Roughly one day after her highly anticipated Olympic comeback came to a heartbreaking end, alpine skiing legend Lindsey Vonn has opened up about the crash that changed everything.
"Yesterday my Olympic dream did not finish the way I dreamt it would,” Vonn, 41, wrote Monday, in her first Instagram post since the accident. “It wasn’t a story book ending or a fairy tail [sic], it was just life. I dared to dream and had worked so hard to achieve it. Because in Downhill ski racing the difference between a strategic line and a catastrophic injury can be as small as 5 inches.”
The one-time Gold and two-time Bronze medalist then explained that her fall, which stunned the crowd watching in Italy, was not a result of the ACL she had ruptured just days prior; rather, it was just a mistake on her part.
“I was simply 5 inches too tight on my line when my right arm hooked inside of the gate, twisting me and resulted in my crash,” she wrote. “My ACL and past injuries had nothing to do with my crash whatsoever.
“Unfortunately, I sustained a complex tibia fracture that is currently stable but will require multiple surgeries to fix properly.”
“Standing in the starting gate yesterday was an incredible feeling that I will never forget. Knowing I stood there having a chance to win was a victory in and of itself. I also knew that racing was a risk. It always was and always will be an incredibly dangerous sport.”
In a Monday phone interview with the Associated Press, Vonn’s father made clear that he would like his daughter to hang up the skis (as a competitor) for good.
“She's 41 years old and this is the end of her career,” he said. “There will be no more ski races for Lindsey Vonn, as long as I have anything to say about it.”
Vonn first retired in 2019, but announced in November 2024 that she was training to return to the sport competitively. And although she did make it as far as the Olympic starting gate (and impressively so), it is there that her comeback story will end.
“I hope if you take away anything from my journey it’s that you all have the courage to dare greatly,” Vonn ended her post on Monday. “Life is too short not to take chances on yourself. Because the only failure in life is not trying. I believe in you, just as you believed in me.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Lindsey Vonn Breaks Silence After Crash at Winter Olympics: ‘I Have No Regrets’.
