Lindsey Vonn is officially back on the World Cup circuit.
The 2010 Olympic downhill champion finished 14th in a super-G race in St. Moritz, Switzerland on Saturday, her first World Cup race in almost six years. Vonn retired in February 2019 after a series of injuries, but announced her return last month after having a partial knee replacement in April.
Vonn was 1.18 seconds behind the winner, Cornelia Huetter of Austria, and had the second-fastest time of the U.S. women. Lauren Macuga was seventh. Vonn will race in another super-G at the same venue on Sunday.
Vonn, who turned 40 in October, is one of the greatest ski racers ever. Her 82 World Cup races are the third-most of any skier, behind only fellow American Mikaela Shiffrin and Ingemar Stenmark. In addition to her gold medal in the downhill in Vancouver, she’s won four overall World Cup titles.
But a crash in February 2013 caused significant damage to her right knee — she tore her ACL and MCL and also had a tibial plateau fractur — and said last week that she was injured in “pretty much” every season after that. She retired in February 2019, citing the toll of her injuries.
“I kept going through all the injuries because I love ski racing. And no injury ever held me back until it finally broke me,” Vonn said before the World Cup races in Beaver Creek, where she was a forerunner.
Vonn said she truly thought she was done when she retired. But after having the partial knee replacement, she was no longer in pain and found she was able to do things she hadn’t been able to do in years.
Maybe, she thought, her ski racing career wasn’t over.
“The passion for skiing has never gone away, I just wasn’t physically able to do it anymore,” Vonn said in Beaver Creek. “Now that I have the chance to do what I love, why would I not try? Life is short. You’ve got to live every day to the maximum, and that’s all I’m doing.”
Vonn announced her comeback in mid-November and resumed training with the U.S. Ski team shortly after. She competed at the FIS Fall Festival at Copper Mountain in early December, compiling enough points across the four races to qualify her for the World Cup circuit.
Though Vonn had hoped to do the World Cup races in Beaver Creek, where the women raced the Birds of Prey course for the first time, she ran out of time and decided to make her debut in St. Moritz, instead. It’s a course Vonn knows well, having won five times there and finished on the podium another five times. Her last win there was in a super-G in 2015.
The USA TODAY app gets you to the heart of the news — fast. Download for award-winning coverage, crosswords, audio storytelling, the eNewspaper and more.
