Alpine Skiing
Comeback queen Lindsey Vonn will never say never
The ski racer’s February 2026 crash and her recovery has captivated the sporting world. Working hard to rebuild her body, Vonn refuses to rule out a return to racing.
On March 30, just 51 days after a crash that changed everything, Lindsey Vonn posted an incredible video to her 3.6m Instagram followers. It’s Vonn, rising from sitting, with the help of crutches, her left leg a map of scars, her right foot in a support boot. And, that’s it. Standing may not seem incredible to most. Fifty days ago, it would have been a miracle to Vonn. “No matter how hard I get knocked down I will always find a way to get back up!” she writes, defiantly.
Vonn was 13 seconds into the Olimpia delle Tofane on February 8, hurtling at 128kph towards what she hoped would be her 13th overall win on this very course, when disaster struck. She crashed in spectacular style, shattering her tibia, fibula and ankle. Vonn had torn the ACL in her left knee nine days prior to the fateful run, but claims she felt good.
She had her strategy planned out. But something went wrong. She went too fast over a small lip and got her arm caught in a gate. It was bad luck, that’s all. She crashed, her skis didn’t come off, and her legs twisted as she rolled downhill. “My leg was torqued, and I couldn’t get my skis off,” Vonn recalled to Vanity Fair reporter Elise Taylor a month after the crash. “I couldn’t move, and I was yelling for help.”
Lindsey Vonn in action at the start of 2026
© Erich Spiess/Red Bull Content Pool
TV cameras captured Vonn screaming, clearly in extreme pain. It was heartbreaking viewing. Eventually, she tells Taylor, she was transferred to a hospital in Treviso, Italy where she was rushed past paparazzi, to a waiting team of 20 medical professionals. She went into surgery and, after a successful operation was recovering that night when her leg began to swell. She started screaming again and painkillers didn’t seem to work. The doctors feared she might suffer nerve damage, losing the function of the left leg, or the leg itself. Vonn was rushed back into surgery and doctors managed to save her leg after three more surgeries.
The pain was one thing, being so far from home, with nurses who didn’t speak her language, and with her career and future life uncertain was almost too much for Vonn. As anyone who’s spent even a night in hospital knows, they can be disorienting places. “It took everything I had for it to not drive me insane,” she tells Taylor. Finally, she was cleared to fly to Colorado for more surgeries, and from there, on March 1, she was released back home to Utah.
She may have taken her first steps on the road to recovery, but in the context of Lindsey Vonn’s incredible, historic career, the next steps are still to be decided.
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Lindsey Vonn’s recovery plan
Surviving the crash was one thing. Surviving the fallout is another. At home in Park City, Vonn tells Taylor that she understandably has mixed feelings about everything that has happened. “I was number one in the world, and potentially on my way to an Olympic medal… Now I’m in a wheelchair,” she says.
Lindsey Vonn has been a serial winner during her career
© Erich Spiess/Red Bull Content Pool
Coming from anyone else’s mouth, such words might sound defeatist. For Vonn, they’re simply statements of truth. With a two-decade career behind her, including 20 Crystal Globes, Vonn doesn’t seem like the type of athlete to let a little thing like a horrifying crash stand in her way. The seat-to-standing video is just one of many proving that she’s already training, building her body back.
She’s always been defiant: she was the first US woman to win gold in downhill, and in 2016, she launched an unsuccessful campaign to allow women to ski against men. “I want to see what I’m capable of, and men’s racing is the next level,” she told USA Today at the time.
In late March she posted a video to her Instagram, Vonn in her gym kit, left and right ankles in compression socks as she works through her first set of pull-ups post surgery. The form is good and the determination is palpable. Earlier the same month she posted videos of massage and one-legged leg raises. “The only goal is to get healthy. One day at a time. #icandothis," she captioned it. She’s also working on the static bike and one post, of lat pull-downs, medicine ball work and more massage, looks like a Rocky training compilation. Occasionally, her face is set in grim determination. Mostly, she’s smiling.
No matter what happens next, I’ve already won
The goal is just to get moving, and well. As the Vanity Fair piece recounts, Vonn sees her physical therapist at 9am every day. They work for two hours, then she does two hours in a hyperbaric chamber to encourage tissue repair, followed by more home gym. She tells Taylor that after the crash, she received letters of support from David Beckham and Tom Brady, both of whom have returned to their sports after high profile retirements. Prince William even lent his support. “The way you wrote about stepping into the starting gate with courage and no regrets says so much about your resilience,” the heir to the British throne wrote her.
Pinned at the top of her Instagram page is a Time magazine cover, tagline – ‘Her comeback’. It’s from last year, but now more than ever, the message still applies: “At 41, I’m still chasing dreams… My hope is that anyone reading this remembers: never give up on yourself… No matter what happens next, I’ve already won,” she writes in the caption.
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Battling doubt
If Vonn does come back, it wouldn’t be the first time she has retired and then returned (although the circumstances this time around are definitely more severe). After originally setting out to break Ingemar Stenmark’s record of 19 Crystal Globes, Vonn announced her retirement in February 2019 at the age of 33, claiming that a career of spills had taken its toll on her body. She wanted to be active for old age. With three Olympic medals and the most World Cup wins (82) of any female skier (a record since broken by Mikaela Shiffrin), she had nothing to prove.
Lindsey Vonn has found it difficult to hang up her skis for good
© Michael Muller/The Red Bulletin
There’s no way that I’ll ever be challenged even remotely close in my life as I have been in skiing
Any of us would have taken an easy life over more punishment, and for a while, Vonn sort of did. She eased into retirement, playing a lot of tennis, investing in companies like Oura and Beyond Meat, and becoming a co-owner of Los Angeles-based women’s football team Angel City FC. She also founded a film production company and, in 2022 she published a memoir – Rise: My Story.
To an outsider, she was crushing it, but none of this challenged her in the same way a Super-G run could. “There’s no way that I’ll ever be challenged even remotely close in my life as I have been in skiing,” she tells Taylor of her thought process at the time.
Eventually (inevitably), the call of the wild drew Vonn back. After a successful knee replacement surgery in 2024, she started skiing for fun and realised she missed racing. To prepare herself for the fear of crashing, she worked with a therapist, Armando Gonzalez. Part of their work involved rewatching old videos of her crashes, a sort of exposure therapy. Gonzales told TIME reporter Sean Gregory that Vonn broke the videos down play by play, like a football coach watching game tape. “She has a superhuman ability,” he said, “to disassociate from pain.”
Vonn made her professional return that December in the FIS Fall Festival at Copper Mountain, Colorado, finishing 24th out of 45 skiers in a downhill race. She then claimed her first World Cup podium in seven years in the Super-G at the season finals in Idaho on March 23. Then, in St. Moritz, she claimed her 83rd World Cup win. Naturally, the Winter Olympics beckoned.
Vonn was back in action in 2024 after a five year break
© Gabriele Facciotti/Red Bull Content Pool
Vonn was ecstatic to be competing again, but some within public and sporting circles were not so supportive of her return. “She should see a psychologist,” two-time Olympic champion Michaela Dorfmeister told krone.tv in November of 2024. “Does she want to kill herself?” Downhill legend Franz Klammer said she had “gone completely mad” on the same programme. Vonn was naturally annoyed. “I am not a long shot,” she told Gregory last October, in response to the negative feedback. “I am back in the game.”
Then her crash happened, the one that tore her left ACL just nine days before the Olimpia delle Tofane. Halfway down the slope at Crans-Montana, she smashed into a fence at 112kph. Yikes doesn’t cover it. ACL aside, thankfully she was OK. Still, everyone assumed she’d tap out, but Vonn refused to give in – despite calls for a younger, uninjured American to replace her on the national team. As far as Vonn was concerned, she was still the only option. “Everyone said it was reckless and I was taking a spot from somebody else and all this nonsense,” she tells Taylor. “I’m not crazy. I know what I can do and what I can’t do.”
It was a very, very small error. We’re talking about a few centimetres
Lindsay Winninger, Vonn’s physical therapist, told Vanity Fair that the criticism came from a general misunderstanding of how athletes are able to handle injury. “When you tear your ACL, it isn’t like you lose all of your strength, power and cardio just overnight,” she says, explaining that Vonn was still in top shape and that racing downhill wouldn’t impact a torn ACL in the same way as more impactful sports like basketball might. Winninger and Vonn’s trainer, Aksel Lund Svindal, both agree that it wasn’t the ACL injury that caused the crash, but bad luck. “It was a very, very small error. We’re talking about a few centimetres,” Svindal told the magazine. “She paid a high price.”
She did push on, and we saw the rest, live on TV. “I was willing to risk and push and sacrifice for something I knew I was absolutely capable of doing,” Vonn wrote on Instagram six days post-February crash. “I will always take the risk of crashing while giving it my all, rather than not ski to my potential and have regret.”
In a later post, she re-capped her comeback season for the haters, proving that she more than had what it took. “One thing that stung was when people said I was selfish and should give my Olympic spot to someone else,” she wrote, listing coming first in the Downhill standings, 3rd in the Super-G standings, two Downhill wins, and a season full of podiums as proof of her continued brilliance. “It wasn’t all for nothing,” she wrote of putting her body on the line again post-retirement. “It was everything.”
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How Lindsey Vonn wants to be remembered
Recovering at home, Vonn tells Taylor that she can’t help but read the comments on her Instagram page. She says what bothers her most is how she’ll be remembered. She doesn’t want it to be for this latest, potentially career-ending crash. “I don’t want people to hang on this crash,” she says. “What I did before [it] has never been done before. I was number one in the standings. No one remembers that I was winning.”
We get the feeling that it will take more than this to keep Vonn down. Speaking with Gregory, she credited her mum, Linda Krohn with giving her strength to defy the odds. Linda, who passed away in 2022, suffered a stroke while giving birth to Vonn, and later developed ALS. “One thing that my mom’s really given me is the ability to pick myself back up,” Vonn says. “That’s what she did her whole life… I’ll never stop doing that.”
Lindsey Vonn isn't ruling out a return to competition in future
© Michael Muller/The Red Bulletin
I don’t like to close the door on anything… You just never know what's going to happen
Driven by her mother’s example and her own determination, Vonn tells Vanity Fair that she doesn’t rule out a return to skiing. But for now, she’s keeping moving. She’s afraid of fading into irrelevance, despite her success. It’s a feeling that “the world keeps turning whether you’re there or not.”
She hasn’t yet decided on the future, she tells Taylor. Maybe she’ll be racing again, maybe she’ll move to Europe. She doesn’t rule out having children. She does know she’s not happy about ending her career on such a horrific run. If the Olimpia delle Tofane were to be her last race, she only made 13 seconds on it. “But they were a really good 13 seconds,” she says. “I don’t like to close the door on anything,” she adds, “because you just never know what’s going to happen.”