Famed Olympic Skier Lindsey Vonn Hospitalized After Intense Crash
Image courtesy of The New Yorker.
By Luis Zonenberg
Few televised events draw a huge crowd these days. Most that do are a select few famed sports events. The crown jewels among these remain the Super Bowl and the Olympics, which both continue to draw in millions of viewers when broadcast. This year, on February 8, all eyes were on both events, particularly the Alpine Skiing Olympics hosted in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. Eleven women competed in the World Cup downhill, including experienced competitor Lindsey Vonn.
Vonn is a famed alpine ski racer, winning four World Cup championships with titles respectively in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2012. Vonn also competed in the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, winning the Gold Medal for the women’s downhill held in Whistler, British Columbia. In 2016, Vonn received her 20th World Cup crystal globe title, surpassing the record set by Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden, who won 19 globes from 1975 to 1984. She currently has the third-highest ranking of all skiers, men or women.
Vonn was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, originally bearing the name Lindsey Karoline Kildow. She was already skiing by the time she was two years old, spending most of her childhood in Burnsville, Minnesota. She was taught to ski by her grandfather, Don Kildow, and continued to ski through her family vacations, which included 16-hour drives from Minnesota to Vail, Colorado. They eventually stopped commuting and moved to Colorado so they could exclusively ski at Ski Club Vail.
The move eventually paid off, with Vonn becoming one of the first American athletes to win the “Cadets” slalom events in Italy’s Trofeo Topolino di Sci Alpino in 1999. By the time she was 16, she made her World Cup debut on November 18, 2000, in Park City, Utah. Vonn would make her Olympic debut not long after, competing in the 2003 Winter Olympics at the age of 17! She raced in both slalom and combined in Salt Lake City, with her best result coming sixth in the combined.
Vonn would return to the Winter Olympics in Turin in 2006, clocking in the second-best time in the first practice run of the race. On February 13 of that year, though, she crashed in her second practice run. She was even evacuated by a helicopter and was hospitalized overnight. Despite suffering pains from her bruised hip, she returned to the slope 2 days later to compete and ultimately finished eighth in the race.
This would soon come back to haunt her years later, when she became eligible to compete in the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina, Italy. Despite retiring in 2019, her partial knee replacement in 2024 gave her a new lease on life and convinced her to return to the sport. Not only would she compete in the women’s downhill competition at the 2026 Olympics, but she would do so 9 days after receiving surgery for a torn ACL!
This drew huge concern from her fans, whose worries proved warranted. During the women’s downhill competition, she crashed after her arm hooked the fourth gate and suffered a complex tibia fracture as a result. She was airlifted off the slopes and was hospitalized in Treviso. Vonn received surgery to stabilize the broken left leg, which also had bone bruising and meniscus damage from another crash she endured in the final downhill before the Olympics.
“While yesterday did not end the way I had hoped, and despite the intense physical pain it caused, I have no regrets,” Vonn explained on her Instagram page. “I tried. I dreamt. I jumped. I hope if you take away anything from my journey it’s that you all have the courage to dare greatly. Life is too short not to take chances on yourself. Because the only failure in life is not trying.”
Vonn is currently stabilized and receiving treatment in the Ca’Foncello Hospital in Treviso, Italy. More updates on her condition are expected in the near future.
