American alpine ski star Lindsey Vonn, who was trying to become Olympic champion again at the age of 41 despite a serious knee injury, fell heavily and abandoned during the downhill of the 2026 Olympics, Sunday February 8. It was the brutal end of the Olympic adventure and certainly the end of his career.
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“Speed Queen” set off but the dream didn’t last very long. Approaching a small bump in a turn, the 41-year-old American lost her balance and, upon landing her jump, immediately fell, her skis perpendicular to the track. After the fall, long minutes passed Cortina.
At the end of this long time, the Olympic downhill champion in Vancouver in 2010 was airlifted, leaving her compatriot Breezy Johnson, already the provisional best time at that time, to become the second American to win gold at the JO in this speed test.
The public applauded for a long time as Linsey Vonn passed through the skies of the “Olimpia delle Tofane”, the legendary track which has seen her win so often (12 times) and for which she had largely made her spectacular comeback last winter, with a view to the Games.
Defeat the curse
The apotheosis did not take place. The fault in particular was a fall experienced at the end of January during the descent of Crans-Montana, in the World Cup, a week before the start of the Olympics. While she approached this race in Switzerland in the wake of an almost idyllic first part of winter – seven podiums in nine races including her 83rd and 84th World Cup victories – the skier from Vail (Colorado) was seriously injured, including a total rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee.
Determined to overcome the curse, Lindsey Vonn announced a few days later her firm intention to be present at the start of the Olympic downhill this Sunday, with a splint.
The American made her comeback last winter, after a six-year retirement, thanks to the installation of a titanium prosthesis on her right knee, also bruised and which forced her to leave the circuit in 2019.
Twenty-four years after her first World Cup race, the American lost her bet, both sporting and medical, and the rest of her career, which was in any case not expected to last beyond this Olympic winter, now seems highly improbable, even for an athlete of her caliber.
Three Olympic medals including one gold
Lindsey Vonn will remain a legend of her sport in any case, through her track record (three medals Olympics including one in gold, four world number one globes, 84 World Cup successes…) and by its trajectory, sublime and chaotic. Lindsey Kildow, her maiden name, experienced her first World Cup race during the Park City slalom in November 2000 (Utah).
She will experience her very first podium four years later in Cortina D’Ampezzo where at the age of 19 she snatches 3rd place in the second contested descent, 24 hundredths behind Frenchwoman Carole Montillet, Olympic champion.
She will end up winning twelve times in the emblematic village of the Dolomites (6 descents, 6 super-G), her favorite European resort and “ the main reason for (his) return » last winter in preparation for the 2026 Olympic Games on the famous “Olimpia delle Tofane”, she explained. In 2004, the 20-year-old American won her first victory on the world circuit at Lake Louise, this time ahead of Montillet.
The oldest Olympic medalist in the history of alpine skiing at the Olympic Games
At the end of a season in which she achieved six successes (5 downhills, 1 combined), Lindsey Vonn, who married American skier Thomas Vonn in 2007 – they divorced six years later – won the general classification of the World Cup in 2008 and at the age of 23, the culmination of ” a wonderful season ».
Four years after her terrible fall in training at the 2006 Turin Olympics, Vonn was crowned Olympic downhill champion in Whistler, during the Vancouver Games. She won bronze in the super-G three days later, then the same metal in downhill in Pyeongchang in 2018, already becoming at 36 the oldest medalist in the history of alpine skiing at the Olympics. Milan Cortina was its fifth participation in the Games, 24 years after Salt Lake City.
