MILAN—Lindsey Vonn’s brutal crash in Sunday’s women’s downhill resulted in a complex tibia fracture to her left leg, a serious injury that saw her airlifted from the mountain in Cortina, Italy, to a nearby hospital where she underwent three surgeries this week.
A severe medical emergency of that nature might cost the average person untold thousands of dollars out of pocket in the U.S., depending on their level of health insurance coverage. At the Olympics, any athlete who requires medical care during the Games is given treatment gratis, according to Jonathan Finnoff, chief medical officer for Team USA.
Medical services at the Olympic Games are covered by the local organizing committee; in this case, it’s part of the €1.7 billion ($2 billion) budget for Milan Cortina 2026. The medical services include six so-called polyclinics in each of the Olympic villages of the expansive Northern Italian Olympics, which offer everything from eye checks and dentistry to OB-GYN services. The Olympic hosts also provide several primary and secondary hospitals, should an athlete need to visit a trauma center for critical injuries, Finnoff said.
When an Olympic athlete suffers an injury requiring immediate care, a team of medical professionals from both the host city and the athlete’s national Olympic team step in to help.
“Say you have a big injury and an athlete has to have surgery here,” Finnoff told Sportico. “They would receive surgery through the organizing committee, or if they wanted something to be stabilized for more definitive treatments back home, then that that could be stabilized here, and then [Team USA’s] travel insurance policy would kick in, and that would cover an air ambulance to get them home.”
In addition to the services offered athletes during the Games, Team USA’s travel insurance carrier covers ongoing care to athletes who sustain injuries at the Olympics that require follow-up.
“What we’re really trying to do is not only provide ongoing and long-term care for our athletes so that they have the optimal recovery,” Finnoff said, “we’re also trying to eliminate any type of financial barrier to seeking that type of care.”
Any athlete who qualifies for the U.S. Olympic team also becomes eligible for elite athlete health insurance, Finnoff said, meaning sports stars have a coverage plan available to them if they don’t already have their own. Furthermore, Team USA has a network of nine U.S.-based medical partners through which Olympians can receive follow-up care. In that commercial relationship, Team USA provides marketing in return for in-kind medical services, Finnoff said.
“Ultimately what that means is that the athlete has no out-of-pocket expense,” if they visit those providers, which include Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles, Texas Children’s Hospital, Adirondack Health in upstate New York, and others.
Finnoff has been chief medical officer for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee since 2020, during which time he has helped implement COVID-19 control measures and dispatched health professionals to assist injured or sick Olympians.
Coordinating medical care at the Olympics is a gargantuan task that begins well before the Games begin. Host committees liaise with the IOC, international sports federations and professional sports leagues like the NHL to determine the specific health needs of each sport before the host committee staffs up. At the Milan-Cortina Games, spread across six villages in three distinct clusters in northern Italy, Finnoff said the hosts have so far done well synchronizing medical services.
“The medical community in Italy is outstanding, we’ve been very happy with the care that the athletes that have had,” Finnoff said. “They’ve been very welcoming to our medical staff, so when somebody is having surgery, they’ve allowed one of our physicians to be in the surgery—not doing it, but being there as an observer—and that’s a huge deal. It gives a lot of people peace of mind.”
At the same time, the dispersed clusters of the Milan-Cortina Games present logistical challenges. The host cities are spread across Northern Italy without streamlined travel connection, meaning Finnoff has had to bring extra staff and supplies to each site. For example, if a flu outbreak started in the Livigno cluster, “and I’m using Tamiflu to treat that,” he said, “if I run out, it’s not as easy to get more” from Milan or Cortina.
Each host nation presents its own healthcare challenges. The healthcare system in the U.S. is unique among major developed nations for being deeply fragmented and largely privatized. With the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics on the horizon, Finnoff said the southern California host committee “has their work cut out for them” to establish the comprehensive Olympic health services for athletes coming ashore for the Games.
“It’s going to be challenging,” he said, “but I think that the LA organizing committee is a very talented group of individuals who are going to absolutely overcome all the challenges that are put in front of them.”