CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy — Seeing if Lindsey Vonn can contend for a medal in the Olympic downhill at age 41 with a titanium replacement in her right knee to cap her comeback after nearly six years of retirement was already going to be one of the highlights of the Milan Cortina Olympics.
Add in that she will now be competing in Sunday's race with a completely ruptured ACL, bone bruising and meniscal damage in her left knee?
“This would be the best comeback I’ve done so far,” Vonn said. “Definitely the most dramatic.”
So dramatic that it has motivated plenty of people to question whether it’s something out of science fiction or attention hunting. Which is just the type of motivation that Vonn thrives on.
Take Vonn’s response on social media to an opinion columnist.
"My life does not revolve around ski racing. I am a woman that loves to ski. I don't have an identity issue, I know exactly who I am. I was retired for 6 years and I have an amazing life," Vonn posted Saturday on X. "I don't need to ski, but I love to ski. I came all this way for one final Olympics and I'm going to go and do my best, ACL or no. It's as simple as that."
Sofia Goggia, Vonn’s biggest rival in downhill and one of her best friends on the circuit, recalled how she came back to win silver at the 2022 Beijing Games after a similarly severe injury.
Goggia had a few weeks to recover after spraining her left knee, partially tearing her ACL and suffering a minor fracture of the fibula bone in her leg, plus some tendon damage. Vonn is attempting to do this nine days after her crash in the final downhill before the Winter Games.
"I remember how I felt — and I didn't tear it completely," said Goggia, who lit the Olympic cauldron in Cortina on Friday. The Italian then cited a phrase from Milanese poet Alessandro Manzoni, "Ai posteri l'ardua sentenza," to suggest that Vonn's performance should only be judged by future generations.
Even Mikaela Shiffrin, the skier who broke Vonn's all-time women's World Cup wins record, can't wait to see what her fellow American can do in a race that starts at 11:30 a.m. in Cortina (5:30 a.m. ET).
“I am so excited to watch. I think we all are,” Shiffrin said upon arriving in Cortina, where she will start competing on Tuesday in the team combined, possibly pairing with Vonn in a skiing “dream team.”
Vonn's race is drawing so much attention that the International Olympic Committee moved its daily media briefing on Sunday a half-hour earlier to avoid a conflict with the downhill.
Shiffrin said she appreciated Vonn’s “tenacity and grit."
“I will be cheering and gripped to the TV,” Shiffrin added. "I have 100% belief that anything is possible. She’s done such incredible things despite injury, through injury, before. I have a lot of belief.”
Shiffrin also mentioned two other teammates who she'll be cheering on — and with good reason. Jacqueline Wiles and Breezy Johnson led the first and second downhill training sessions, respectively, and can also contend for medals.
Wiles has two career podium results in Cortina and Johnson won gold in downhill at last season's world championships.
Vonn holds the record of 12 World Cup wins in Cortina. Goggia, meanwhile, has four World Cup wins in Cortina and will have home crowd support.
Other contenders include Emma Aicher, the 22-year-old German who wasn’t even born when Vonn first started racing in Cortina; Kajsa Vickhoff Lie, who was second in the opening training and carried Norway’s flag at the opening ceremony; and Kira Weidle-Winkelmann, a German who has finished second in two downhills this season and was second in the final training.
As for the downhill course, the highlight is the Tofana schuss, a narrow chute between two walls of Dolomite rock where the skiers accelerate to 80 mph (130 kph).
But the real key to the Olympia delle Tofane track comes above the schuss, where there’s a key right turn that includes an uphill stretch.
“It’s incredibly reverse banked,” said Kristian Ghedina, the Cortina native and former racer who grew up in a home just below the finish line. “That’s where your speed for the rest of the course gets determined and if you don’t take the right trajectory it makes a huge difference because you end up going uphill.”
After the schuss, there’s a challenging left turn called Delta where the slope takes on a new downhill dimension
“It’s called Delta because that’s where hang gliders — “deltaplano” is the word for a hang glider in Italian — take off during the summer,” Ghedina said.
Aksel Lund Svindal, the 2018 Olympic downhill champion from Norway who now coaches Vonn, noted how a large brace that Vonn will be wearing over her left knee negatively affects her aerodynamics, but added, “We’re not focusing on that because if she starts to ask to take the brace away I think there’s a couple of doctors that would have something to say about that. Please don’t ask her that question.”
Actually, it’s probably better not to question Vonn at all.
She was also battered before the 2019 world championships but took bronze in downhill before going into a nearly six-year retirement.
“I’ve been in this position before. I know how to handle it,” Vonn said. “I feel a lot better now than I did in 2019 . . . And I still got a medal there with no LCL and three tibial plateau fractures. So, like I said, this is not an unknown for me. I’ve done this before.”
As evening arrived in Cortina, Vonn took to social media to note that she will race tomorrow in her final Olympic downhill "and while I can’t guarantee a good result, I can guarantee I will give it everything I have. But no matter what happens, I have already won.”
"I will stand in the starting gate tomorrow and know I am strong. Know that I believe in myself. Know that the odds are stacked against me with my age, no ACL, and a titanium knee- but know that I still believe," Vonn wrote on Instagram. "And usually, when the odds are stacked against me the most, I pull the best of what's inside me out."
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