Lindsey Vonn expressed “no regrets” about her Olympics comeback despite its unfortunate ending, which led to her breaking her leg in the downhill on Sunday and ending her time at the 2026 Winter Games.
The gold medal-winning Olympian spoke out for the first time since the scary tumble she took over the weekend, revealing she sustained a complex tibia fracture in a lengthy post on Instagram to her fans.
“Yesterday my Olympic dream did not finish the way I dreamt it would. It wasn’t a story book ending or a fairy tail, it was just life,” Vonn wrote. “I dared to dream and had worked so hard to achieve it. Because in Downhill ski racing the difference between a strategic line and a catastrophic injury can be as small as 5 inches.
“I was simply 5 inches too tight on my line when my right arm hooked inside of the gate, twisting me and resulted in my crash. My ACL and past injuries had nothing to do with my crash whatsoever.”
As a result of the injury, Vonn said that she would need “multiple surgeries” to fix the tibia fracture properly.
Vonn competed in the downhill despite tearing her ACL nine days before the event when she crashed at a separate competition ahead of the Milan Cortina Olympics.
The American skier crashed 13 seconds into her downhill on Sunday and she had to be airlifted to a hospital in Treviso.
“While yesterday did not end the way I had hoped, and despite the intense physical pain it caused, I have no regrets,” Vonn continued. “Standing in the starting gate yesterday was an incredible feeling that I will never forget. Knowing I stood there having a chance to win was a victory in and of itself. I also knew that racing was a risk. It always was and always will be an incredibly dangerous sport.
“And similar to ski racing, we take risks in life. We dream. We love. We jump. And sometimes we fall. Sometimes our hearts are broken. Sometimes we don’t achieve the dreams we know we could have. But that is also the beauty of life; we can try.”
Vonn had been looking for her fourth Olympic medal in Cortina this winter and was in the process of doing the unthinkable and returning to the sport of skiing after coming out of retirement.
She has won two downhill races and reached the podium in seven of eight World Cup races this season since she returned.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Vonn’s father Alan Kildow told the outlet that if has any influence over his daughter’s decision, this would be the end of her career.
“There will be no more ski races for Lindsey Vonn, as long as I have anything to say about it,” he said.