Olympic gold medalist skier Lindsey Vonn recently spoke extensively about her Milano-Cortina crash that left her with a devastating injury. She highlighted how brutally painful the entire ordeal was, which left her helpless and skeptical of her future.
During the 2026 Winter Olympics, Vonn came in for her flagship downhill event, and at the beginning of the race, she met with a severe crash that injured her leg, which later led to a diagnosis of a tibia fracture. She got airlifted to a local hospital, which started a spree of surgeries that confined her to a hospital bed for weeks.
Speaking to ESPN, Vonn unveiled for the very first time the toll the injury on her leg had on her entire body and how she remained in a constant state of agony, leading to 12 hours of frenzied screaming.
“This injury was so much harder on so many different levels, I can’t quite put into words, I mean just the crash itself, the amount of pain, when you crash normally and you tear your ACL, you have pain, but it’s not that severe and it’s not for that long, and I had 12 hours of screaming on top of my lungs, I was sweating and my body was screaming i pain,” she said.
She went on to say how this experience has given her a perspective beyond sports and made her optimistic about how to handle setbacks going ahead. She has made a point to keep going despite the negativity.
Lindsey Vonn Speaks about Dealing with Negative Reactions
After the winter Olympics crash, Lindsey Vonn’s battle went beyond her ruptured leg and took the shape of social media bashing. For several weeks, Vonn kept responding with defiance to comments that demeaned her and raised questions about her credibility as an athlete, attributing it to the crash.
She spoke about how helpless she felt, not being able to directly prove her critics wrong, and spoke about how little the naysayers know about the details of sports or what an athlete actually goes through.
“Everyone had their opinion on that crash, and the people that have no understanding of my sport and what it takes to succeed or how easily it is to have a major crash and they were commenting so strongly as if they knew exactly what it was when they had no idea, and it was frustrating because I felt helpless in the hospital as I had to voice to correct them,” she said.
Vonn went on to highlight how she wants her critics to understand that the crash was an isolated incident and not a statement on her career, and that she would do the whole thing all over again if she had to.
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