Lindsey Vonn’s days are full.

“It’s a lot of rehab,” she said from a conference room in Los Angeles.

“Wake up at 7:30, breakfast at 8, 9 to 11 is rehab at my house. I have a little break, eat some food. Go to a hyperbaric chamber. Do about two hours with decompression in the hyperbaric, and then I come back and have a little break. And then usually work out from, like, 5 to 6:30, little break, shower, dinner. That’s kind of my day every day, six days a week. Sunday is kind of a day off without a scheduled program. But I, of course, always go to the gym on my own.”

No surprise there.

To speak with Vonn has long been a truly fantastical experience. She’s one of those very famous people who has walked just about every red carpet there is and is also about the biggest badass anyone can ever meet. And she’s also this plain-spoken girl from the Upper Midwest prone to tearing up whenever the conversation turns to her childhood ski coach and lifelong mentor, Erich Sailer, who died last August, two months before his 100th birthday.

She’s also crashed so many times racing downhill on ice at 80 miles an hour and gotten up and done it all over again, seemingly without fear, that she can seem more like a comic book action hero than an Olympian. She’s basically bionic at this point — and still fantasizing about what it would feel like to stand in front of a starting gate at the top of a mountain.

Now, after her brutal injury at February’s Olympics and the long recovery road she’s still on, that just might be a bridge too far, even for Vonn. She doesn’t shy away from honesty about how lonely and hard the last two months have been.

Suffice it to say, this is not the post-Olympic life Vonn envisioned for herself in late January, when she had become once again, at 41, the world’s best speed skier. She was on top of the downhill standings and a favorite to win multiple medals at the Winter Games in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.

Then came the crash in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, nine days before the Olympic downhill, a moment when plenty of other athletes would have wrapped themselves in bubble wrap. Vonn, who tore her anterior cruciate ligament, was racing for an edge, like she always has.

Her team thought the season was over. She told them it wasn’t and prepared to race in the Olympics. After the final training run, her coach, the former downhill champion Aksel Lund Svindal, a skeptic after the Crans-Montana crash and the ACL tear, was a skeptic no more.

And then, 13 seconds into her downhill run, racing for gold, she slipped a few centimeters too far to the right at the fourth gate and hooked her arm. She learned the hard way that it wasn’t one of the breakaway gates that racers smack into and come away largely unscathed most weeks on the World Cup circuit.

“It’s a discussion that will be had,” she said.

In a split second, Vonn was tumbling down the ice in a cloud of snow dust, hoping to survive a crash that nearly turned catastrophic. She shattered her left tibia and fibula and her right ankle. After her initial trauma surgery, her lower left leg swelled with fluids. Dr. Tom Hackett, the head physician for U.S. Ski and Snowboard, who is all too familiar with Vonn’s anatomy from previous operations, basically had to fillet her lower leg to let fluids stream out so proper blood flow could resume. Had it not, Vonn risked permanent nerve damage and other complications, such as necrosis and infection that could have rendered the leg basically useless.

Then came days of lying still in the intensive care unit. A device called an external fixator, with pins piercing through her skin and deteriorating muscles, stabilized the bones. Her team came to the hospital. They had a cry together.

A week and a half after the crash, she flew to Vail, Colo., to the Steadman Clinic, where Hackett used a toolbox full of screws and pins and plates and a giant rod to put her leg back together again.

And then, finally, another long, slow rehabilitation process could begin.

“Normally, when you have an ACL or something like that, you start off slowly, but then you eventually, after about a week or two, make pretty good progress,” Vonn said.

This is not a normal rehabilitation, though, not with broken bones in both legs, and the damage that the external fixator had done in service to save the leg.

The pins that stabilized the bone had caused scar tissue to build up. Just bending her leg was difficult. Also, Hackett had to cut through so much muscle during the last surgery that everything was stretched out and discombobulated.

And her ankle on her other leg was broken. And she still had a torn ACL.

“All these things, it took time,” she lamented. “There were so many layers to it. That made it challenging. And then of course, when you have such slow progress, that inevitably becomes more mentally challenging as well.”

She’s already been posting plenty of videos of her rehabbing sessions in the gym. You don’t need healthy legs to do pull-ups. You just need to be able to grab hold of the bar.

Still, she only moved fully out of her wheelchair at the start of this week. She’s still on crutches. She has a walker. Her goal is to be able to ditch the crutches by the end of the month. She’s still only allowed to put about 30 percent of her weight on her leg.

Maybe she will be able to play some tennis this summer. She will likely need to wear a brace. She doesn’t have an ACL in her left knee.

“I feel like I’m so far away from that right now that I’m not thinking that far ahead, but even if I can just do squats in the gym or, you know, go road biking, I’ll be happy,” she said.

She’s inching toward getting her life back and doing the public-facing stuff that had become such a big part of her existence. In the past two weeks, she’s been on the cover of Vanity Fair and had the “Today” show’s Craig Melvin out to her house in Utah for an interview. She’s flown to Los Angeles — in itself, another sign of her recovery — on this day to do interviews in conjunction with a campaign for a biopharmaceutical company, Invivyd, back to her other life as a spokesperson.

She tells the story of doing everything she could to avoid getting sick before the Olympics. She isolated herself when teammates got sick. She stayed away from buffets. She wore a mask at times.

She stayed. And then she crashed. Does she regret not making sure to ski a few centimeters to the left?

“That would have been a more conservative line, and it wasn’t my plan,” she said.

Never has been.

Plus, her teammate Breezy Johnson had put up a stellar run and was sitting in the leader’s chair at the bottom of the mountain. Vonn wanted the gold medal. She always does. There was only one thing to do — go get it.

She’d been in this same position 16 years before in Vancouver. Julia Mancuso skied a killer run ahead of her. She knew she would have to ski “on the limit” to beat her. She knew where she could make up a few precious hundredths of a second. She did.

Now she was at the top of Cortina and thought she had figured out where she could be faster than Johnson.

“That’s why I had an aggressive approach,” she said. “That’s what I came there to do. I came there to win, regardless of who was sitting at the bottom or who was behind me in the starting gate. I was there, and I had all the intentions of putting everything on the line, and that’s what it takes to win the Olympics. It’s worked for me before, but unfortunately, it didn’t work for me this time.”

So what does she do now? Whether she races again is a silly question at this point. She’s just learning to walk. If all goes well, she will have another operation in September to remove some of the metal in her left leg. Then she and her doctors have to figure out the best way to repair her ACL. And then she has to rehab that injury.

She doesn’t see herself as a full-time coach, the way Svindal, her old pal on the circuit, was for her the past year. That was a special circumstance that just sort of came about for both of them.

But she lives in Park City, Utah, the home of U.S. skiing and so many top skiers. Go to a World Cup race and start asking random racers if they have a story about Vonn helping them in some way. Everyone seemingly does. Some of them have moved into her house during tough times.

So much of downhill racing is about knowledge. She wants to pass hers along.

Sofia Goggia, the Italian star who won bronze in the Olympic downhill, called her the night before the downhill in Beijing in 2022. Goggia took the silver medal there.

“What I’m most excited about is to mentor,” Vonn said. “I’m always willing and wanting to be someone that if you need me, I’m there.”

Vonn crashed in Cortina. She could have lost her leg. She isn’t going anywhere.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Olympics, Global Sports, Women's Olympics

2026 The Athletic Media Company