Lindsey Vonn undergoes surgery after Olympic downhill crash as father says it marks ‘end of her career’
(Olympic Broadcasting Services via AP
Lindsey Vonn is being treated at a hospital in Treviso following a crash in the Olympic downhill on Sunday. The 41-year-old, who was racing on a torn ACL in her left knee, said she “sustained a complex tibia fracture” that will “require multiple surgeries to fix properly” in an Instagram post late Monday afternoon.
“While yesterday did not end the way I had hoped, and despite the intense physical pain it caused, I have no regrets,” Vonn wrote in her post. “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.”
Vonn lost control in the opening traverse on the Olympia delle Tofane course after her right pole clipped the fourth gate. She twirled sideways down the slope before awkwardly landing on her back with her skis crossed. A mandatory safety air bag inflated under Vonn’s racing suit during the crash, supplier Dainese confirmed to the Associated Press. The air bag, which is triggered by a complicated algorithm when racers lose control, may have softened her fall.
“I was simply 5 inches too tight on my line when my right arm hooked inside of the gate,” Vonn stated. “My ACL and past injuries had nothing to do with my crash whatsoever.”
Vonn was surrounded by medical personnel immediately after her fall as a hush fell over the crowd at the base of the mountain. After getting strapped to a gurney and flown away by helicopter, Vonn initially arrived at a clinic in Cortina before later transferring to a larger hospital in Treviso, a two-hour drive to the south.
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Vonn was being “treated by a multidisciplinary team” and “underwent an orthopedic operation to stabilize a fracture reported in her left leg,” the Ca’ Foncello hospital told the AP in a statement on Sunday night. The U.S. Ski Team said Vonn was “in stable condition and in good hands with a team of American and Italian physicians,” according to the AP.
The AP reported that Vonn’s father, Alan Kildow, said he slept in his daughter’s hospital room overnight.
“She has somebody with her — or multiple people with her — at all times,” Kildow said in a phone interview with the AP. “We’ll have people here as long as she’s here.” Vonn’s family was seen on the NBC broadcast watching the race from the finish area.
“First, the shock and the horror of the whole thing, seeing a crash like that,” Kildow told the AP regarding what he felt watching the scene unfold. “It can be dramatic and traumatic. You’re just horrified at what those kinds of impacts have.”
Kildow said Vonn is being “very well cared for” in Italy. He also said his daughter’s crash “had nothing to do with the ACL issue on her left leg.”
“She had demonstrated that she was able to function at a very high level with the two downhill training runs. … And she had been cleared by high level physicians to ski,” he continued.
Vonn tore her ACL in the final World Cup downhill before the Olympics. After consulting with a team of physicians and trainers, she stated her steadfast determination to compete in a press conference prior to the training runs on Friday and Saturday. While some have questioned on social media whether or not she should have been allowed to race, members of the ski community have defended the three-time Olympic medalist’s decision.
“What is also important for people to understand, that the accident that she had yesterday, she was incredibly unlucky. It was a one in a 1,000,” FIS president Johan Eliasch told the AP on Monday. “She got too close to the gate, and she got stuck when she was in the air in the gate and started rotating. No one can recover from that, unless you do a 360. … This is something which is part of ski racing. It’s a dangerous sport.”
“People that don’t know ski racing don’t really understand what happened yesterday. She hooked her arm on the gate, which twisted her around. She was going probably 70 miles an hour, and so that twists your body around,” teammate Keely Cashman told the AP. “That has nothing to do with her ACL, nothing to with her knee. I think a lot of people are ridiculing that, and a lot people don’t (know) what’s going on.”
Fellow SSCV alumni Kyle Negomir, who placed 10th in the men’s downhill said ultimately the choice to compete is an individual one.
“Lindsey’s a grown woman, and the best speed skier to ever do this sport. If she made her decision, I think she should absolutely be allowed to take that risk,” Negomir told AP. “She’s obviously good enough that she’s capable of pulling it off. Just because it happened to not pan out yesterday doesn’t mean that it definitely wasn’t a possibility that she could just crush it and have a perfect run.”
Vonn went down on a reverse-banked uphill stretch right before the Tofana schuss, a narrow chute between two walls on the downhill course.
“That’s where your speed for the rest of the course gets determined and if you don’t take the right trajectory it makes a huge difference because you end up going uphill,” Kristian Ghedina, a Cortina native and former racer who grew up in a home just below the finish area, told the AP.
Vonn was leaning into the reverse bank when a slight bump bounced her into the air, causing her to clip the fourth gate.
“It’s super flat after it so the goal is to be as close to that gate as possible and she really nailed the turn but she was too close to it so she got hooked into it,” Norwegian skier Kajsa Vickhoff Lie told the AP regarding the specific gate which derailed Vonn’s hopes of capping her two-decade plus career with an Olympic cinderella story. “But that’s how it is with the Olympics, you really want to be on the limit and she was a little bit over the limit.”
“I watched the video, and probably like anybody else, saw that she went through that panel, that uphill double, and for sure kicked her in the air and there was a pretty significant fall after that,” head U.S. ski coach Paul Kristofic told the Associated Press.
Vonn has won a record 12 times in Cortina. The location of the 2026 Games was a key reason for her to make a comeback in the spring of 2024 after retiring almost six years prior. Organizers said the section where Vonn crashed was not particularly different than other years. Women’s race director Peter Gerdol told the AP there wasn’t extra attention given to controlling the size of the bump that sent Vonn airborne.
“Not severely,” Gerdol said. “Because actually today, all the athletes went through quite easily. Lindsey made a mistake and it happens. It can happen in any section of the course. It happened there but it could have been in another.”
If the Olympic crash marks the end of Vonn’s racing career, the former Vail resident and Ski and Snowboard Club Vail athlete will walk away with 84-career World Cup wins after adding two more in what was a remarkable — albeit tragically shortened — 2025-26 campaign. She finished on the podium in seven of the eight World Cup races she finished this year, finishing fourth in the other one. Vonn is also currently leading the downhill standings; if she were to end the season on top, she’d tie Mikaela Shiffrin for the most globes in a single discipline (9). Shiffrin surpassed Vonn’s World Cup win total in 2023 and now leads the all-time standings with 108-career victories.
“And there’s a hell of a lot of the difference between a speed race, a downhill especially, and a slalom,” said Kildow, who told the AP that Saturday’s race will be Vonn’s last one if he has any say in the matter.
“She’s 41 years old and this is the end of her career,” Kildow continued. “There will be no more ski races for Lindsey Vonn, as long as I have anything to say about it.”
“I hope if you take away anything from my journey,” Vonn stated, “It’s that you all have the courage to dare greatly.”
