Lindsey Vonn spent 18 years ski racing at the highest level, earning the first Olympic women’s downhill gold for an American, two world championships, four World Cup overall season titles and 82 individual World Cup race victories.
Vonn retired from competition in 2019 at age 34, citing the physical toll from several major injuries over her career. She announced Thursday that she plans to rejoin the U.S. Alpine skiing team with hopes of returning to competition this season.
Here’s a chronological look through Vonn’s Alpine skiing career:
Vonn, then Lindsey Kildow, placed sixth in the combined event, the best finish for any U.S. female Alpine skier at the Salt Lake City Games. It remains the best Olympic finish for any Alpine skier from any nation that young since 1976.
After that race, Vonn shared that she had a grade-school assignment to write about a life goal, according to The New York Times. She had learned to ski at Buck Hill, a 306-vertical foot bump overlooking Interstate 35 south of Minneapolis.
“I wrote, ‘To make it to the Olympics and win more ski races than any woman ever has,’” she said then, according to the report. “But I later changed that to say that I wanted to make it to a bunch of Olympics.”
At age 20, Vonn earned her first World Cup victory in a downhill at Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada. For her career, Vonn won 18 times in Lake Louise, the most victories for any Alpine skier at a single World Cup venue.
Vonn’s emergence came at a time when the U.S. women’s Alpine program was in need of stars. Picabo Street had retired after the 2002 Olympics, no American woman won a World Cup race in the 2003-04 season and it had been three and a half years since an American woman won any World Cup downhill.
Vonn believed her strength at Lake Louise stemmed from her childhood. She remembers Lake Louise being the only women’s speed races that were on TV in the U.S., and she watched them over and over.
Vonn won two of the first three World Cup downhills in the 2005-06 season. She was also second-fastest in the first downhill training run at the Olympics. But in the second training run, she crashed at 60 miles per hour, slamming hard on the snow on her back. A team physician described it as a “sledgehammer hitting you in the pelvis without breaking anything.”
Vonn stayed in a hospital overnight, missing the third training run. Then she was released from a trauma center and placed eighth in the downhill, two days after the crash and in immense pain from a pocket of fluid trapped in her back. Vonn raced in four events at those Games with a best finish of seventh.
By these worlds, Vonn was in the middle of a three-year run of World Cup overall titles and had already accrued 18 World Cup victories, then tied with Tamara McKinney for the most in American women’s history. But she had yet to win a gold medal at an Olympics or worlds.
That all changed in Val d’Isère, France. Vonn won the super-G and then the downhill at worlds, setting her up to be one of the faces of the Olympics the following year.
After the downhill world title, Vonn sliced open her right thumb on a broken Champagne bottle while celebrating. She cut a tendon, which required surgery, but it did not prevent her from skiing the remainder of that season.
Once again, injury was a major part of Vonn’s story at a key moment of her career. She bruised her right shin during pre-Olympic workouts in Austria, causing “excruciating” pain just to put on a ski boot. She competed through it to become the first American woman to win the Olympic downhill.
“My win was the end result of every choice and every effort I’d made since I was nine years old,” Vonn wrote in “Rise,” her memoir published in 2022. “It was the desired outcome of every sacrifice my family had ever made for me. It was everything. To this day, that is the most satisfying feeling I have ever known.”
Vonn crashed hard in the opening super-G in Schladming, Austria, and needed to be airlifted off the mountain to a nearby hospital. She suffered ACL and MCL tears in her right knee, plus a fractured tibial plateau
Vonn tried to rush back from surgery for the 2014 Olympics, but reinjured her right knee in a November training crash and again in a December race, ending her season.
More than 10 years later, Vonn had partial right knee replacement surgery after it developed severe degeneration.
In Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, site of the 2026 Olympics, Vonn earned her 63rd career World Cup win, breaking her tie with retired Austrian Annemarie Moser-Pröll for the most by a woman.
In May 2024, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation posted a highlight of Vonn’s record-breaking day. “Cortina, È come la mia seconda casa,” Vonn replied to the post. Translation: Cortina, it’s like my second home.
Vonn came back from a broken arm in a November 2016 crash and a jarred back in a December 2017 race to win the last three World Cup downhills going into her last Olympics before retirement.
Though Italian Sofia Goggia took gold, Vonn became the oldest woman to win an Olympic Alpine skiing medal with her bronze. She retired a year later after breaking her own record as the oldest woman to win an Alpine skiing world championships individual medal, another downhill bronze.
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