Lindsey Vonn is not ready to say goodbye. Seven months after a horrifying crash ended her fairy-tale return at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, the Olympic gold medalist looked USA TODAY’s Nancy Armour in the eye and answered the question the entire skiing world has been asking.
Will she race again?
Her answer was classic Vonn: honest, unfinished, and refusing to shut anything down.
“I don’t want to close the door on racing,” she said. “I have to be 100% and I want to get back on the mountain before I can make that judgment.”
She will be on a mountain again. That part she is sure of.
“You’ll always find me on the mountain in one way or another,” Vonn said. “I feel like where I am now, it’s definitely going to happen. I just don’t know when that’ll be. I don’t know what speed I’ll be going.”
This winter is off the table. The following winter — 2027-28 — is when she expects to be back on snow. By then she will have had the remaining surgeries: hardware coming out of her shattered left leg and, finally, the ACL reconstruction she has been living without since she tore it nine days before the Olympics.
Only after she is fully healed and actually skiing again will she decide whether “on the mountain” means recreational laps or another starting gate.
“There’s a lot of unanswered questions that I have in my mind and I’m still trying to process everything,” she admitted. “By the time I get back to skiing… maybe I’ll be in a much different place. But I think the door is still open.”
That is the same Lindsey Vonn who came out of a six-year retirement at 40, won World Cup downhills at 41, arrived in Cortina ranked No. 1 in the world, and then lined up for the Olympic downhill on a fully ruptured ACL because she refused to leave anything untried.
Thirteen seconds later the dream exploded. A complex tibia fracture, compartment syndrome, a near-amputation, multiple surgeries, months in a wheelchair and on crutches. The worst crash of a career already stacked with them.
Most athletes would have called it the end.
Vonn is still writing the sentence.
She has no timeline for a racing decision and no interest in making one from a rehab room. First she wants her body back. Then she wants to stand on snow again. Then she will decide whether the unfinished 13 seconds in Cortina get a sequel.
For now the message is simple and very Vonn:
