Lindsey Vonn, widely regarded as the most decorated female downhill skier of all time—with an astonishing 82 World Cup victories, three Olympic medals (one of them gold), and eight World Championship medals (including two golds)—has made a striking return to the fast-paced world of professional downhill skiing.
Now at 40 years old, Vonn is more than a decade older than many of her current competitors, and in some cases nearly twice their age. Yet she’s entering this new chapter with a reconstructed knee and a revitalized mindset. “I’m capable of so much more now than I was during the last few years of my career,” she said in a Zoom interview from Europe this past February, where she’s currently training. “I can lift heavier weights and jump higher.”
Vonn admits her body had been signaling the need for rest well before her final race in 2019. According to her, some of her team members had been encouraging her to retire for nearly five years by that point. A serious crash in November 2018—her third in just nine months—proved to be the turning point. That fall left her with three fractures and a torn LCL, making it clear that her body needed a break. “I was mentally exhausted,” she reflects.
Leaving the sport behind, however, wasn’t easy. “Accepting that something I loved so deeply was no longer part of my life was incredibly difficult,” she admits. In the aftermath of retirement, Vonn turned to therapy and deep personal reflection. She began writing a memoir, but found herself unhappy with the first draft and ended up starting from scratch. “I was in a dark place when I first wrote it,” she explains. “I’ve grown so much since then.” The revised version, Rise: My Story, was published in 2022. Although she acknowledges she’s still figuring out her identity, she has learned to distinguish her sense of self from her skiing career.
Vonn has since built a new lifestyle, splitting her time between Utah and Miami, and immersing herself in extreme water sports like wakeboarding and windsurfing. These activities provided a new kind of freedom. “I couldn’t feel my knee,” she says of the appeal. “That made me feel more like myself again.”
Even as her mental recovery progressed, her physical limitations remained a challenge. “Living my everyday life was hard,” Vonn recalls with a slight chuckle, now distanced from the worst of it. She remembers trying to go for short walks with a friend’s seven-year-old and struggling to make it past ten minutes. For someone who spent decades hurtling down mountains at over 80 miles per hour, such limitations were stifling. “Living in pain isn’t fun,” she states plainly.
Now, with her body healed and her perspective renewed, Vonn is ready to take on the slopes once more—not to repeat the past, but to prove what she’s still capable of as a stronger, wiser athlete.