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There’s no denying the nervous apprehension that rippled through the ski racing world after Lindsey Vonn announced her shock comeback in November. She’d walked away nearly six years earlier due to a battered right knee worn down by a string of gruesome crashes and multiple surgeries, no longer able to endure the punishing demands of the circuit. Now she was proposing a return on the wrong side of 40 with a knee made of titanium to a high-risk sport where no woman has ever won any top-flight race past 34 years old.
But a funny thing happened on the way to Vonn’s humiliation. In the two months since her unretirement, she’s finished 14th in a super-G at St Moritz, before improving to sixth and fourth in her next two races at St Anton. Incredibly, she says she feels healthier now than when she called time on her extraordinary career in early 2019. And after only three races, Vonn’s chances of competing in a fifth Olympics next year at Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo seem more than plausible. From the NBC point of view, it’s a possibility that could be described in industry jargon as manna from heaven.
Vonn’s improbable revival continues this weekend at Cortina, where she will contest both the downhill and super-G on the Olimpia delle Tofane course where next year’s Winter Games will be staged – and a venue that’s been indelibly linked with her ocean-deep lore. It’s where she earned the first of her 137 World Cup podiums as a teenager back in 2004 before winning there a record 12 times from 2008 to 2018, more than any other ski racer in history. It’s also where in 2015 she broke Annemarie Moser-Pröll’s 35-year-old record of 62 World Cup wins across all disciplines.
“I am not holding on to the past, I am embracing the future,” Vonn wrote ahead of her first comeback race in December. “Call me naive, but I believe in the impossible. Because it’s only impossible until someone does it.”
If ever there were an athlete whose journey was less wanting for a coda, it might be Vonn. The winner of three Olympic medals and 82 World Cup races, the American superstar from the gentle slopes of Minnesota seemingly squeezed every drop from her potential after soldiering through so much pain over the back end of her career. After watching her win a bronze in the downhill at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games to become the oldest female alpine skier to win a medal in Olympic history, Vonn’s sister told me near the finishing corral: “Every single meal she’s eaten in the last two years is to build up to this moment. Every single gym workout. You don’t realize the amount of every single thing she’s done every day for the last eight years has been for this day and that two minutes. The emotion of it is kind of overwhelming.”
No one would have thought twice if Vonn had rode off into the South Korean sunset that afternoon, but she pushed through another World Cup season, leaving no crumbs with another downhill medal at the world championships in Åre. She went out on her own terms and with no regrets, in her words, retiring as the most decorated female skier in history and the global face of the sport. She kept active during her years away, dabbling in windsurfing, polo and motorsport while keeping up her rigorous fitness regime despite chronic pain. “I was at peace with being finished,” she said last month. “But of course I missed going fast.”
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But everything changed last April when Vonn underwent a partial right knee replacement, where part of her bone was replaced with titanium components. The groundbreaking surgery, performed by orthopedist Martin Roche, not only alleviated the persistent discomfort she’d resigned herself to living with, but also restored her self-belief. Suddenly pain-free when playing tennis and other sports, Vonn asked herself what skiing would feel like.
“It has changed my life entirely,” Vonn said. “I really thought that when I retired, giving my body a break would take away a lot of the pain and it didn’t. And I tried to have surgeries and to clean it up but my knee was just too far gone. I knew that there were some technological advances in the medical field that potentially could help me, but I never imagined that I’d come out of surgery and within a few days have a completely different life.
“I literally don’t think about the knee at all. Which is crazy, because that’s all I’ve thought about for the last 11 years.”
Her US teammates, including a few she’d first met at autograph signings when they were children, weren’t sure if she was serious when she began training with them in November, but it didn’t take long for her fighting spirit to shine through. As she’s pushed herself to new limits, Vonn has also became a mentor to the younger American skiers, offering guidance, encouragement and tactical counsel that only someone with her experience could provide.
The 40-year-old from St Paul has re-entered the World Cup circuit under a new wild-card rule that enables former champions to get decent starting numbers for races if they come out of retirement without having to build up ranking points in lower-level competitions. But it also means she’s leaving the gate long after the top-ranked skiers, leaving her with a bumpier and more challenging course. That stands to change if she keeps stacking results like these.
Vonn is bidding to join a growing class of professional athletes who have challenged conventional notions of longevity and resilience by competing into their 40s, a roll that includes NFL quarterback Tom Brady, seven-time F1 champion Lewis Hamilton and 23-time major singles champion Serena Willams. It’s early days, but even her first two months back serve as a testament to both the advancements in medical technology and the indomitable spirit of an athlete unwilling to let age or injury define her limits.
“Tom, Lewis, Serena. They’ve all done it,” Vonn said this week. “The resources that athletes have now allow for a better recovery. So even though you’re older, you’re still recovering faster than I was when I was in my 20s. … It’s changed the perception of how long an athlete can compete for. I think it’s mainly a mindset shift, but it’s possible.”
