Three-time Olympic medalist Lindsey Vonn is walking again, training again and cautiously optimistic again — seven months after a downhill crash at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics nearly cost the skiing legend her leg.
“I feel good. I’m getting better,” Vonn told TNT Sports at the US Open over the weekend. “I still have another surgery so I’m trying to get as strong as possible.”
Movieguide® has followed Vonn’s comeback since the crash upended her career, and the 41-year-old’s story keeps landing on the same theme: showing up is its own kind of victory. When she reflected on the wreck back in February, she told fans “the only failure in life is not trying” — a line that sounded less like an athlete’s cliché and more like someone who had actually thought it through.
The crash itself was brutal. Thirteen seconds into her downhill run at Milano Cortina, Vonn clipped a gate, flew sideways and struck her head on the course before medical crews airlifted her out. She had already torn her ACL in a World Cup crash days earlier and raced anyway, saying she would “rather go down swinging than not try at all.”
What followed was a complex tibia fracture, a broken ankle, compartment syndrome and a blood transfusion. Surgeon Dr. Tom Hackett performed an emergency fasciectomy — cutting her leg open to relieve the pressure — in a procedure Vonn has credited with saving her from amputation.
Movieguide® readers who tracked her early rehab may remember the caption she posted from her hospital bed that week: “Definitely some hard times but still thankful…still working hard. The only goal is to get healthy. One day at a time.”
That gratitude has held up under a recovery most people would find demoralizing. Vonn told PEOPLE magazine in July, around the time of the ESPY Awards, that she went nearly three and a half months unable to walk without help.
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“I was in a wheelchair for so long, I was on crutches for so long,” she said, adding that her ankle was still broken even five months out. “I got very emotional when I was able to walk on my own.”
She isn’t there yet, either. One more operation, on the ACL she competed on at the Olympics, still lies ahead, and Vonn isn’t pretending it will be quick.
“Once I get my ACL, then I’ll have another long road ahead of me,” she said. “I’m hoping that I can have the next surgery in November, but it’ll be in the winter sometime, and then it’ll be another nine months until I’m fully recovered from that.”
Do the math, and Vonn’s full recovery stretches toward the summer of 2027 — a year and a half removed from a crash that briefly threatened far worse than a lost ski season. She has called the whole ordeal the most extreme, painful and challenging injury of her career, “times 100.”
For an athlete who has spent two decades collecting Olympic medals and World Cup titles, patience with a slow, unglamorous recovery may be the harder discipline. Vonn seems to know it, naming every small gain out loud — a step without crutches, a strengthened leg, a surgery date on the calendar — rather than taking any of it for granted.
Whether she ever races competitively again remains an open question, one even Vonn hasn’t answered. What she has offered is a plain lesson for anyone facing a long climb back from something that knocked them flat: get up, say thanks and keep going one day at a time.
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