CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Next time we see Lindsey Vonn, she’ll be racing the Olympic downhill.
Vonn completed her second training run on the Olympia delle Tofane in as many days Saturday, Feb. 7. Her time of 1:38.28 was two seconds faster than the previous day, and put her in third place before the race was interrupted by heavy fog at the top of the course.
‘When she came down, she talked about skiing and was calm and didn’t talk about the knee at all. And then I didn’t want to ask, either, because I figured that’s a good sign,’ said Aksel Lund Svindal, the two-time Olympic champion who is now Vonn’s coach.
‘How I’ve learned to know her, when she’s calm means that she feels like she has under control.’
Vonn was off-balance on a couple of her landings, including one near the bottom where her damaged left knee appeared to give a little. But Svindal said that is not unexpected. Vonn’s brain is telling her to land on her right leg and, if she does, it causes her to wobble a bit.
‘Try to have less of that tomorrow if we can,’ he said, smiling.
Especially since Vonn will need to push harder Sunday if she wants a medal. Which is the whole point of this last week.
Vonn crashed eight days ago during the last downhill before the Olympics, tearing her left ACL and suffering bone bruising and meniscus damage. But she’s been determined to ski at her fifth Olympics and, if she’s going to ski, she’s going to ski to win.
‘Good enough to win this race, hopefully,’ Svindal said when asked how he’d rate her physical strength right now.
‘But her mental strength, I think that’s why she has won as much as she has,’ he added. ‘Also, she has some experience now at 41 years old. I think that’s what she needs to bring out tomorrow, all her experience and her mental strength.’
Skiers only need to do one training run to be cleared for the race. But Svindal said it was important she do the second run, as well, because the course had changed, and was more like what it will be on race day. Instead of the mushy and soft conditions during the first run, the surface had hardened.
‘All the small bumps, you don’t cut through them, you feel them through your body. So a very different feeling,’ Svindal said.
Some of the jumps were shaved, too, reducing the amount of air skiers get.
‘She knows that she’ll have to push harder tomorrow because the rest of the girls will, and it’s the Olympic downhill. You’re not going to get away with a medal here unless you push hard,’ Svindal said. ‘And I think she’s ready for that.’
But after having a partial knee replacement in April 2024, Vonn felt so good she began contemplating a comeback.
“I retired in 2019 because my body said no more, not because I didn’t want to continue racing,” Vonn told USA TODAY Sports in October. “So I feel like this could be an incredible moment to end this chapter of my life and move forward in a really exciting and peaceful way.”
Cortina was a big part of that.
Cortina has always been one of Vonn’s favorite places. She made her first World Cup podium there, winning a bronze medal in the downhill in 2004, and 12 of her 84 World Cup victories came there.
To ski in an Olympics there, maybe have those be her final races, seemed a fitting end.
“It’s such a special place for me,” Vonn said in October. “I don’t think I would have tried this comeback if the Olympics weren’t in Corina. If it had been anywhere else, I would probably say it’s not worth it.
“But for me, there’s something special about Corina that always pulls me back.”
Vonn had mixed results after she returned to the World Cup circuit in 2024, but she finished the season with a silver medal in the super-G at the World Cup finals in Sun Valley, Idaho. After a full off-season to train and fine-tune her equipment, the 41-year-old Vonn was unstoppable.
She won the season’s first downhill, in St. Moritz, and another in Zauchensee. She was on the podium in all five downhill races, and two of the first three super-Gs.
Vonn led the downhill standings, putting her in position to join Mikaela Shiffrin as the only skiers to win nine season titles in a single discipline. Vonn also was second in the super-G standings and sixth in the overall.
The possibility of winning another season title even persuaded Vonn to rethink her retirement plans.
After last week’s crash, however, her entire focus is on Sunday’s downhill.
‘We knew that today would be different and it would really increase our chances of nailing tomorrow if we did today,’ Svindal said. ‘And that’s why we did it.’