Lindsey Vonn crashes in Olympics downhill, taken away by helicopter

MILAN — Maybe it was the curse of 13 or just of the rules of a game where in the end the mountain always wins.

Or maybe it was a reminder of the cold hard reality of the Olympic Games, that as much as they can deliver emotional gold they can just as easily break your heart.

Lindsey Vonn, 41, the No. 1 downhill racer in the world now and forever, 16 years after she became the first American woman to win an Olympic downhill, seven years after injuries drove her into retirement, nearly two years since undergoing partial knee replacement surgery, 10 days after rupturing her ACL, stood at the starting gate the 13th starter on a postcard Sunday morning in the Italian Dolomites atop a mountain she had won on more than any other skier, 90 seconds from completing the greatest comeback in Olympic history.

Vonn started as she always has, hell bent, pedal to the metal, always pushing the edge of the envelope, damn her critics, damn her compromised knee. Then just 13 seconds — 13 — into the Milano Cortina Olympic Games downhill final down the Olympia delle Tofane course, she clipped a gate first with her shoulder and then with her pole, launching her airborne spinning until she crashed sideways then bounced down the mountain, fracturing her left leg.

Vonn cried out in agony, clutching her leg, and later could be heard sobbing while she waited to be airlifted off the mountain by helicopter. It was not the end to history’s greatest downhill career she or her legion of fans wanted but Vonn went out on her own terms.

“It doesn’t change anything about her legacy,” said Jackie Wiles, Vonn’s U.S. teammate, who finished fourth. “She’s a fighter, and that’s the way that she’s going to go out and ski every time.”

While Vonn was undergoing surgery to stabilize her fractured leg, another American, Breezy Johnson, who had known as much heartache on Cortina d’Ampezzo’s Olympia delle Tofane course as Vonn had joy, stood atop the Olympic medal podium, the gold medal around her neck.

Johnson, 30, edged Germany’s Emma Aicher by four-hundredths of a second to become the second American woman to win the Olympic downhill gold medal.

“I had a good feeling about today. I sort of still can’t believe it yet, so I don’t know when it’ll sink in,” Johnson said. “I knew I had to push. I knew I had to go harder than I did in training. I had to be super clean, and I felt like I did that. I got a little bit squirrely off of some of the jumps, but I tried to just keep it rolling and I knew the speeds were good. I just hoped it would be enough.”

Four years ago, just days from the Olympic Games in Beijing, Johnson tearing down the Olympia delle Tofane course hit a jump too hot, lost control airborne and then tore up her right knee when she finally crashed.

After returning to the sport, Johnson was slapped with a 14-month ban by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for missing three drug tests in a 12-month period a so-called whereabouts failure violating USADA and the World Anti-Doping rules.

The 14-month ban expired in December 2024 allowing Johnson to win the 2025 World downhill title a few months later.

While Johnson’s margin of victory was the narrowest in an Olympic downhill in a dozen years, Sunday will forever be best remembered for Vonn’s career-ending crash.

“I hope it’s not as bad as it looked,” Johnson said of Vonn’s crash. “I know how difficult it is to ski this course and how sometimes because you love this course so much, when you crash on it and it hurts you like that, it hurts that much worse. My heart just goes out to her.”

Vonn was initially taken to Cortina’s Codivilla Putti Hospital for immediate treatment then later airlifted to Ca’ Foncello Hospital in Treviso, where she underwent surgery

“In the afternoon, she underwent orthopedic surgery to stabilize the fracture sustained in her left leg,” the hospital said in a statement. U.S. Ski and Snowboard later released a statement saying that Vonn was in “stable condition and in good hands with a team of American and Italian physicians.”

Injuries prevented Vonn from defending her Olympic downhill title at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi and appeared to drive her out of the sport in 2019. But she shocked skiing when she returned to competition in 2025 after undergoing partial knee replacement surgery on her right knee in April 2024. The procedure kept the ACL, the medial meniscus, and cartilage on the knee’s inner part intact.

But her comeback prompted deeply personal and vicious criticism from some of the sport’s all-time greats, which has ranged from suggesting she is starved for attention to that she is mentally unstable. Michaela Dorfmeister, the two-time Olympic champion, went so far as to ask if Vonn had a death wish?

Pirmin Zurbriggen, a four-time World Cup overall champion, said, “I have the feeling that Vonn hasn’t recognized the meaning and purpose of her other life in recent years. She has probably suffered from no longer being a celebrated champion.”

Austria’s Franz Klammer, the 1976 Olympic downhill gold medalist and winner of 25 World Cup downhills, said, “She’s gone completely mad.”

Dorfmeister, who swept the 2006 Olympic downhill and Super G titles, said in an interview with Austrian TV that Vonn “should see a psychologist,” and then went even further asking, “Does she want to kill herself?”

Asked by reporters last spring what she thought has prompted such a personal level of criticism, Vonn responded, “I have no f------ idea.”

“I don’t think it’s crazy,” she continued. “I mean, it is crazy, but it also, I don’t think I really deserved the disrespectful comments to the degree that they were given. I of course expected criticism in that, you know, is my knee safe? That’s a valid question. But there were a lot of questions that had to do with me as a person and my psychological state and what my life is outside of skiing and that was completely inappropriate and disrespectful, and I didn’t deserve it but no one asked Marcel if his life is fulfilled outside of ski racing. Or if he needed to see a psychologist.

“That was only directed at me and that’s pretty f----- up, to be frank.”