Lindsey Vonn wins World Cup downhill at 41, making history

When Lindsey Vonn said she felt good this week, she wasn’t kidding.

The former Vail resident and world’s best female downhill racer laid down a smoking time on Friday in the St. Moritz World Cup downhill, beating out the rest of the field in Switzerland by nearly a second.

“I just called my dad, he was crying so hard, I’ve never heard him so emotional in my whole life — it made me cry too,” Vonn told FIS after becoming the oldest winner, male or female, in World Cup history. “The win means so much to me. I knew in the summer I was on the right path, and all the hard work has paid off.”

Vonn was the only racer to crack 1 minute, 30 seconds, completing the 705-meter course in a time of 1:29.63. She was 16th on course and roared ahead to a stunning finish after an average start. Magdalena Egger, of Austria, finished in 1:30.61 to claim second. While Egger was .98 seconds behind Vonn, the next 12 racers were all within a second of each other, showcasing how dominant a performance it was from the 41-year-old. Mirjam Puchner, also of Austria, rounded out the podium in third and was 1.16 seconds behind Vonn, who separated herself in the middle section of the Corviglia slope.

The U.S. Ski Team put five athletes into the top 20. Defending downhill world champion Breezy Johnson — who was picked instead of Vonn to join Mikaela Shiffrin in the team combined event last February in Saalbach — finished 15th, 2.02 seconds off the win. Teammate Isabella Wright was one-hundredth of a second back in 16th while Jacqueline Wiles and Haley Cutler placed in 18th and 20th, respectively. Keely Cashman and Allison Mollin also scored World Cup points, finishing 24th and 27th.

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“I felt pretty good confident going into this race,” Cashman said. “The training we got here before was amazing. The snow is amazing, it’s sunny out, it felt really good. … Everybody loves the days when everyone does well and we’ve obviously had the best pace there is training with Lindsey and she’s absolutely crushing it.”

Vonn was 0.61 back after the first two time checks but posted the fastest times of the field in the final three sectors.

“I was thinking OK, well, I just need to ski the pitch really clean and carry my speed down,” she said. “I still didn’t ski the best that I could have on the compression on the bottom, but I tried to be dynamic, clean, like I’ve been in training, and it was pretty solid.”

Vonn, in a press conference on Wednesday, said she felt good heading into the St. Moritz World Cup, which was the first downhill of the season. She put on 12 pounds of muscle during the offseason and enlisted the help of coach Aksel Lund Svindal, the Norwegian downhill star, who said he believed she could come back in her 40s to dominate the field just as she had 10 years earlier.

“Aksel said it the other day in the press conference, people think I’m a really good glider, but I’m actually a better turner,” Vonn said. “I started off as a slalom skier. And I try to be clean and generate power. That’s where I’m skiing well now — in the turns.”

“Systematically, every single thing I could do to be faster, I did. I knew I was skiing fast, but you never know until the first race, and it was a little faster than I expected,” Vonn said.

It was Vonn’s 44th downhill win, and the 83rd World Cup victory of her career. Her last win came in 2018, and in 2019, she announced she would be retiring after finishing third in the World Championships downhill.

But Vonn came out of retirement last season, stunning the ski racing world. She started her comeback with a string of middling performances before finding an old pair of boots that were collecting dust in her basement, she said. Those boots, along with the experience of getting back to racing after taking five years off, eventually led to a podium finish in her last race of the season, when she finished second in the super-G in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Vonn is currently third on the all-time wins list behind Ingemar Stenmark, who has 86 World Cup wins, and Mikaela Shiffrin, who has 104.

The St. Moritz World Cup continues on Saturday with another downhill, followed by a super-G on Sunday, weather permitting. After that, the World Cup women’s speed circuit will head to Val d’Isere, France, where a downhill is scheduled for Dec. 20 and a super-G is set for Dec. 21.

“I think I had a great run, but I also made some mistakes,” Vonn said. “So, I’m excited for tomorrow.”

Vail Daily sports reporter Ryan Sederquist contributed to this article.