Lindsey Vonn on snowboarding the comeback path | USAEMALL.com

For Lindsey Vonn, it was a reluctant farewell – the last run of her stellar career, at the Alpine World Ski Championships in Are, Sweden, in 2019. In the world of alpine skiing, few have been more decorated. She’s won almost every major title, from World Cup Championships to Olympic medals, as the trophy case in her home proves. 

She says when she’s racing, she doesn’t think about the achievements: “I think you just have a different perspective. You’re focused on the next one, racing and performance, and you never really get to look back and say, ‘Hey, good job,’ you know?”

She was fast, reaching speeds of up to 85 mph. She was also fearless, and resilient. Crash after terrible crash, she always fought her way back. But 2013 was one of her hardest seasons. Vonn’s right knee bore the brunt of a crash in the World Cup Super-G, and it was never the same. Flash forward almost six years, on the day of her last race – bum knee and all – she still managed to take home the bronze.

At 34, Lindsey Vonn was retired.

“Skiing was always my sun, and everything in my life revolved around it: What time I woke up, what I ate, when I went to bed. It was all dictated around what’s best for my skiing career,” she said. “And then, I woke up one day and my sun is gone.”

Ski racing is all Vonn ever wanted. Her dad, a former alpine skier himself, moved the family from Minnesota to Vail, Colorado, just so that Lindsey could train for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Those same slopes she now sees from her home in Park City, Utah.

“This is kind of just where I go to, you know, re-group and recharge my batteries,” she said. “And the dogs love it.”

In retirement, Vonn has kept many of her corporate sponsors, which helped her buy homes in Miami and Beverly Hills. She continued to wow red carpets, and not racing gave her more time to pour into her foundation, helping under-served girls achieve their own athletic dreams.

But that knee kept getting worse. “I just couldn’t do the things I love to do anymore,” she said. “It was really bad. I couldn’t straighten it all the way. I couldn’t flex it all the way. And so, I was just stuck in this half-state that ended up causing hip pain, back pain, neck pain. It wasn’t just my knee, unfortunately. It was kind of everything. It’s like you get to the end of your rope and you gotta make a decision. So, I did.”

A knee replacement – the outer portion of her right knee is now titanium.

But she didn’t do it just to get back into skiing. “I don’t need to ski,” she said. “I am Lindsey. I am not a skier; I’m a person that loves to ski. And that’s a really big distinction for me, in my mind, in my heart.”

I asked, “How soon afterwards did you wonder how far you could push it?”

“It was pretty quickly after!” she laughed.

Only four months, in fact. She took her coaches to New Zealand to acquaint her new knee with her old sport. “It just was such a drastic difference that I thought, well, if I can do all of these things that used to hurt me before, where would that take me? And my mind starts to wander, and here we are.”

And where she is, is back on the U.S. ski team, hoping to qualify for one more trip to the Olympics: Italy 2026.

“I will be at a disadvantage,” Vonn said. “I am 40, and at that time next year I will be 41. But I know my skiing is there. I think I’m actually skiing better now than I was last few years of my career.”

She admits there has been some good-natured ribbing: “For sure. There’s one girl that calls me Grandma, which I don’t exactly appreciate! But there’s definitely some jokes around the team that, you know, I raced in my first Olympics before one of the girls was born.”

She knew there would be some raised eyebrows, but she got more than that, with some critics going so far as to question her sanity. “These past few weeks have been tough,” she posted on Instagram last month. “I know they are only a few voices out of many… But it still hurts.”

She told us, “What I didn’t expect was people to criticize me as a person and why I’m doing it, and that I can’t handle life outside of ski racing.”

She dismisses most of it, choosing to concentrate on training smarter, not harder. “It’s not like I’m preparing for another ten years of my skiing career,” she said. “I’m just preparing for one year, for literally two races.”

She’s put the rest of her life on hold for the moment – a single goal does require a singularity of focus, much like making her banana bread does. And there’s a purpose to that: “I need to put on weight, man,” she said. “I’m about 20 pounds less than when I was racing before.”

That brand of determination, she says, came from her mom, Lindy Lund. “She would have given anything to play tennis, to play squash, to ride a bike, and she couldn’t,” Vonn said.

Her mom suffered a stroke while pregnant with Lindsey in 1984. It was debilitating, but she soldiered on without complaint. When she was diagnosed with ALS (once known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease), she – like her daughter – wasn’t about to give up. “She thought that she could beat the odds, and she could be the one that would live 20 more years, and she lasted one,” Vonn said. “Man, it was hard. I still got her number in my phone. I still message her.”

She said her mom would want her to be flying high once again, even though winning another downhill will be an uphill battle. In a sport measured in hundredths of a second, the difference between first and last can be miniscule. But on this second go-around, Lindsey Vonn is taking time to savor the view just as much as the chase.

“The fact that I’m even talking about going to the Olympics right now is something I never thought I would ever do,” she said. “So, I’m already winning!”

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Story produced by Michelle Kessel. Editor: Joseph Frandino.

       
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