Lindsey Vonn leaned into the gate on Sunday, staring down at a Cortina downhill course that she knew by heart.
She took a deep breath and stomped her skis. In her right knee was a titanium implant where the 41-year-old joint had been partly rebuilt. On her left knee was a brace, holding it together despite a freshly torn ACL.
When she heard the beep to start, Vonn dug her pink ski poles into the snow and set off on a run that already ranked as one of the most audacious in Olympic history.
It would last all of 13 seconds.
Depending on whom you ask, Vonn’s appearance at the start line was either a defiant show of championship mentality from one of the greatest downhill skiers of all time—or a hopelessly ill-advised Hail Mary from an athlete who had suffered a devastating crash only nine days earlier.
“Ski racers, especially at Lindsey’s level,” former U.S. Ski team physician Kevin Stone said, “are not normal human beings.”
Before the season began, Vonn had promised not to take any unnecessary risks while she mounted her comeback—except once it came to the Olympics. At that point, she told former ski racer and NBC analyst Steve Porino, all bets would be off.
“‘I will leave nothing to chance,” he remembered her saying. “And it will be all-in.’”
If Vonn was racing more conservatively in recent months, it was impossible to tell. She soared to the top of the World Cup downhill standings and aimed to keep racking up points all the way to the Games. That’s why Vonn was even racing on Jan. 30 in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, when she careened off course and ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee.
For some athletes, the injury would have meant a year on the sidelines. But for Vonn, a three-time Olympic medalist who has built a career on risk-taking that bordered on recklessness, it was merely the start of a countdown to what she envisioned as her greatest moment.
“I’m not letting this slip through my fingers,” she said.
By Tuesday, the skier who had so recently been airlifted off a mountain, had two reasons to be encouraged. Her knee was neither swollen nor terribly sore. Although scans had confirmed the tear, Vonn knew that plenty of skiers had managed to compete in similar condition. More importantly, she had come too far to quit now. Vonn and her surgically repaired right knee had come out of retirement specifically for one last shot at Olympic glory in Cortina. She wasn’t about to let an injury to the left one slow her down.
“Everyone else was like…let’s just take this day by day,” said Aksel Lund Svindal, the Norwegian Olympic champion who has helped coach her during her comeback. “Including, let’s say, people with medical experience.”
Vonn insisted on showing the world that she would be ready in time for Sunday’s race. She posted a video of herself squatting with heavy weights and lunging on the knee, protected by a brace.
As the Games drew closer, Vonn seemed to grow more and more confident. On Friday, the morning of her first training run here, she posted a selfie on Instagram with the caption, “No one would have believed I would be here…but I made it.”
She completed two training runs in the space of 48 hours. In the second, she finished third out of 21 skiers—a clear signal that she wasn’t just trying to limp to the start line. Vonn was here for a medal. And she had reason to be optimistic: Cortina was her home away from home, the place where she had won an unprecedented 12 World Cup races. Even as doctors expressed their initial pessimism, Vonn plowed ahead.
“She was a lot more positive than those doctors were,” Svindal said.
Vonn was even more positive than Svindal, who found himself sweating every corner of her training runs. “If this works, it’s awesome,” he thought. “If something happens, it would be bad.”
The only person who refused to consider the possibility of anything bad happening was Vonn herself. On the day before the race, she even made time to go on social media to respond to a contributor’s column published in USA Today questioning her judgment to race on a torn ligament.
“Why am I taking risk ‘at my age’? This ageism stuff is getting really old,” she wrote on X. She also pointed him to the season’s downhill standings.
Finally, race day arrived and Vonn set out to prove her doubters wrong. Her American teammate Breezy Johnson had already produced the run of her life to set the time to beat. Vonn knew exactly what she needed to do.
In her star-spangled blue-and-white skinsuit she charged out of the start, tore past the first three gates then leaned hard for the most aggressive line into a sweeping right-hand corner. That’s when Vonn’s right arm snagged the gate, causing her to spin out and crash. Hours later, it would emerge that she had fractured her left leg and undergone surgery, according to the Associated Press.
The problem, as it turned out, wasn’t the injured knee. Replays show that it never buckled or gave out under her. But Vonn’s line into the corner was less than ideal—a fraction off the inch-perfect precision she needed if she was going to add to her 2010 Olympic downhill gold. Just as she promised, Vonn was going all in to win.
Through a strange quirk, the interruption caused by Vonn’s crash may have aided her teammate. Johnson’s strongest competition only returned to the course after standing still for 15 minutes.
But by then, Vonn was nowhere near the race. She had been airlifted off a mountain for the second time in two weeks. Only this time, Vonn’s Olympic dream had been left in the snow.
Write to Rachel Bachman at Rachel.Bachman@wsj.com