Lindsey Vonn’s fellow skiers have defended her decision to compete in the women’s downhill at the Winter Olympics while dealing with a ruptured ACL.
The American crashed out early in her run on Sunday. She suffered a fractured leg and was airlifted from the course. Some users on social media said she should not have been racing only a week after injuring her knee. But those who know the risks of skiing best supported Vonn’s decision.
“People that don’t know ski racing don’t really understand what happened yesterday,” Vonn’s US teammate Keely Cashman said on Monday. “She hooked her arm on the gate, which twisted her around. She was going probably 70mph, and so that twists your body around.”
Cashman, who suffered a heavy crash of her own five years ago, said Vonn’s crash had “nothing to do with her ACL, nothing to do with her knee”, and people who think otherwise are “totally incorrect”.
“I think a lot of people are ridiculing that, and a lot of people don’t [know] what’s going on,” Cashman added.
Vonn had been in the middle of a remarkable comeback, coming out of a six-year retirement in 2025 after knee replacement surgery. There were doubts the 41-year-old could compete at the highest level again but she reached the podium in all five World Cup downhill races she entered in the run-up to the Olympics, including two victories. However, the crash at the end of January that ruptured her ACL made some question whether she was risking her life as she sought to win her second Olympic gold medal.
Italy’s Federica Brignone, a two-time world champion, dismissed that criticism. “It’s her choice,” Brignone said. “If it’s your body, then you decide what to do, whether to race or not. It’s not up to others. Only you.”
Another of Vonn’s US teammates, downhill specialist Kyle Negomir, also had no problem with her decision to try to replicate her gold medal performance from the 2010 Olympics.
“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 said. “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.”
The president of the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, Johan Eliasch, said it was common for athletes to compete while dealing with injuries.
“I firmly believe that this has to be decided by the individual athlete,” Eliasch said on Monday. “And in her case, she certainly knows her injuries on her body better than anybody else. And if you look around here today with all the athletes, the athletes yesterday, every single athlete has a small injury of some kind.
“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. 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.”
Vonn’s US teammate, Breezy Johnson, claimed gold on Sunday. She emphasized why skiers choose to compete in such a dangerous sport.
“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 you that much worse,” she said. “… I can’t imagine the pain that she’s going through, and it’s not the physical pain, we can deal with the physical pain. But the emotional pain is something else.”