More people gasped as they gazed into their laptop screens. Then more and more, like little spot fires that eventually enveloped the room when the televisions finally caught up.
The stages of Lindsey Vonn’s fall.Credit: AP
As we all digested the situation, there was a combination of both stunned silence and rumbling chatter, as the debate over Vonn’s judgment began immediately. Mercifully, the sound was off, so we couldn’t hear her screams of anguish.
SportItalia journalist Tancredi Palmieri drew a worthy comparison on social media between Vonn and the last voyage of Dante Alighieri’s Ulysses, from the Inferno section of his Divine Comedy.
If you don’t know, let’s get literary: after returning home from the Trojan War, and finally reuniting with his family, Ulysses couldn’t sit still, so he indulged his itchy feet and departed again on an impossible journey beyond the known world that would eventually claim his life, and the lives of everyone who came with him.
American fans react after Lindsey Vonn’s crash.Credit: AP
Before they crossed that boundary, Ulysses delivered a speech to his men. We’re paraphrasing here: “Life is short, so don’t play it safe. Have another crack.” It was stirring, heroic, and a bit stupid. But that’s the nature of both warriors and athletes alike.
Life is short. For some, sadly, it’s really short. And few know that better than Winter Olympians. This is an inherently dangerous endeavour. Vonn, who retired in 2019 due to pain from previous injuries, may suffer life-long impacts from this crash. She may not. She knew that going in, and has known that every single day she’s strapped on her skis – and she kept on doing it anyway.
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It’s impossible to say whether she crashed because of the ACL, or because of its flow-on physical and mental challenges, or if we should completely detach those things from the outcome. After all, Vonn wasn’t the only athlete to require a helicopter to lift them off the same course on Sunday – and, in training the day before, her braced knee seemed to be coping just fine, finishing third-fastest.
Vonn had spent part of her downtime between rehab and practice sessions on X, clapping back at her doubters, including journalists and doctors weighing in from afar. This is not to condemn her for “posting through it”, as the kids say, but to illustrate her combative, one-track mindset: she was absolutely determined to do this, and anyone who disagreed was either wrong, couldn’t understand her, or both. Even if those people were coming from a place of seemingly genuine concern, including one writer she accused of “ageism”, who later had to protect his account because of the pile-on that followed Vonn’s reply to him.
Lindsey Vonn is airlifted after her crash.Credit: AP
That guy’s crime was to ponder out loud why Vonn, at her age, given her many accomplishments and current net worth, would still be doing this, assessing both the positive (late-era Lionel Messi) and negative (a 58-year-old Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul) possibilities, and ending his article on this poignant note: “I have no doubt there is meaning behind Vonn’s suffering, and that should be good enough for all of us.”
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But here is the modern sporting paradox in a nutshell: we celebrate late-career miracles and anoint those who achieve them as legends, while also condemning those who fail with the benefit of hindsight. We are hypocrites.
Vonn’s crash was foreshadowed in green and gold. Australian freestyle skier Daisy Thomas, who ruptured her ACL in November, was, like Vonn, determined to forge ahead and compete at Milano Cortina 2026 regardless. On Friday, during training, she crashed at the end of what was supposed to be a short, sharp session that stretched longer than intended.
Thomas, 18, subsequently withdrew from the women’s freeski slopestyle event but is still planning to take part in the big air competition. She is not the first Olympian to ignore what their body is telling them, and she will not be the last. All athletes, to some degree, engage in a level of delusion. Sometimes it’s a superpower, sometimes it’s a critical weakness.
If we could offer Vonn, or Thomas, or Laura Peel, or anyone else a time machine that would take them back to a fork in the road and allow them to change their original decision, would they step inside? Probably not. Unless you’re in that position, it’s difficult to answer – but you can question whether it’s smart, and admire them for still having a go at the same time.
Truthfully, that’s pretty much all you can do.
The Winter Olympic Games will be broadcast on the 9Network, 9Now and Stan Sport.
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