DOBBIACO, Italy — Lindsey Vonn on Monday made her first public comments since her crash in Sunday’s women’s downhill at the Winter Olympics, saying she sustained a “complex tibia fracture” that is stable but will need “multiple surgeries” to fix.
Vonn, the American Alpine skiing legend, hooked a gate and fell to the snow just 13 seconds into her run in the Olympic downhill — a race that once looked like it might be a remarkable coronation after an unlikely return to the sport two years ago, but instead ended with a painful injury.
“While yesterday did not end the way I had hoped, and despite the intense physical pain it caused, I have no regrets,” she wrote in her statement on Instagram. “Standing in the starting gate yesterday was an incredible feeling that I will never forget.”
In her second season back after a five-year retirement, Vonn had become, at 41, the best speed skier in the world again, leading the World Cup downhill standings and tracking to be a favorite to win Olympic gold. But a week before the Olympics, she crashed in a World Cup race in Switzerland. Last Tuesday, she revealed she had a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) after that crash but said she intended to compete at the Olympics anyway.
She did make it to the starting gate in Cortina d’Ampezzo, but seconds later, the dream turned into disaster. Coming around a turn, she veered toward the edge of the course, hooked her arm around a gate, got turned sideways in midair and had no chance to land safely, landing in a cloud of snow and yelling in pain.
“The difference between a strategic line and a catastrophic injury can be as small as 5 inches,” she wrote on Instagram. “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.”
In an inherently dangerous sport, with athletes traveling at high speeds down icy slopes, skiers are always riding on the edge to shave precious fractions of seconds off their runs. She was trying to do it with a severe ACL injury that, though not as damaging to an Alpine skier as it is to many other athletes, didn’t make it any easier either.
Vonn, though, insisted it was not a factor in the crash.
“My ACL and past injuries had nothing to do with my crash whatsoever,” she wrote.
As stunned fans looked on from the bottom of the downhill run on Sunday, Vonn was airlifted off the mountain and taken to a local hospital in nearby Treviso. Reports began to surface Sunday night that Vonn had sustained a fracture that required surgery. Before the injury, she had hoped to not only ski the Olympic downhill run but also Tuesday’s team combined and Thursday’s super-G.
Vonn has won 84 World Cup races in her career, third most in history behind only fellow American star Mikaela Shiffrin (108) and Swedish legend Ingemar Stenmark (86). She’s won three Olympic medals — gold in the downhill in Vancouver in 2010 and a pair of bronzes in super-G and downhill in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in 2018. In the Instagram post, she did not address her future plans, but she has previously said this season would be her last.
These Olympics were setting up to be the culmination of Vonn’s comeback, which started in November 2024 when she announced her return to ski racing with an eye on competing at her beloved Olympia delle Tofane slope in Cortina, where she’s won a record 12 World Cup races. At the time, many in the skiing community questioned whether it was wise for a then-40-year-old to return to such a demanding sport, or whether she was even physically capable.
Vonn quickly put those fears to rest, landing in the top-six in two races in St. Anton, Austria, in January 2025, just her second and third World Cup races since returning. Overall, her first season was up-and-down, but it also proved she belonged back on the top circuit.
Then it ended with a flourish — a podium finish in Sun Valley, Idaho. Vonn took second in the super-G at the World Cup finals there in March, then headed into an offseason of training she asserted would make her even better.
That it did. This season, Vonn has two World Cup wins and finished no worse than fourth in the eight World Cup races she completed before the pre-Olympic crash in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, on Jan. 30. Less than a week later, she was telling the world she intended to try to ski on that torn ACL.
It sounded absurd to some, but Vonn’s style has never been to back down.
“Knowing I stood there having a chance to win was a victory in and of itself,” she wrote of her moment in the starting gate. “I also knew that racing was a risk. It always was and always will be an incredibly dangerous sport.”
Among the thousands of replies to Vonn’s post were several shows of support from fellow Olympians, other sports stars, even Hollywood celebrities. Simone Biles. Jannik Sinner. Reese Witherspoon. A collection of well-wishers showing how far her story reached.
The legacy, the comeback, the crash in Switzerland, the persistence even in the face of an ACL tear, the determination to get in that starting gate — it all set her up for an incredible Olympic finale, one way or another. That’s how she always wanted it.
“I tried. I dreamt. I jumped,” she wrote.