Lindsey Vonn says she suffered a complex tibia fracture “that will require multiple surgeries to fix properly” when her Olympic hopes ended in a heavy crash.
The American crashed out early in her run during the women’s downhill competition on Sunday. Her cries of pain could be heard clearly on the television broadcast and spectators and her fellow athletes were visibly shaken as she was airlifted to hospital.
She was competing on Sunday while dealing with a ruptured ACL she had suffered a week earlier.
“I was simply 5 inches too tight on my line when my right arm hooked inside of the gate, twisting me and resulted in my crash. My ACL and past injuries had nothing to do with my crash whatsoever,” she wrote in an Instagram post on Monday.
Vonn added that she had no regrets about her decision to race. “Knowing I stood there having a chance to win was a victory in and of itself. I also knew that racing was a risk. It always was and always will be an incredibly dangerous sport,” she wrote.
Some users on social media said she should not have been racing only a week after injuring her knee. However, those who know the risks of skiing best supported Vonn’s decision.
“People that don’t know ski racing don’t really understand what happened yesterday,” Vonn’s US teammate Keely Cashman said on Monday. “She hooked her arm on the gate, which twisted her around. She was going probably 70mph, and so that twists your body around.”
Cashman, who suffered a heavy crash of her own five years ago, said Vonn’s crash had “nothing to do with her ACL, nothing to do with her knee”, and people who think otherwise are “totally incorrect”.
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“I think a lot of people are ridiculing that, and a lot of people don’t [know] what’s going on,” Cashman added.
Vonn had been in the middle of a remarkable comeback, coming out of a six-year retirement in 2025 after knee replacement surgery. There were doubts the 41-year-old could compete at the highest level again but she reached the podium in all five World Cup downhill races she entered in the run-up to the Olympics, including two victories. However, the crash at the end of January that ruptured her ACL made some question whether she was risking her life as she sought to win her second Olympic gold medal.
Italy’s Federica Brignone, a two-time world champion, dismissed that criticism. “It’s her choice,” Brignone said. “If it’s your body, then you decide what to do, whether to race or not. It’s not up to others. Only you.”
Another of Vonn’s US teammates, downhill specialist Kyle Negomir, also had no problem with her decision to try to replicate her gold medal performance from the 2010 Olympics.
“Lindsey’s a grown woman and the best speed skier to ever do this sport. If she made her decision, I think she should absolutely be allowed to take that risk,” Negomir said. “She’s obviously good enough that she’s capable of pulling it off.”
However her father, who has skied competitively himself, said he believes she should retire from racing.
“She’s 41 years old, and this is the end of her career,” Alan Kildow told the Associated Press on Monday. “There will be no more ski races for Lindsey Vonn, as long as I have anything to say about it.”
Kildow and Vonn’s three siblings have been at her bedside as she recovers from her injuries in hospital in Treviso.
