Lindsey Vonn on her Olympic crash, the long recovery road and what lies ahead

Lindsey Vonn’s days are full.

“It’s a lot of rehab,” she stated from a convention room in Los Angeles.

“Wake up at 7:30, breakfast at 8, 9 to 11 is rehab at my house. I have a little break, eat some food. Go to a hyperbaric chamber. Do about two hours with decompression in the hyperbaric, and then I come back and have a little break. And then usually work out from, like, 5 to 6:30, little break, shower, dinner. That’s kind of my day every day, six days a week. Sunday is kind of a day off without a scheduled program. But I, of course, always go to the gym on my own.”

No surprise there.

To speak with Vonn has long been a truly fantastic experience. She’s one of those very famous people who has walked just about every red carpet there is and is also about the biggest badass anyone can ever meet. And she’s also this plain-spoken girl from the Upper Midwest prone to tearing up whenever the conversation turns to her childhood ski coach and lifelong mentor, Erich Sailer, who died last Augusttwo months before his 100th birthday.

She’s also crashed so many times racing downhill on ice at 80 miles an hour and got up and done it all over again, seemingly without fear, that she can seem more like a comic book action hero than an Olympian. She’s basically bionic at this point — and still fantasizing about what it would feel like to stand in front of a starting gate at the top of a mountain.

Now, after her brutal injury at February’s Olympics and the long recovery road she’s still on, that just might be a bridge too far, even for Vonn. She doesn’t shy away from honesty about how lonely and hard the last two months have been.

Suffice it to say, this is not the post-Olympic life Vonn envisioned for herself in late January, when she had become once again, at 41, the world’s best speed skier. She was on top of the downhill standings and a favorite to win multiple medals at the Winter Games in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.

Then came the crash in Crans-Montana, Switzerlandnine days before the Olympic downhill, a moment when plenty of other athletes would have wrapped themselves in bubble wrap. Vonn, who tore her anterior cruciate ligament, was racing for an edge, like she always has.

Her team thought the season was over. She told them it wasn’t and prepared to race in the Olympics. After the final training run, her coach, the former downhill champion Aksel Lund Svindal, a skeptic after the Crans-Montana crash and the ACL tear, was a skeptic no more.

And then, 13 seconds into her downhill runracing for gold, she slipped a few centimeters too far to the right at the fourth gate and hooked her arm. She learned the hard way that it wasn’t one of the breakaway gates that racers smack into and come away largely unscathed most weeks on the World Cup circuit.

“It’s a discussion that will be had,” she said.

In a cut up second, Vonn was tumbling down the ice in a cloud of snow mud, hoping to outlive a crash that almost turned catastrophic. She shattered her left tibia and fibula and her proper ankle. After her preliminary trauma surgical procedure, her decrease left leg was swelled with fluids. Dr. Tom Hackett, the head doctor for US Ski and Snowboard, who’s all too aware of Vonn’s anatomy from earlier operations, principally needed to fillet her decrease leg to let fluids stream out so correct blood circulation might summarize. Had it not, Vonn risked everlasting nerve injury and different issues, akin to necrosis and an infection that might have rendered the leg principally ineffective.

Then got here days of mendacity nonetheless in the intensive care unit. A tool known as an exterior fixator, with pins piercing by her pores and skin and deteriorating muscle groups, stabilized the bones. Her crew got here to the hospital. They needed to cry collectively.

Per week and a half after the crash, she flew to Vail, Colo., to the Steadman Clinic, the place Hackett used a toolbox stuffed with screws and pins and plates and an enormous rod to place her leg again collectively once more.

And then, lastly, one other long, gradual rehabilitation course of might start.

“Normally, when you have an ACL or something like that, you start off slowly, but then you eventually, after about a week or two, make pretty good progress,” Vonn stated.

This isn’t a traditional rehabilitation, although, not with damaged bones in each legs, and the injury that the exterior fixator had accomplished in service to avoid wasting the leg.

The pins that stabilized the bone had brought about scar tissue to construct up. Just bending her leg was tough. Also, Hackett needed to minimize by a lot muscle throughout the final surgical procedure that every part was stretched out and discombobulated.

And her ankle on her different leg was damaged. And she nonetheless had a torn ACL.

“All these things, it took time,” she lamented. “There were so many layers to it. That made it challenging. And then of course, when you have such slow progress, that inevitably becomes more mentally challenging as well.”

She’s already been posting loads of movies of her rehabbing periods in the gymnasium. You do not want wholesome legs to do pull-ups. You simply want to have the ability to seize maintain of the bar.

Lindsey Vonn celebrates her win on the downhill in Zauchensee, Austria, in January. She had two victories on the World Cup tour this season. (Barbara Gindl/APA/AFP by way of Getty Images)

Still, she solely moved absolutely out of her wheelchair at the begin of this week. She’s nonetheless on crutches. She has a walker. Her objective is to have the ability to ditch the crutches by the finish of the month. She’s nonetheless solely allowed to place about 30 p.c of her weight on her leg.

Maybe she’s going to be capable of play some tennis this summer season. She will probably must put on a brace. She would not have an ACL in her left knee.

“I feel like I’m so far away from that right now that I’m not thinking that far ahead, but even if I can just do squats in the gym or, you know, go road biking, I’ll be happy,” she stated.

She’s inching towards getting her life again and doing the public-facing stuff that had turn into such an enormous a part of her existence. In the previous two weeks, she’s been on the cowl of Vanity Fair and had the “Today” present’s Craig Melvin out to her home in Utah for an interview. She’s flown to Los Angeles — in itself, one other signal of her recovery — on at the present time to do interviews along side a marketing campaign for a biopharmaceutical firm, Invivyd, again to her different life as a spokesperson.

She tells the story of doing every part she might to keep away from getting sick earlier than the Olympics. She remoted herself when teammates acquired sick. She stayed away from buffets. She wore a masks at instances.

She stayed. And then she crashed. Does she remorse not ensuring to ski a number of centimeters to the left?

“That would have been a more conservative line, and it wasn’t my plan,” she stated.

You have by no means been.

Plus, her teammate Breezy Johnson had put up a stellar run and was sitting in the chief’s chair at the backside of the mountain. Vonn needed the gold medal. She all the time does. There was just one factor to do—go get it.

She’d been on this identical place 16 years earlier than in Vancouver. Julia Mancuso skied a killer run ahead of her. She knew she must ski “on the limit” to beat her. She knew the place she might make up a number of treasured hundredths of a second. She did.

Now she was at the prime of Cortina and thought she had found out the place she could possibly be sooner than Johnson.

“That’s why I had an aggressive approach,” she stated. “That’s what I came there to do. I came there to win, regardless of who was sitting at the bottom or who was behind me in the starting gate. I was there, and I had all the intentions of putting everything on the line, and that’s what it takes to win the Olympics. It’s worked for me before, but unfortunately, it didn’t work for me this time.”

So what does she do now? Whether she races once more is a foolish query at this level. She’s simply studying to stroll. If all goes properly, she could have one other operation in September to take away a few of the metallic in her left leg. Then she and her docs have to determine the finest strategy to restore her ACL. And then she has to rehabilitate that harm.

She would not see herself as a full-time coach, the approach Svindal, her previous pal on the circuit, was for her final yr. That was a particular circumstance that simply form of happened for each of them.

But she lives in Park City, Utah, the dwelling of US snowboarding and so many prime skiers. Go to a World Cup race and begin asking random racers if they’ve a narrative about Vonn serving to them indirectly. Everyone appears to do. Some of them have moved into her home throughout powerful instances.

So a lot of downhill racing is about information. She needs to cross her alongside.

Sofia Goggia, the Italian star who gained bronze in the Olympic downhill, known as her the night time earlier than the downhill in Beijing in 2022. Goggia took the silver medal there.

“What I’m most excited about is to mentor,” Vonn stated. “I’m always willing and wanting to be someone that if you need me, I’m there.”

Vonn crashed in Cortina. She might have misplaced her leg. She is not going anyplace.