For the first time since her horrifying crash at the 2026 Olympics, the American skiing legend speaks at length about what really happened at Milano Cortina, the five surgeries and paparazzi frenzies that followed, and whether this is really, truly the end.
Then she wakes up. To a reality where she did not. Instead, she crashed 13 seconds into the race and shattered her tibia, fibula, and ankle in the process—injuries so severe that she spent weeks in the hospital and almost lost her left leg.
“I was number one in the world, and potentially on my way to an Olympic medal,” Vonn tells me. “Now I’m in a wheelchair.” She’s lying on her couch in Park City, Utah, wearing an Under Armour sweatshirt, compression socks, and several bandages. She’s not wearing any makeup except for eyelash extensions, a lingering beauty hallmark of a high-profile woman who needs to be camera-ready at all times. She both does and doesn’t know how it happened. Physically, she felt good, despite tearing the ACL in her left knee nine days prior during a World Cup race at Crans-Montana in the Swiss Alps. Mentally, she felt great: “I was in the exact mental state that I wanted to be in. I was ready to go,” she says. In fact, she had a whole strategy planned out: On that early section of the course, there was a small lip before a gate. Usually, turning over it, you’re pushed to the left. “It’s called the drift,” Vonn says. Except she went over the lip too fast and pressured her outside ski too hard. The drift didn’t happen. Instead, she stayed straight and her arm caught on the gate’s poles. While many gates have breakaway flags—which would have allowed Vonn’s arm to punch through the gate—this one didn’t. “It was a very, very small error. We’re talking about a few centimeters,” says her coach, Aksel Lund Svindal. “She paid a high price.” Vonn crashed. Catastrophically crashed. Her skis failed to pop off. They twisted and warped her body like a corkscrew as she hurtled down the hill. When she finally skidded to a halt, the world heard her screams. They pierced the air with such force that they were picked up by the NBC broadcast. “My leg was broken. My skis were still on. My leg was torqued, and I couldn’t get my skis off. I couldn’t move, and I was yelling for help,” Vonn remembers. Then, softly: “I just needed someone to take my skis off.” A helicopter airlifted her off the course as the world watched. It brought her to a tent on the side of the race course where Tom Hackett, the head physician for Team USA Ski and Snowboard, waited wearing a Gor-Tex bib. The scene was a chaotic triage. Medical staff tried to wrangle Vonn out of her helmet, goggles, suit, and ski boots. She screamed out in distress. Fans swarmed the tent in an act of Olympic-level rubbernecking. “It was just an awful situation,” says Hackett. He splinted her leg and got her back into the helicopter to fly to the official Olympic clinic in Cortina. When they arrived, Hackett had to be both doctor and security guard. “Paparazzi were bum-rushing the place, saying that they were friends and part of her PR team,” he says. At the clinic, they gave Vonn painkillers and put her into a CT scan. The medicine didn’t last long. “Halfway through, I started sweating. I was just in such extreme pain. I screamed at the top of my lungs: Get me out. It just wouldn’t dissipate. It wouldn’t let up. It’s seared into my brain,” Vonn says, looking down at the floor. The CT scan revealed that Vonn had a severe fracture in her left leg that required surgical stabilization. After a few calls, Hackett made the decision to transfer her to a hospital in Treviso, Italy. They arrived via helicopter 40 minutes later, but they had trouble landing. Paparazzi had swarmed the helipad. “It had somehow leaked that that’s where we were going,” Hackett says. “Which was extraordinary. I didn’t tell anybody.” The hospital quickly mobilized a team of 20 doctors and nurses to scrub in. The first surgery went great, Hackett says. Afterward, they moved Vonn into a room in the ICU. Hours went by. Vonn fell asleep. It was a Sunday night. Most of that team of doctors and nurses went home. But then Vonn woke up. She started screaming again, even more bloodcurdling than before. Her leg had begun to swell and wouldn’t stop. Hackett measured every few minutes. “It’s getting worse, and she’s not responding to monster amounts of fentanyl, morphine, oxycodone, like every narcotic you can imagine,” he says. He knew what this was: full-blown compartment syndrome, a dangerous condition where pressure mounts in the leg, restricting blood flow and causing widespread nerve damage. “I’m sure you’ve seen hot dogs or brats on a grill. They get more and more swollen. Then all of a sudden, they burst. They crack. That’s basically what happens with compartment syndrome,” Hackett tells me. “There was a very significant chance that she was going to lose all function of her leg, if not the leg itself. Best-case scenario in those situations is, you might keep your leg, but it’s going to be useless.” Frantically, Hackett began to dial the numbers of the Italian doctors he met just hours before, trying to communicate in the little Italian he knows: “Shit. We got to get an OR team in.” Usually, at this time of the year, this place would be covered in snow, but Utah is experiencing its warmest winter on record. Instead of looking out onto a blanket of white across Vonn’s property, it’s just dirt as far as the eye can see. A congenial house manager lets me in. She politely informs me that Vonn is finishing up some physical therapy. While we wait, would I like a tour? Vonn’s one-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Chance, pitter-patters alongside us as she takes me around: to Vonn’s living room, with its floor-to-ceiling windows showcasing the rugged, muddy landscape. To her kitchen, where there’s a feathered pink mask that was given to Vonn by her close friend Mariska Hargitay as a gag gift. Finally, we get to her trophy case, which sits on the second floor of the modern mountain house. Although “case” doesn’t really do it justice. It’s more like the library shelves at Alexandria, stretching almost the entire wall and requiring a built-in ladder to reach its top levels. Most are filled with Crystal Globes, the name for World Cup trophies. But mixed in among the professional accolades are deeply personal prizes, many of which she won as a young child growing up in Minnesota: a fifth-place slalom trophy at Afton Alps in 1992, which Vonn earned as a seven-year-old. An orange blimp—a Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Award—for favorite female athlete. At the very center of it all is her 2010 gold medal from the Vancouver Olympic Games, where she was the first American woman in history to win downhill. But a small glass object sits in front of it, no taller than four inches. I peer closer: “Buck Hill Ski Racing Club. Most Improved. 1994,” reads the engraving. The 16-run Buck Hill in Burnsville, Minnesota, is the first slope Vonn ever skied. A few minutes later, I’m back in her living room. Vonn rolls in in her wheelchair. It has a backpack attached to it. Inside is a cheesy Western romance—Wild Eyes by Elsie Silver—that she reads to kill time during her daily hyperbaric chamber sessions. “It’s an easy read,” she says, laughing. “Let’s just be clear about that.” We don’t laugh much during our conversation. She’s finally off the painkillers, which has made her feel a lot better. But she’s still exhausted. She spends nearly all of her time in rehab. Her physical therapist comes around 9 a.m. every day to work with her for two hours. At 1 p.m. she drives 30 minutes to a hyperbaric chamber, which she sits in for two hours. Then she drives 30 minutes back to her house for the gym. On her Instagram, she recently posted a video of herself doing Russian twists with a weighted ball. Because Lindsey Vonn is not like us. No normal person would do Russian twists with a shattered left leg, a broken right ankle, and a torn left ACL. And no normal person—or even most professional athletes—would attempt to mount a professional comeback at age 41. In February 2019, Vonn retired from skiing at age 33, riddled with chronic injuries. She thought her right knee had sustained irreversible damage. She felt at peace doing so. At the time, she had the most World Cup wins of any female skier in history. She has three Olympic medals, one gold and two bronze. She had lucrative brand partnerships. She had a legacy as one of the best speed skiers the world had ever seen. There was a soft California king bed of laurels for her to rest on. “When I retired at 33, everyone was like, ‘Holy shit, you are so old,’” she says. So she made a new life for herself. She got into tennis. She really got into business: She made early-stage investments into Beyond Meat, Just Egg, and Oura . She became a co-owner of women’s soccer team Angel City FC. She founded her own production company, Après Productions, which co-produced a documentary on Picabo Street. Vonn calls her postretirement life “amazing.” But it wasn’t skiing. “I think that’s probably my downfall,” she admits. “I like to challenge myself. And there’s no way that I’ll ever be challenged even remotely close in my life as I have been in skiing. That’ll always be my personal challenge: How do I find joy in regular things?” Because there was one other thing she did in retirement: She got a cutting-edge Mako partial knee replacement by acclaimed surgeon Martin Roche. After it healed, she got back onto the slopes, just for leisure. But that’s when she realized something: The knee that’d ended her career no longer hurt. At all. “I had gotten so used to not racing,” she says. “But then the switch flipped back on: ‘Oooh, I miss this.’” They put her under anesthesia as Hackett performed a fasciotomy: limb-saving surgery that cuts into the connective tissue surrounding muscles to relieve dangerously high pressure. She awoke in the ICU with suction pumps attached to her legs, sucking out all the excess blood. A third surgery followed to close some incisions from the second, but not everything could be sewn up. So a few days later, she went back in for her fourth. “It was all about trying to save her skin and muscles, basically,” Hackett says. Vonn is so grateful for her doctors and nurses in Treviso, but she’s still haunted by her stay. It was one thing to be in the most constant, excruciating pain, even under an extreme amount of medication. Then add in the realities of being in an ICU: Nurses woke her up every three hours, speaking a language she couldn’t understand. She shared a room with other patients, with only a thin curtain dividing them as she experienced the near-amputation of her leg. The lights stayed on until 11 p.m., and the exit sign stayed on all night. “It took everything I had for it to not drive me insane,” she says. After the fourth surgery closed up Vonn’s leg, Hackett cleared her to fly back to Vail, Colorado, on a transatlantic medevac. “I couldn’t move out of my bed, let alone somehow manage to get on airplane,” she says. “I still had a catheter.” On February 20, Hackett performed a six-hour surgery at the acclaimed Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colorado, to actually fix the fracture: “The definitive, big-dog surgery,” as he calls it. Finally, on March 1, almost a month after her crash in Cortina, she returned home to Park City. Letters poured in from David Beckham, Jannik Sinner, Tom Brady, and even Prince William. But the one that carried the most meaning was from Diane Sawyer: “You can’t have courage and comfort at the same time.” It made global headlines. By returning, Vonn joined a small cadre of professional athletes—Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Tom Brady—who’ve attempted to compete at an elite level in their 40s. “Everyone thought I was crazy,” she says. For a while, it looked like she was. Her first few races were unremarkable. But then she started winning. In December 2025, she won the downhill race at St. Moritz and became the oldest skier in history, male or female, to do so. A month later, she won again at Altenmarkt-Zauchensee, Austria. “She was in the fight to win every single race she did this winter,” says Svindal. By late January 2026, she was first in the downhill standings and had qualified for the Olympic Games. She wanted to do it in her 40s on the biggest stage. “I wanted to win the Olympics, and I wanted to win the downhill title, and I was on track to do both of those things.” Then Crans-Montana happened. Halfway down the slope, she crashed into a fence at 70 miles per hour and tore her ACL. Most people thought she’d be done, that she’d throw in the Olympic towel. Cortina was a mere nine days away. But Vonn refused to withdraw, even as critics on social media demanded she let another American replace her on the team—one who might have a better chance. This confused Vonn. She believed she was the best chance. “Everyone said it was reckless and I was taking a spot from somebody else and all this nonsense,” she says. “I’m not crazy. I know what I can do and what I can’t do.” Her physical therapist, Lindsay Winninger, thinks the criticism came from a general lack of understanding about elite athletes’ bodies and how they handle injury. “Lindsey is in peak physical condition. She in top shape going into those Olympic Games. When you tear your ACL, it isn’t like you lose all of your strength, power, and cardio just overnight.” Then there’s the realities of downhill: It’s not a sport like basketball, where you’re constantly pivoting and jumping. She just needed to do a handful of clean turns. Both Vonn and her coach tell me that the injury had nothing to do with her Olympic crash, despite the online speculation. The thing that bothers her most, though, isn’t what people say about her online, or the pain that she’s in, or the long recovery she faces, where the fate of her body is still unclear. It’s what people are going to remember. “I don’t want people to hang on this crash and be remembered for that,” Vonn says. “What I did before the Olympics has never been done before. I was number one in the standings. No one remembers that I was winning.” Vonn has found it difficult to think about giving up her calling, a phenomenon familiar to most great athletes who all must give up their craft one day. “It’s the feeling that no one cares,” she says. “That the world keeps turning whether you’re there or not.” I have to ask: Is she thinking about returning to skiing…again? She pauses. “I don’t like to close the door on anything, because you just never know what’s going to happen,” she says. “I have no idea what my life will be like in two years or three years or four years. I could have two kids by then. I could have no kids and want to race again. I could live in Europe. I could be doing anything.” But there’s hope, then there’s reality. “It’s hard to tell with this injury. It’s so fucked up. I really feel like that was a horrible last run to end my career on.” She trails off: “I only made it 13 seconds. But they were a really good 13 seconds.” Fashion editor, Deborah Afshani; hair products by Sutra Beauty; makeup products by YSL Beauty; hair, Laura Polko; makeup, Karan Mitchell; tailor, Daxton Price; set design, Melissa Mae. Produced on location by 5Towns. For details, go to VF.com/credits.
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