Lindsey Vonn can bike. She can play tennis. She is finally moving like a person again. Which is exactly why the next step feels so hard.
The American ski racing legend will go back under the knife in November — this time to remove the plates and hardware holding her shattered left leg together and to reconstruct the ACL she tore nine days before the Olympics. Then the long recovery starts again.
Vonn still has not decided whether she will race. That question comes later. First she has to get the metal out of her body.
“You’ll always find me on a mountain. In one way or another, I’ll be out there,” she told USA TODAY Sports. “I don’t know when that’ll be … and I don’t know what speed I’ll be going.”
The February crash in Cortina lasted 13 seconds and nearly cost her the leg. Compartment syndrome. A complex tibia fracture. Multiple surgeries. A year of rebuilding bones that had been in pieces. Only after that healing could doctors even talk about the ACL she ruptured in Crans-Montana and the hardware she does not want to carry for the rest of her life.
The cruel part is timing. She has not had surgery in months. She feels good. Everyday life is coming back. Now she has to undo some of that progress on purpose.
“It’s easier to process when you have an injury and you know you have to have an immediate surgery,” Vonn said, “as opposed to, ‘I haven’t had a surgery in months. I feel really good. Why am I having a surgery now?’”
The answer is long-term health. She needs an ACL. She does not want a hardware store’s worth of plates left in her leg forever.
Once the November operation is done, she expects about nine more months of rehab. That timeline rules out any serious return this winter. A racing decision, if there is one, would wait until she is whole again.
For now the story is simpler and heavier than a comeback headline.
Vonn survived the crash. She fought her way back to tennis courts and bike rides. And just as normal life started to feel possible, she has to go back into surgery — so she can keep that life.
