Vonn’s much-anticipated try for downhill gold on the second day of the Games ended with a terrible crash and became a story of recovery. Mattia Ozbot / Getty Images

DOBBIACO, Italy — Go back. Find the video of that 13-second journey that Lindsey Vonn took from the starting hut to the fourth gate.

The American Alpine skiing star blasts out hot, going after the Olympic women’s downhill the only way she knows how — gold or bust. And then it all happens. The slightly off-track turn. The rise off the lip of the jump. The arm hooking the red gate. The brutal tumble down the ice, those skis with knife-sharp edges twirling as the snow cloud engulfs her. Then the slow, sad slide to a stop.

That’s the moment, two weeks before this closing ceremony Sunday, when everything changed — for Vonn, for Alpine skiing, in some ways for these Olympic Games.

And maybe, most importantly, for the countless people who had happily allowed the story of Vonn’s comeback in her early 40s, and this improbable attempt to win a gold medal with a tear in the most important ligament in her knee, to rent space in their brains. Over the previous year, and especially the past three months, as she tore apart competitors 10 and 20 years younger on a bionic knee, Vonn presented like a superhero on skis — an indestructible, unstoppable force.

And then there she was, helpless and screaming in the snow.

Everyone forms their own memory reels of the Olympics. Alysa Liu’s irrepressible exuberance on the ice will get a lot of play. Italians will always treasure those moments when their hero Federica Brignone captured one improbable gold medal and then another. Norway has Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, the cross-country GOAT, putting down the hammer on the field.

In four years, though, there will be over 100 new gold medalists and a slew of triumphal moments that may blend with these ones in crowded minds. But will anyone soon forget the sights and sounds of those 13 seconds?

When ski racers scream, hope pretty much dies. They know when something feels like it has gone very wrong.

At the bottom of the Olympia delle Tofane slope, in the grandstands about 2,000 feet below, there was nothing but a sickening silence after Vonn’s crash. No one could hear the screams down there. But very quickly, everyone heard about them, phones lighting up with messages and clips, and alerts on social media.

Nearly everyone was looking up at the slope, hoping against hope. Then, from behind, they heard the blades of the rescue helicopter chopping through the air and the quiet rumble of its engine. They knew what it meant. Helicopters rarely fly up ski mountains for anything less than terrible.

For 14 days, as the Milan Cortina Games wore on, Vonn remained, in a way, its most enduring star. Athletes won and lost medals every day, had their moment or two in the spotlight, and then moved along. Meanwhile, those paying even the slightest attention to Vonn’s comeback story remained riveted by every update she delivered.

She waited nearly 36 hours to post the first one, which popped just ahead of the prime-time Olympic telecast in the U.S. There were two medical details: She sustained a complex tibial fracture that would take multiple surgeries to fix.

The rest of the message told a story of love and loss, of a dream no less worthy because it didn’t come true.

“I dreamt. I tried. I jumped,” she wrote. She told everyone they ought to do the same. And for anyone who dared, she’d be right there with them.

“Life is too short not to take chances on yourself. Because the only failure in life is not trying. I believe in you, just as you believed in me.”

The beginning of Vonn’s stunning crash, just 13 seconds into the Olympic women’s downhill.Jacquelyn Martin / AP

Maybe she wrote the words herself. Maybe she had some help. It didn’t matter. The skiing career was likely over, but Wonder Woman was still there, climbing out from the rubble. On Instagram, where she has about 3.5 million followers, the post has received 1.4 million likes and more than 45,000 comments. Everyone from Novak Djokovic to Reese Witherspoon and Olivia Munn chimed in.

Nearly every other day after that, the updates kept coming. Each day, another vision of her competing at something that seemed so much bigger than hockey games and figure skating routines, and even the rest of the Alpine races.

At the Winter Games, only curling happens every day. But Vonn seemed to be happening every day, too.

Sometimes it seemed like she was losing. Two days after that first post, a second one spoke of a third surgery and a long road ahead. She shared a picture of her left leg braced with a contraption known as an “ex-fit” — short for an external fixator. The “ex-fit” is made up of a series of rods, pins and wires that stabilize a severely broken bone by going through the skin and keeping the bone in a proper healing position. It’s not pretty. It looks like a torture device.

On Valentine’s Day, six days after the crash, news of another surgery. This one, the fourth, would allow her to go home. It also came with a request — don’t be sad for her. She had no regrets.

“I am still looking forward to the moment when I can stand on the top of the mountain once more. And I will,” she wrote.

And then, on successive days, came the videos of putting Wonder Woman back together again. First, the one with her friends and hospital staff washing her hair and massaging her healthy right leg and her face, getting her ready to face the world outside the hospital.

Then came the one that showed how three medical teams got her across the Atlantic. All those paramedics and EMTs, lifting her from one gurney to another, into and out of an ambulance, onto and off a plane.

On the same day that Mikaela Shiffrin won her medal, there was more news from Vonn, and it was not happy. On the day of her crash, her beloved 13-year-old rescue dog, Leo, the love of her life, as she described him, had died after a battle with cancer and a heart ailment. Had anyone else had a worse two weeks? Life can be cruel.

And then two days after that, another six hours of surgery, this one, finally, seemingly aimed at not just saving the bone in her lower leg but rebuilding it.

Vonn posted a series of photos and videos that became familiar but no less affecting during the Games — her being wheeled around on some sort of gurney, great efforts made toward stabilizing her leg, a thumbs up, a big team of people around helping to put her back together again.

This one also included a plan for repairing her knee, and a little more information about the extent and seriousness of the injury.

“Made it through surgery… it took a bit more than 6 hours to complete. As you can see, it required a lot of plates and screws to put back together but Dr Hackett did an incredible job,” she wrote, referring to Thomas Hackett, her renowned orthopedic surgeon.

The image was pretty harrowing. A severely broken leg with a series of circles and lines that are likely all those “plates and screws” that Vonn references in her post.

“I’m bionic now for real,” Vonn wrote on X.

As the Winter Games drew to a close, Vonn’s journey appeared to have reached its latest hinge moment. There was no doubt that she had been to some very dark places and faced some terrible possibilities, like a lot of Olympians do during the Games, though hers were of a different magnitude.

There had been little talk about getting healthy enough to resume her career. Vonn had said this was her last season of ski racing, regardless of what happened at the Olympics. Plus, anytime an athlete suffers a serious injury, the first concern is fixing them enough so that they can experience a life without significant limitations.

The Olympic shining moments kept arriving. An overtime triumph to win gold for the U.S. women’s hockey team. A record sixth gold medal for Klæbo.

Amid it all, Vonn’s story, with all of its twists and uncertainty and struggle, kept coming. It seemed like it would for a long while. Given Vonn’s stature, and all the footage that is being collected, it’s a safe bet she is going to tell it in a big way before too long. If there is one thing everyone has come to know about Vonn, she does not do things halfway. She is all about big and all-out. Always has been. It’s her superpower, the thing that made her so great on skis, and also brought its share of doom, over and over again.

Where was it going to lead this time? The story was still unfolding, and will long past the moment the Olympic flame goes out Sunday night.

The Milan Cortina Winter Games are ending. They are headed to France in four years.

Vonn’s story, the one that captivated from before the Games started until the final days, may just be getting started.

SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7060782/2026/02/22/lindsey-vonn-winter-olympics-crash-injury-acl-updates/