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In December 2024, Breezy Johnson glided into the starting gate on the Stifel Birds of Prey downhill course atop Colorado’s Beaver Creek, a sight for sore eyes and a bundle of nerves. “The anxiety will always be there until I’m in the downhill gate,” the 30-year-old said at Team USA’s pre-Olympics media summit in October. “Like, at no point can [I tell myself], I’ve got this thing.”
Out of World Cup action for 14 months after whereabouts failures, she dropped on to Birds of Prey as bib No 32 in the 45-racer field – all women for the first time in the history of the legendary venue. With a few bends of her reconstructed knees, she snapped through the timing wand, charged through the Abyss (one of Birds of Prey’s steepest pitches) and kept carving her way through the 1.7-mile (2.7km) drop’s icy chop. Altogether, it was a solid run for Johnson, a 13th-place finish on home snow to restart her World Cup scoring streak. And just like that, America’s would-be standard bearer of the slopes was at it again.
Attention will be on Johnson again this weekend when she competes in the Olympic women’s downhill at the Milano Cortina Games. Since a 2020-21 breakout of four World Cup downhill podiums that rocketed her to second in the world rankings, the Wyoming-born, Idaho-raised Johnson – who legally changed her birth name, Breanna, to her nickname, Breezy – has been heralded a global threat, next in the succession line of scarily talented American skiers behind Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin.
Johnson’s top-14 finishes in her Pyeongchang Olympics debut in 2018, at the ripe age of 22, only seemed to underscore the threat. But like many in her chosen profession, she would fall victim to the unavoidable hazards of her daredevil sport and suffer further for her undimmable aggression. But until recently, it was her body paying the steepest price.
Three years into her World Cup career came a broken leg; within nine months, ligaments shredded in both knees, forcing Johnson to withdraw from the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing. “As athletes, we’re used to really good control over our bodies,” she said earlier this week in Italy. “We can do extreme athletic events, and then suddenly you can’t even, you know, turn a muscle on and walk.” The injuries were all pretext for her hardest hit yet – not to bone or tendon, but to her reputation.
World Cup skiers must file pre-determined locations and 60-minute windows daily for random drug testing. But Johnson left her testers hanging on three separate occasions (once in 2022 and twice in 2023), triggering an automatic World Anti-Doping Agency violation that the US Anti-Doping Agency upgraded to a 14-month ban. (Prior to that, she had never failed a drug test.) In a May 2024 Instagram post, Johnson apologized for disappointing her fans and called the missed tests “a human error,” added that she was “paying the consequences,” and vowed: “See you at Birds of Prey!”
Johnson has long been open about skiing’s psychological toll – self-doubt, perfectionism, fear of failure and the intense therapy addressing it all. She has talked about the inner voice that whispered during her long stretches off the slopes – “maybe you suck” – and the way fear rides the chairlift with her, always poised to pitch her into existential crisis.
Recalling her suspension, she told the Washington Post: “You feel like a criminal. It was very lonely.” But instead of letting the time away spiral her, she turned it into self-improvement fuel. Drawing on mental toughness forged through prior injury rehabs, she trained by herself and watched rivals sharpen their numbers from afar. “At the end of the day I want to win a gold medal,” she said in October when asked about the growing field of potential world-beaters. “I want to be the best out of everybody, not just in the US.”
As promised, she served that reminder at Birds of Prey, thrilling fans with a solid World Cup reentry. From there, Johnson kept the momentum going: first and third in super-G at the European Cup in Sarntal, Italy, podium bronze at a World Cup tune-up in Kvitfjell, Norway. Then, three months after Beaver Creek, she answered her biggest personal challenge yet at the 2025 world championships in Austria, pairing with longtime friend Shiffrin for the US’s first-ever team alpine victory and topping the women’s downhill podium for her first individual worlds gold. “I was psyched because I knew that I had skied my best,” she said afterward. “I’m just going to enjoy this because I’ve had a lot of moments that weren’t like this.”
The results cemented Johnson’s place on Team USA and as Shiffrin’s speed complement. And now with Vonn’s recent ACL injury adjusting American medal hopes (not that her box jump showcase wasn’t impressive), Johnson provides a bit of insurance, too – ironic given her own medical history. With everything to ski for in Cortina, Johnson is charging free again – this time with no headwind in sight. “At this point, I’m like, you know, your next Olympics is definitely not guaranteed,” she said this week. “You never know when the journey will end, and so you have to seize the opportunities that are in front of you.”
