At the 2026 Winter Olympics, where Opening Ceremonies took place Friday, the late sportscaster Jim McKay’s iconic phrase “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” can already be summed up in two words: Lindsey Vonn.
The reigning rock star of the Winter Games, Vonn has committed to competing Sunday in the women’s downhill competition, where skiers can reach speeds of 95 miles per hour on the slopes of the far northern Italian Dolomites. Oh, and Vonn plans to do this on a right knee reconstructed in titanium last year and a left knee with a severed anterior cruciate ligament.
Really.
Vonn violently crashed Jan. 30 during a downhill race in Crans-Montana, Switzerland. As she confirmed the ACL rupture and described other damage in recent days, she might as well have added, Don’t even ask, doofus. I’m competing at my fifth Olympics at age 41 whether or not you think it’s safe.
I’m not letting this slip through my fingers. I’m gonna do it. End of story.”
Lindsey Vonn
“I haven’t cried. I haven’t deviated from my plan,” Vonn said at a news conference Tuesday. “Normally, in the past, there’s always a moment where you break down and you realize the severity of things and that your dreams are slipping through your fingers. But I didn’t have that this time. I’m not letting this slip through my fingers. I’m gonna do it. End of story.”
Whether you think it’s insanity, vanity, plain-old heart and Olympic grit, or all of the above, Vonn’s quest strains the physical and psychological universe of even elite athletes. She plans to compete with an injury from which world-class skiers often take a year to heal — after surgery. Any don’t-do-it medical advice has been trumped by the encouragement of teammates and her childhood idol.
“She’s an absolute beast,” says NBC analyst Picabo Street.
A word about Street: She is also an insane athlete, having returned from her own crash-test-dummy-like history in skiing to medal. Vonn met Street when she was 9-years-old. To this day, whatever Picabo says, it’s gospel to Lindsey.
Street will be on that Alpine mountain Sunday, hoping beyond hope that her protege makes a clean run and doesn’t do any permanent damage.
“She’s a good friend and someone I care about immensely,” Street said recently. “I know it’s going to be a lot, and I’m going to have to keep myself in check to not have any of my emotions waft off of me and affect her.”
Vonn holds 20 World Cup titles and a 2010 Olympic gold medal — and remains TV-ratings platinum. Blonde hair cascading over her puffy parkas, a mischievous smile camouflaging that soul-piercing stare, Vonn looks as if she wasn’t born but instead hatched inside a Colorado cave where all the offspring of Nordic ski gods must come from. On the lifts of Telluride and the Swiss Alps, where women are still objectified as snow bunnies, Vonn is steely, ice cold. The most tenacious of competitors, she’s basically Elsa in a starting gate.
Let’s be clear: If NBC and the International Olympic Committee had a vote in Vonn’s ability to compete, they’d green-light her even if all her limbs were prosthetics. But is that smart?
In sports, the line between bravery and stupidity, courage and crazy has always been fine — and Vonn certainly isn’t the first to approach the boundary.
Olympic history is loaded with athletes who had no business competing on torn cartilage and ruptured tendons. Gymnast Kerri Strug remains iconic, miraculously completing a second vault in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games with what was later diagnosed as tendon damage from a third-degree lateral sprain in her left ankle. Limping before she sprinted down the vault runway, Strug landed on both feet briefly before awkwardly hopping on her uninjured right foot, saluting the judges and then collapsing on the mat. Her score carried the U.S. women to all-around gold.
Across the seven Olympics I covered for The New York Times and The Washington Post, my most enduring memory is of Rulon Gardner unlacing his wrestling shoes for the last time in Athens in 2004. The corn-fed Wyomingite had won a bronze medal after competing with nine toes; two years earlier, he had lost his right middle toe to frostbite after a snowmobile accident and somehow surviving in temperatures 25 below zero for 17 hours. He was no longer the kid from nowhere who upset Russian Aleksandr Karelin, the greatest Greco-Roman heavyweight of all time, at the 2000 Sydney Games. But something inside Gardner wanted to feel the magic again. After the match, I asked what happened to his toe. “It’s in my refrigerator back home in a jar,” Gardner said. “I’m going to bury it on the hill next to my dog as soon as I go home.” These are the kinds of single-minded souls competing in Italy over the next two weeks. These are the kinds of single-minded souls competing in Italy over the next two weeks — disposable heroes, put on pedestals with corresponding national anthems every four years and then forgotten about until the next Olympic cycle arrives. Vonn’s journey to Sunday was set in motion years ago — eons before she tore her left ACL. Backing out now is like fleeing a wedding at the altar. And yet: The risk for personal safety is so much greater than a competitor with two healthy, stable and connected ACLs. John Keeling, a Washington-area orthopedist and knee specialist who has reconstructed the ACLs of many current and former professional athletes, sees the risks. “It’s an ego trip awaiting a bigger casualty,” he told me over text. “She has already won and been a champion. I’m not an ageist, but come on — she could really further damage her knee. Even an amputation is not out of the question if she dislocated. There is a plethora of young talent that are healthy. Let them compete.” Don’t tell Vonn that. Soon after she completed her practice run on Friday — finishing 11th but with no significant mishaps — she clapped back at a physician questioning the severity of her injury on X. “Someone with a prior tear or surgery may not experience as much swelling or pain with a repeat injury,” wrote Brian Sutterer. “Bottom line: I don’t think this was a fresh, bread-and-butter ACL tear like everyone is assuming.” Vonn’s reply began: “Lol thanks, doc. My ACL was fully functioning until last Friday. Just because it seems impossible to you doesn’t mean it’s not possible.” Maybe that’s the point. Maybe this isn’t about a medal or vanity or anything more than one of the best to ever fly down a ski slope at breakneck speed praying she can push her body beyond mortal boundaries one last time. Maybe all Lindsey Vonn wants is to write her own ending and not let others decide it for her.
Mike Wise is a sports journalist whose past employers include ESPN’s The Undefeated, The Washington Post and The New York Times. He is writing a biography of Olympic gold medalist Billy Mills. 
