Lindsey Vonn, one of Team USA’s most-decorated and popular athletes at the Milan-Cortina Olympics, crashed 13 seconds into an downhill skiing event Sunday and was airlifted off the course for the second time in the past nine days.
Vonn, a three-time Olympic medalist, was hoping to complete a defiant comeback despite rupturing her left ACL in a training run on Jan. 30.
Instead, Vonn was strapped to a gurney and flown away from the Tofane Alpine Skiing Centre in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy — possibly ending the 41-year-old skier’s storied career.
“She’ll be OK, but it’s going to be a bit of a process,” said Anouk Patty, chief of sport for U.S. Ski and Snowboard. “This sport’s brutal and people need to remember when they’re watching (that) these athletes are throwing themselves down a mountain and going really, really fast.”
This was not the first crash of Vonn’s long tenure atop her sport.
The worst might have been at the 2013 world championship in Austria, when she tumbled after landing in a patch of soft snow during the super-G and wound up needing reconstructive surgery on her right knee.
Vonn came back but missed the Sochi Olympics in 2014 after tearing her repaired right ACL during a World Cup downhill at Val d’Isere, France.
In 2016, she crashed during a World Cup super-G in Andorra, breaking bones in her left knee. She competed again the next day, but went nearly a year without participating in a World Cup race.
Two other skiers — Andorra’s Cande Moreno and Norway’s Nina Ortlieb — also crashed early on in their runs in the downhill event Sunday.
About an hour after competition resumed following Moreno’s crash, Team USA’s Breezy Johnson won gold in in the downhill event.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
