The ‘miracle’ of Lindsey Vonn: How one of the great sports comebacks came to be

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Perusing the start list for the women’s alpine skiing World Cup, most of the numbers look the same.

The document states the competitors’ names, nationality, bib number and year of birth. Some 42 of the 54 competitors were born in the 1990s, while 11 were born in the 2000s.

And then there’s one woman who doesn’t quite fit the trend, her year sticks out a mile. It’s 1984, and it’s Lindsey Vonn.

“This is history in the making,” the announcer boisterously proclaims as Vonn prepares to start her run down the white, gleaming slopes of Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.

“Lindsey, Lindsey!” the crowd, one of the largest the event has ever hosted, chants. We may be deep in the Italian Dolomites but Vonn’s name and popularity go far across the globe. Only local favourite and Olympic gold medallist Sofia Goggia can command a rowdier din.

There is a huge ovation as Vonn crosses the line in 20th in a downhill race (she was heading for the top five before a later error curtailed her progress) here on this Saturday in mid-January. She gives a double wave to the crowd, some of whom are proudly waving U.S. flags. When she leaves the course, there is a scrum of frantic people to walk through; she stops to sign their skis and their helmets, they yell her name and try and time their selfies so that Vonn is in the picture when she walks past.

As the chief of U.S. Ski & Snowboard, Anouk Patty, tells The Athletic: “You do a few laps with her here and you see that everybody is watching her. She transcends the sport.”

It was in Cortina in 2019 that Vonn knew her skiing career was about to end, when her body was in so much pain that she couldn’t finish a race.

And it will be in Cortina in 2026 at the Winter Olympics, if all goes to plan, that she brings the curtain down on what is certainly one of the greatest careers in the history of skiing, but perhaps also on one of greatest comebacks modern sport has witnessed.

How on earth did we get here? This is the miracle of Lindsey Vonn.

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“Miracle” is the word Vonn uses when chatting to assembled media after her downhill run in Cortina.

“The fact that I’m back here is a miracle in itself,” she says, her light, smiling, relaxed demeanor, complete with trademark fluffy double bobble hat, incessantly contradicting the unyieldingly steely determination that has characterised her career.

“I was on pace for a top-five result and I have to be happy with that. … It has been six years and this is the fastest course with the most terrain that I’ve skied. The difference in speed for me was a lot, so it was hard for me to adjust.

“My body can sustain a lot. I’m not like I was when I retired — I can take a hit. I’ve got titanium now.”

How she was when she retired was, again in her own words, broken “beyond repair.”

“My body is screaming at me to stop and it’s time for me to listen,” she said as she ended a glittering career of three Olympic medals (one gold in Vancouver in 2010), four World Cup titles and eight world championship medals.

Five years later, a knee replacement took the pain away and gave her a second chance. But what did people think when she made her shock announcement of a comeback?

“I thought: ‘She’s crazy’.” That was the reaction of Patrick Riml, who has known and worked with Vonn for the best part of a quarter of a century, including as alpine director of the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Association.

He is now Red Bull’s head of athlete special projects and, as part of a partnership with the U.S. team, is working closely with Vonn.

“But also it wasn’t much of a surprise,” Riml adds of Vonn’s decision to return to the sport.

“I’ve known her since 1999 and I know how crazy she is, obviously in a positive way. Her commitment and her dedication… when she sets herself a goal, it’s full-on and full-throttle. So yeah, she’s crazy, but the knee responded well and it soon made sense.”

There are many questions to ponder around Vonn’s comeback at the age of 40, six years older than any of the 54 competitors she faced in Cortina.

The main one, for someone who achieved pretty much all there was to achieve in the sport, is why?

“Well, she was never planning on retiring in 2019, her body basically forced her to,” Riml adds. “It was never that she’d done everything she wanted and now it was time to do something different… it was forced by injuries.”

In August, Riml travelled with Vonn to New Zealand, where she tried skiing again with her titanium knee. It couldn’t have gone any better.

“With this new knee that’s now a part of me… I feel like a whole new chapter of my life is unfolding before my eyes,” she said on social media.

“Everything went well and the plan was made to get a little more serious,” Riml adds.

The pair had kept in touch during Vonn’s retirement, but there was never any question of her making a comeback, due to how she finished the sport in such considerable pain.

“There were days when she could only have one single run because her knee was so sore,” he says. “Now with the partial knee replacement and feeling so well, and having a quality of life she didn’t have for a long time, she’s able to do things she couldn’t for many years. And she’s pain-free.

“It’s not fun when you get up in the morning and your knee hurts… you might have perfect conditions for training, but you have to pull the plug after 10 minutes because her knee is so sore.

“She’s enjoying it more now.”

Vonn’s story is not unique among elite athletes in sport. There are many who find it hard to say goodbye.

Rower Sir Steve Redgrave retired after his fourth successive Olympic gold medal in 1996 and gave, like Vonn, an unequivocal statement that he was done. “Anybody who sees me in a boat has my permission to shoot me,” the Briton famously said.

Redgrave did come back (and wasn’t shot) to win a fifth gold in Sydney in 2000. But his misgivings about continuing, like with legends such as Muhammad Ali in boxing, Michael Jordan in basketball, Michael Schumacher in Formula One and Martina Hingis in tennis, all people who reached the very top of their sport and then came back for more, were more about mind than body.

Vonn’s was almost exclusively physical. She needed to be fixed — and the replacement knee has been the catalyst behind her second lease of skiing life.

The Minnesota native spent five post-retirement years enjoying working with her foundation and business, she played a bit of tennis, but she did all of it in pain. Even walking would be problematic.

She took advice from Tom Hackett, of the renowned Steadman Clinic in Colorado, who has worked with the U.S. Ski Team. He helped lead her to Dr Martin Roche, an expert in complicated knee repair.

Almost a year ago, in April 2024, Vonn had surgery on her right knee, in layman’s terms a partial knee replacement, with titanium alloy replacing a little bit of bone.

After re-educating her own body and her knee, she could do physical activities that had been beyond her capabilities for years.

It was then that she realised she would be able to ski again and the idea of a comeback for the most successful downhill skier of all time (with 43 World Cup wins) formed.

Fast forward to winter and, 2,183 days after her last World Cup downhill, Vonn was back.

The instant results, given her time away from the sport and her age, were incredible; 14th in St Moritz (Switzerland) in December and then sixth and fourth in St Anton (Austria) last month.

So well has it gone that Riml, her close confidant who consoled her after the Cortina downhill when that slight error ended her chances of a first podium finish since her comeback, says it hasn’t been challenging for him to help enable Vonn’s return.

“I don’t think it’s a real challenge (for me),” he says. “We went up to Austria at 5 a.m. in October, it’s pitch dark and she’s there with the biggest smile on her face.

“That’s pure passion for the sport and she’s so incredibly good at it, so the only challenge for me is getting her into a rhythm and the routines and a little more mileage in those legs.”

Considering how impressed everyone has been with Vonn since her comeback, it may be a surprise to skiing outsiders that the initial reaction to ending her retirement was, well, mixed.

Here’s a selection:

• Michaela Dorfmeister (two-time Olympic champion): “Vonn should see a psychologist; does she want to kill herself?”
• Pirmin Zurbriggen (four-time World Cup champion): “There is a risk Vonn will tear her artificial knee to pieces. I have the feeling that she hasn’t recognised the meaning and purpose of her other life in recent years — she has probably suffered from no longer being a celebrated champion.”
• Franz Klammer (Austrian skiing legend): “She’s gone completely mad.”

Vonn was taken aback. But while some within the sport were frosty, the U.S. team welcomed her with open arms.

U.S. skier Lauren Macuga, who at 22 years old just won her first World Cup race, grew up watching Vonn. Macuga was born in 2002, two years after Vonn made her World Cup debut.

“I always watched her growing up, and now I get to be on the team with her, it’s very cool,” she says.

“She’s been so open about helping all of us. Any chance she gets she’s right there telling us what we can do to improve, where we need to be in the line. You can ask her anything and she’ll tell us. And it’s cool because she doesn’t have to, she could keep it all to herself and go on a one-woman train!”

U.S. team boss Patty is grateful that Vonn is sharing her advice and experience with her teammates. With Vonn comes a roadshow all of its own — her own coaches and medical people, her own PR machine — and yes, when the U.S. team have finished their run in Cortina, they stay and watch their teammates while Vonn does her own thing. When you’re bigger than the sport, perhaps that’s an inevitability.

But in what is ultimately an individual sport, Vonn has become de facto player-coach too.

Patty explains: “You can hope for that to happen and encourage it, but at the end of the day it’s up to her to do it and for them to engage with it. She’s embraced the role of educating and teaching the next generation on how to be a really professional ski racer.

“As a 40-year-old woman who’s doing one of the most gnarly sports out there, it’s not like it’s easy. It’s really intense with massive injuries and life-or-death situations. Coming back and doing that, it appeals to people who know nothing about the sport. We’ve all gone to points in our lives when age catches up, when the knees get a little creakier.

“She’s blown that barrier away. It’s the Olympics next year and that retirement ceiling just got bumped up by eight-plus years.”

There have been technical challenges, as well as mental and physical, and those will continue in the coming months as Vonn attempts to fine-tune her body and her skiing equipment in what is very much (well, as things stand) a 15-month venture, which takes in this week’s world championships and, in theory, ends in Cortina next February.

“The knee has been absolutely fine, she feels better skiing now than she did five years ago,” Patty adds.

“You can see much more symmetry in her balance and her turning. Before she retired she had to favour the knee a bit. That’s gone now, so technically she can ski a bit more smoothly and with more balance…

“We have to keep reality in mind, but she’s surpassed all expectations. It’s been quite extraordinary, actually.”

Riml adds: “People talk about talent… well, they all have talent. It comes down to dedication and willingness to do whatever it takes to be as fast as you can. That’s what she does. When she has a goal, everything else is put to one side… My only problem (with Lindsey) is holding her back.

“People were very outspoken about how stupid this is. I think she’s already proved them wrong.”

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In beautiful, picturesque Cortina they’re very much gearing up for next year’s Olympics, the second time the area has hosted the biggest event in winter sports.

Images of Vonn and her competitors adorn buildings in the high street and Olympic rings proudly shine from the revamped Olympic Stadium.

It’s the place where Vonn has already won 12 races, where she knew her career was supposedly over in 2019 and where she may enjoy the ultimate redemption story in 2026.

“The funny thing is that when we started talking about this, the plan was, ‘Let’s see how it goes, we have a lot of work to do’,” Riml says. “And now look at her. I’m so excited about this, I can’t even tell you.”

On Vonn’s official website, her considerable career achievements are listed in some detail; her Olympic triumphs, her world championship success, her endless victories and her comeback from a two-year injury layoff to break more records (yep, she’s done it before).

The timeline ends in 2019. The comeback has not yet been written, but Vonn plans for there to be plenty of content.

“To be actually competing here was definitely not what I anticipated,” she said this week ahead of the world championships in Austria.

“I didn’t anticipate doing so well so quickly. This season has been about managing my expectations and I’m trying to continue doing that here.”

But then she adds: “I’m fast, I’m competitive, I’m ready to compete for a medal.”

Good luck managing those expectations. She’s bulletproof, nothing to lose, she is titanium… and the fairytale continues.

(Top image: Getty; Francis Bompard/Agence Zoom, Mattia Ozbot)