Skiing
Unstoppable: Lindsey Vonn
Lindsey Vonn, one of skiing’s all-time greats, is in the shape of her life with a rebuilt knee—and ready to write a final chapter in her extraordinary sporting journey.
Sometimes, the only way to appreciate raw speed is to slow it down. Especially when it comes to down hilling. Then you can see just much how a pair of highly engineered 7-foot-long racing skis—wood at the core; layers of stiff, light titanal and graphene laminates; steel-alloy edges honed by bastard files and gummy stones—vibrates and carves and chatters across fall lines that have been injected with water from high- pressure nozzles, milled by grooming machines and then frozen solid. You can see how human quadriceps push through the competing forces of a sweeping off-camber turn. You can see how an unlucky gust of wind, or a fraction of a degree in a the angles of a ski’s bevel, can translate into milliseconds—the difference between a World Cup podium and empty hands.
Even lifelong racers struggle to articulate what it’s like to hurtle down a mountain at 80 miles per hour: World champion downhiller Breezy Johnson likens it to playing a chess match while sprinting. Or “Formula One with knives on your feet,” as she says. You’re going so fast, says two-time gold medalist Aksel Lund Svindal, that you have to focus on the terrain 50 meters ahead of you, because it will be under your boot soles and gone in a flash. Lindsey Vonn has said it’s like flooring it down the interstate, rolling down the window and sticking your head all the way out. It takes strength, heft, courage and daring. Or, as she wrote in her 2022 memoir, Rise: My Story, downhillers must have big eier. Which is German for eggs—and slang for balls.
Vonn at the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in Austria last February.
© Getty Images
Vonn, in a career that spanned 2002 to 2019, had eggs enough to become one of the sport’s greats. Her historic catalog of accomplishments includes 82 World Cup wins, now third on the all-time list, including a record 43 in downhill and 28 in super-G. Her trophy case is tiered with 20 World Cup crystal globes, more than any other man or woman. She clinched downhill gold in Vancouver in 2010. When it comes to American skiers, she alone has transcended the relative obscurity of alpine racers to become a pop culture icon. At her peak, she sometimes won races by close to two seconds—and sometimes crashed in spectacular fashion, with an encyclopedic medical résumé that included a shattered arm, torn knee ligaments, cracked tibial plateaus and nearly a dozen surgeries. Leading up to her final events at the World Championships in Åre, Sweden, Vonn’s physical therapist at the time, Lindsay Winninger, had to loosen up her right knee—which could no longer straighten or bend all the way, thanks to multiple ACL injuries—for more than an hour before every trip to the hill. Vonn still managed to earn downhill bronze.
Yet there are some problems that can’t be simply outworked— even when you’re one of the hardest-working women on the tour. In her final season, as she was chasing the all-time record for World Cup victories, Vonn was followed by HBO camera crews; rather than documenting a fairy tale, they captured a champion caught between humanity, perseverance and desperation. Winninger was slightly terrified every time Vonn clicked her poles together and launched out of the starting hut: Could she survive another run?
But the damage was too extensive. Only stopping cold could make Vonn’s pain abate and give her busted body a break. Six years ago, at age 34—while her drive and her touch on snow and her love for skiing were as strong as ever—she said farewell to what made her feel the most alive. “Mentally, I still feel like I could win,” she said in 2020. “But ski racing is dead to me.” No one, least of all Vonn, believed she’d ever compete again.
I can finally use my body the way it's meant to be used.
When any top-shelf athlete decelerates to the pace of the rest of the world, their perspective usually shifts. Their priorities change. They can finally take in the 30,000-foot view, not just the one 50 meters ahead of them. It’s impossible to find the same rush doing anything else, but most eventually realize that they don’t need it anymore. And most stay away, because coming out of retirement is a risky proposition: Pros have as much, or more, to lose than they have to gain. That’s especially true for downhill racers.
So when Vonn, then 40, announced that she was rejoining the U.S. Ski Team in November 2024—with an all-important competition in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, only 14 months away—it generated buzz that resounded beyond the bounds of alpine racing. Her followers rejoiced. The media pounced. The peanut gallery tittered. After all her laurels, after all those years away, after all she’d put her body through, everyone had two questions: How? And why?
As she stomped her skis and crouched behind the starting wand at the top of a super-G in St. Moritz, Switzerland, last December—her first World Cup start in 2,183 days—the butterflies were familiar; the focus, the distilled sense of danger. But something was different. While Vonn once used fury to her advantage at the top of every run—describing herself in Rise like she was “going to eat a child” as she listened for the countdown beeps—now she was awash in a sensation akin to peace. Home. “Until that moment, I never had the feeling of overwhelming joy to the point that I wanted to cry,” she says, speaking from her home in Park City, Utah, in September. “It’s not a normal reaction to be teary-eyed when you’re about to ski 80.” The pressure, once existential, was a privilege.
It soon became clear that her comeback was more than a victory lap or a vanity project. The downhill is too brutal for that. And when you’re Lindsey Vonn, you don’t compete unless you think you have a chance of winning. “A million things can happen that can change the outcome of a race,” she says. “But I’m not doing this for a participation trophy. I don’t want a gold star.”
“I’m not doing this for a participation trophy,” says Vonn.
© Michael Muller
In some ways, it feels like Vonn has hardly been gone: She has managed to remain a relevant public figure from the moment she pulled off her bib in Åre. She says the first days without skiing were like “jumping off a psychological cliff,” leaving behind the mental cycles of preparation, the regular zings of adrenaline, the lonely traveling circus that is elite ski racing. “It took me a year, year and a half to really settle into life after I retired,” she says. Eventually, she found her bearings: She focused on the foundation she started in 2015, providing empowerment programs and sports scholarships to girls in underserved communities. She took business classes at Harvard, became an angel investor, started a production company and became one of the owners of the NWSL’s Utah RSalt Lake City. She has sat front row at Jason Wu, Carolina Herreraand Thom Browne. Circulated at Art Basel. Shotgunned a beer on stage with Dierks Bentley. Her feed is a rolling register of celebrity encounters: Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon on the set of The Morning Show. Jannik Sinner’s box at the U.S. Open. Leo Messi before an Inter Miami match. Post Malone. Malala Yousafzai. Her dating life is irrelevant to her skiing, but nevertheless: It landed her in People every time her status changed.
In many ways, she was fulfilled by the kaleidoscopic reality she built—even though she’d lost her north star. “I love adventures. I love traveling the world and meeting new people. I have a lot of businesses that challenged me mentally and pushed me out of my comfort zone,” she says. At the same time, she knew there was no substitute for the experience of generating her own G-forces down a fall line. “There’s nothing like ski racing, so I could pretend the other things I did were exciting,” she says. “They’re not ever going to be the same.” It wasn’t a void, exactly; she wasn’t incomplete or seeking attention. She admits it took a while, but Vonn has become more confident in who she is as a person, one who is no longer defined by skiing. “I’m a more mature woman now. I’m much more grounded and calm,” she says. “I know my purpose, and I have pretty thick skin.”
She did have one carryover, however: the gym. It’s no secret that Vonn has always loved the grind. She has collectively spent years in the mind-numbing hamster wheel of rehabilitation. Post-retirement, she never stopped working out—“it’s my meditation,” she admits—and pushed as hard as her knees would allow. In fact, her lower body demanded constant PT just to keep her joints somewhat supported. But she was unable to jump, do much agility work, move explosively or lift heavy barbells. In her time away from competitive skiing, she lost a lot of the muscle she’d built up as a skier—necessary not just for strength and power but for the physics of flat-out mass hurtling down a mountain. While Instagram isn’t often a realistic barometer of anything substantive, it was obvious that Vonn’s general fitness was on point. As she puts it, “I was totally doing beach-bod workouts, not skiing workouts, and it showed.”
Post-retirement, Vonn never stopped working out—“it’s my meditation.”
© Michael Muller
She could still free ski—and in 2023, she even had enough strength and grit to pull off a gutsy statement run down the Streif in Kitzbuhel, the most notorious men’s downhill track in the world, becoming the first and only woman to do so. (Not only that, it was after just five weeks of training. And she skied at night. Eier.) Day to day, though, Vonn’s right knee was bone crunching on bone. Mangled. It was iffy to play tennis, too tender and stiff to hike. She could barely walk one of her dogs around Park City. When she occasionally wore heels, the aches ratcheted up through her hips to her back. She underwent a few scopes; she tried several injections. All she sought was a life free of chronic pain. The only remaining solution was to undergo a knee replacement.
Vonn consulted with four or five surgeons, all of whom recommended a total replacement—which would have significantly restricted her participation in high-impact activities. (Pickleball: probably. 80 mph down a ski hill: a thousand times no.) But a partial replacement is different. In simpler cases, it’s more like resurfacing the tires of a car. Except Vonn’s knee had . . . issues. As her eventual surgeon, Martin Roche, explains, repairing a torn ACL and then repairing that repair after a second injury—which was the case with Vonn, after a horrific 2013 crash—involves drilling a tunnel through the tibia to anchor the new ligament. Eventually some of that bone can dissolve, leaving a cyst. Vonn had also developed bone spurs and post-traumatic arthritis. It all added up to biomechanics that were agonizingly off-kilter—and ultimately determined the end of her first round. “It was a very, very complex knee,” says Roche. But he was willing to take it on.
“I know my purpose, and I have pretty thick skin,” says Lindsey Vonn.
© Michael Muller
Knee replacement surgery has made huge advances in the last decade, thanks to robot assistants like the Mako—which can scan anatomy, perfect the placement of implants and alignment of joints and help surgeons sneak past muscles and ligaments with a tiny incision. But it’s still uncommon for someone so young to get this kind of procedure; typically, people tend to wait until they’re a decade or two older so they don’t have to get it done twice. Of course, Vonn is far from typical—and what unfolds for her in the next few years could change the calculus of how long the rest of us put off replacements of our own. After Vonn had her cyst removed by another surgeon in Colorado, she traveled to Florida in April 2024, where Roche shaved off a few millimeters of damaged bone, cleaned up underneath her kneecap, inserted two pieces of titanium alloy and told her to rest for a month and a half. “That’s when the real Lindsey came out,” he says.
A few weeks post-op, Vonn sent him a video of herself wakeboarding. She wasn’t being cavalier; as a connoisseur of pain, she understood it was safe, and Roche knew she knew. “She was able to achieve an unbelievable recovery at a speed I hadn’t seen before,” he says. “It’s simply uncharted.” Ten weeks post-op, Vonn was on skis again—and the difference was transformational. “I didn’t have to think about my knee,” she says. “I felt nothing, when all I felt before was pain. I had this ridiculous Joker smile from ear to ear.” Not long after, she flew to New Zealand to try super-G training with her former coach, Chris Knight, who’d worked with her 2015–2018. She could ski 15 runs a day, more than she’d been able to do since her mid-20s. Right away, Knight saw that Vonn’s technique was, in many ways, better and more supple than it had been before she retired; back then, she had to shift her weight to her left side every time she made a right-footed turn— not a powerful stance for generating speed. “She had to get used to skiing with two legs, basically,” he says. Vonn agrees. “I can finally use my body the way it’s meant to be used,” she says. Vonn can’t recall an exact revelatory moment, but at some point it was clear that racing at the highest level was possible.
Her mother, Linda Krohn, suffered a stroke while giving birth to Lindsey, and it has always fostered a sense of responsibility in Vonn to live a life without regret—not to mention reframe temporary discomfort. And when Krohn passed away from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2022, it shifted Vonn’s outlook even more. “Losing her has amplified the way I was already living,” she says. “When I started feeling really good after my knee replacement, it seemed like she would’ve been disappointed in me if I didn’t try. I never want to get to the finish and feel like I could have given more.”
Winninger, who has also worked with NFL, NBA and NHL athletes, knows firsthand that returning to sports-specific training at an elite level—especially after years away—can be difficult. “I wasn’t exactly skeptical of Lindsey’s comeback,” she says. “Let’s call it hesitant.” And because Vonn wasn’t close to healthy when she stopped skiing in 2019, she had even more ground to make up. “Because of all my injuries,” she says, “I could never train as hard as I needed to during the last years of my career.” At first, she had to retrain her musculature and nervous system to remind her knee that, yes, it could bend. Once she blew through post-op recovery, she’s been able to rebuild her body from the ground up. The first time she was able to do a 20-inch single-leg box jump again, in early November 2024, she was overcome with emotion. “It was a signal to me that my life had changed,” she says. “Now things like that happen all the time.”
Vonn is convinced that she’s quicker than she was in her mid-20s, with more lean muscle. She can clean 70-plus kilos, front squat more than 80. She can hammer on her road bike for hours around Park City. Whether she’s at home or visiting Red Bull’s Athlete Performance Center Los Angeles for training and biometric testing, she usually works out twice a day—and she’s a hundred percent focused every session, says her current trainer, Peter Meliessnig . Her age seems to be a nonissue. “Even though I’m 41,” says Vonn, “I’ve done a complete 180. I feel really fucking good.”
Vonn in action during the Audi FIS Alpine Ski World Cup Women’s Downhill.
© Getty Images
Initially, though, most people had no idea how rapidly she was progressing. When Vonn announced her return, the reaction from some circles—notably former World Cup skiers—was fast and fierce. “Does she want to kill herself?” (2006 downhill gold medalist Michaela Dorfmeister.) “She’s gone completely mad.” (Franz Klammer, four-time winner at the Hahnenkamm.) “She hasn’t recognized the meaning and purpose of her other life in recent years.” (Four-time overall World Cup champion Pirmin Zurbriggen.) These reactions—especially from her peers— surprised Vonn. “I’m getting pretty tired of people predicting negative things about my future. Did they all become doctors and I missed it?” she wrote on X in December 2024.
“It’s funny,” she says now. “At this point, I’d think that people would realize that every time they say something negative about me, it only makes me ski faster.” And while it is becoming more common to see older athletes stay on, or return to action—Tom Brady, LeBron, Lewis Hamilton, Serena—the ones who get the most positive attention tend to be men. “Some of it was just sexism, frankly,” says Johnson. Marcel Hirscher, 36, an eight-time overall World Cup champion who is currently in the thick of his own comeback, hasn’t received the same backlash—and has nothing but admiration for Vonn. “I was extremely happy for Lindsey, for competitive skiing, and for the positive symbolism and signal effect that this has and will continue to have far beyond our sport,” he says. “The disrespectful comments were instructive somehow. It got very quiet in those rows very quick.” As Vonn pointed out in an interview last summer, she’s losing money by returning to racing; it’s not like she has nothing else going on. “That makes it even cooler,” says Svindal, who ended his career the same week as Vonn in 2019. “It shows that she’s basically doing it for the love of the sport. It’s for all the right reasons.”
From a medical standpoint, if Vonn crashes hard, the implant isn’t going to break and it’s not going to make a wreck worse. Yes, a full knee replacement could well be in her future, whether it’s from a ski accident or—much more likely—the protracted ravages of time. “She knows her knee isn’t perfect,” Roche says. “So far, she has pushed the envelope, and we haven’t seen any repercussions.” Contrary to her critics, Vonn doesn’t consider herself reckless; her preparation has always been detailed, down to her photographic memory for the undulations and curves of every course. “Some people think I’m some kind of daredevil,” she says. “Yes, I’m fearless, but I am very calculated. I don’t just go out and ski. I prepare for everything and I know exactly how to limit the risk.”
Vonn on a downhill training run before a World Cup race last January.
© Getty Images
In fact, the biggest challenge wasn’t the physical preparation or the return to snow—it was the logistics and minutiae of dialing in her support team and equipment. As Hirscher says, “A comeback a like this isn’t a case of ‘I did this, so I’ll just do it again!’ The skiing world has turned five times since we both retired.” Some of Vonn’s former loyal staffers, like Winninger, had moved on from chasing pros on tour. Vonn’s favorite tech of nine years, the renowned Heinz Hämmerle, had also retired, so she needed to find another guru at Head, her sponsor. Ski and boot specs had changed—and Vonn herself had changed—enough that she felt like she was starting from zero, tinkering with bindings, plates, heel heights, cuffs, sidecuts. To Knight, it seemed like they were throwing the kitchen sink at the problem. “I definitely struggled with my equipment last season,” Vonn says. “If the downforce isn’t right and you’re sliding in the turns, then it doesn’t matter how fast your engine is. You won’t have a winning car.”
In her frustration, she called Svindal, a fellow Head and Red Bull athlete she’d always admired for his openness and his analytical approach. Soon thereafter, he joined her team as a coach. “I think it’s the first time a recently retired male champion has ever come out to coach a female,” Vonn says. “In tennis, it’s normal. In ski racing, it’s not. I ruffled some feathers—and I’m excited about that.” Svindal is there to liaise between her and Head and provide structure as she tests her gear, complementing the experience of Knight. “I was honestly a bit surprised when I said yes,” says Svindal. “But flattered. I respect her comeback a lot. It’s a project for us with a limited time scope that we can both pour ourselves into.”
For both skier and coach, the impending competition in Cortina is exerting a supercharged focus; unlike most of their competitors, they’re not trying to sustain a career for four—or eight—more years. And, as Svindal says, his athlete is no longer mentally drained by training with pain and feeling constantly underprepared because of it. The first time he coached Vonn in person, a two-week stint in Corralco, Chile, in October, she was able to ski six early morning runs a day down a nearly full-length downhill course that started near the summit of a volcano and finished just above stands of monkey trees. The wide-open, varied terrain allowed coaches to replicate some sections of World Cup courses. “She still has so much angle, so much power,” Svindal says. With his systematic data collection and Knight’s experience, her setup is almost there. “She can still go faster,” says Knight. “It was a blank sheet of paper this time last year, and now we just have to clean up a few things.”
And that might be the most exciting prospect: that Vonn hasn’t yet reached top speed. Last season, she was often working from unfavorable positions in the start order because of her dearth of recent results. In that first World Cup super-G in St. Moritz, she finished 14th, 1.18 seconds off the podium. In St. Anton, Austria, a few weeks later, she was fourth in super-G and sixth in downhill. Her campaign culminated in a second-place finish in a highly technical super-G in Sun Valley, Idaho, making her the oldest woman—by over five years—to land on a World Cup podium. It was her 138th. The result was a resounding clapback for an athlete who was still, in truth, working out a lot of kinks. “Considering how little training I had, not just in the few months leading up to the World Cup, but the previous six years, the season went amazingly well,” says Vonn. “It was a test run, and now I’m ready to go. I have most of my puzzle pieces in place, and I just have to put the final ones on the board.” The silver medal spoke volumes to her detractors, who are dwindling by the race. “I haven’t really heard anything from all of the people who were very opinionated,” she says.
"I’m fearless, but I am very calculated. I don’t just go out and ski.”
© Michael Muller
I am doing something no one else has done.
Vonn is not coy about how much she loves skiing the Olimpia delle Tofane track in Cortina, where the women’s speed races will be held in February. She reached her first World Cup podium there in 2004. She has won 12 races there, and broke the then-women’s World Cup victories record there in 2016. It was also the site of her final World Cup appearance—when, she says, “I was hanging on by a thread and my knees were toast.” Making the U.S. team would allow her to leave the mountain—and the sport—on a positive note. If she does, she will likely be the oldest American athlete at the Games—and could end up the oldest ski racer, male or female, to ever medal. “I can fall asleep visualizing that course,” she says. “It’s like I’ve skied it a million times. I know that I’ve been very successful in Cortina. It’s one of my favorite places on Earth.”
So what are her chances? Vonn has to put up enough points to ensure a good bib. Her equipment, she says, is 90 percent dialed.She’s honing her fitness with short and difficult exercises, says Meliessnig. Her age is proving to be an asset. “With the number of years of experience that Lindsey has, you have a certain level of mental toughness and consistency in your ability to execute at big events,” says Winninger. Team USA will likely have four spots a per discipline, with athletes largely chosen based on World Cup results, and the competition among teammates—including Lauren Macuga, Breezy Johnson and Mikaela Shiffrin—is stiff. Vonn herself isn’t offering predictions. “I’m the underdog and the favorite at the same time,” she says. “No one expects me to do anything at age 41, but also everyone expects me to do everything. And so I am just trying to stay true to myself. I know what I’m capable of.”
The reason she loves ski racing hasn’t changed at all: It’s the sense of endless possibility, the freedom to go as fast as she wants, the adrenaline, the nerves and, yes, the risk. But that’s not why she’s doing it all again. “I’m not looking to prove that I was a great ski racer,” she says. “It’s no longer about the skiing, to be honest. My journey is resonating with so many people, and I see it as a responsibility. I get to show what’s possible for women in sports.” In April 2024, she was gingerly leaving a hospital with a walker. In November 2024, she was in a U.S. Ski Team speed suit. And next February, she could well make history. “I mean, listen,” a she says. “I am doing something no one else has done. I am doing something I never thought I could do. So I’ve already won.”
Lindsey Vonn is the final cover story of the Red Bulletin US edition.
© Michael Muller
