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 a 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 starts, 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.
