cortina a number of times. She knows that turn better than anyone in the world,” Nathaniel Vinton, author of The Fall Line: How American Ski Racers Conquered a Sport on the Edge, told me after the race on Sunday. So, how does someone so experienced clip a gate in mid-air?

According to Vinton, the issue for Vonn—and for her torn-up left knee—may have been less the gate itself than the difficult, reverse-banked turn that preceded it. “The real thing I was watching for was the two seconds before takeoff, because that’s where it’s all set up,” said Vinton. “When I heard she was going to race, I thought of that turn, because you’ve got a fallaway and a compression, all with your weight on your left leg. That, to me was the turn that would really test it.”

Vinton, whose book covers a season in the career of Vonn, Bode Miller, and the cohort of American skiers who dominated Alpine racing in the late 2000s, has skied that same course in Cortina multiple times. He said that particular turn, near the top of the slope, is both incredibly technical and deeply physically demanding.

“The centrifugal force and your momentum as you’re turning is puling you to the left, and you’ve got to brace against that,” he said. “But you’re bracing on a slope that’s falling away, so it’s critical that you have the edge set and you’re carving the turn. You’re not going to have the natural slope as a bank to hold you, it’s the opposite. So you’ve got to get your edge in the snow and have it carving in the ice to create the grip on the inside edge of your left ski.”

Vinton told me that Vonn is the best in the world at this kind of high-stakes, high-strain maneuvering. But those two seconds, when she was turning to her right on her left leg, are difficult for any skier under any circumstances, much less one with a torn ACL.

Vonn surely knew coming into the race that this particular turn would be especially stressful on her body. She could’ve tried to compensate by choosing a different line down the slope, one that put less pressure on her left knee. But it wasn’t in Vonn’s nature to take a more conservative line. “She’s not going to ski conservatively to finish tenth. It’s just not in her,” Vinton said. “She’s gonna go for the win.”

Vonn’s aggression has made her an all-time great. It’s also at times pushed her body past its limits. That’s what happened on Sunday, when—it was later reported—she broke her left leg and had surgery to stabilize the fracture. (Vonn is now in stable condition, according to the U.S. ski team.)

Overshadowed in the wake of Vonn’s crash was the story of Sunday’s gold medalist, her American teammate Breezy Johnson, who also maximized a tight line even while knowing how dangerous such a line can be.

Johnson has her own history with the slopes of Cortina d’Ampezzo: She missed the 2022 Beijing Games after blowing out her right knee during a training run down the same mountain where she won gold on Sunday.

“I love the sport of ski racing and I wanted so badly to realize my dream of becoming an Olympic Champion,” Johnson wrote on Instagram at the time. “This sport is brutal. Someone asked me yesterday why we do it. And at times like these you wonder. But the truth is that, for me, the feeling of racing is the feeling of being truly alive, and so I will keep coming back every time. Because that feeling of skiing fast is worth everything.”

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Johnson missed the entire 2024 ski season while serving a suspension imposed by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for missing three drug tests in a 12-month span. She came back strong in 2025, winning the downhill at the World Championships, and was poised to be Team USA’s biggest downhill star in 2026—until Vonn announced her comeback. As Vonn was being tended to on the Cortina slopes, NBC periodically cut away to Johnson, sitting alone on a bench, as Hicks and Porino continued to discuss what they’d just seen.

“I want to make this point,” Porino said. “Yes, she might be 41 years old. Yes, she has a compromised, bad body. Yes, she does not have an ACL. The reason that she fell was because of her genetic makeup. Because she just went too hard.”

Going too hard is what made Vonn and her cohort of U.S. ski racers so legendary in the first place. On Sunday in Cortina, on one surgically repaired knee and another with a torn ACL, Vonn went too hard down a perilous line in the quixotic, self-imperiling pursuit of one last Olympic medal. The choice knocked her out of the Olympics and likely ended her competitive skiing career. She went for broke. She ended up broken. Maybe that’s how it was always going to be.