Lindsey Vonn Bombing Down A Mountain Days After Tearing Her ACL Is Mind-Boggling
Don't take this the wrong way, but Lindsey Vonn is definitely tougher than you
One of the stories in the lead-up to the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina has been the return of 41-year-old skiing star and, let's be honest, OutKick favorite, Lindsey Vonn.
That hit a snag just a week ago when Vonn crashed during a World Cup event in Switzerland that left her with an ACL tear, bone bruising, and meniscal damage.
So, Olympic dreams over, right?
Wrong!
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On Friday, Vonn hit the slopes for a training run, and while a training run is rarely newsworthy, doing it just days after tearing a ligament in your knee isn't just newsworthy; it might be one of the more impressive athletic feats in recent memory.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend to be a skiing expert, but I know enough to know that it can be unkind to your knees, especially when you're ripping down a mountain at the kind of speeds that Olympic downhill skiers hit.
Now imagine doing it with a banged-up knee.
I can't. If I knocked my knee against my bed frame I'd be canceling plans, but here comes Lindsey Vonn doing the exact thing that caused the injury a week ago.
Tough. As. Nails.
And that looked, again, to my untrained eye, to be smooth as hell. Plus, getting one run under her belt has to have put Vonn at ease for the rest of the competition.
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For a lot of sports, the Olympics is the absolute pinnacle, so to see an athlete like Vonn — who has already proven herself to be among the all-time greats — gutting it out like this is so cool. She doesn't need to be there. She's there because she wants it so badly.
That's what we like to see in sports: athletes fighting through that kind of adversity.
Vonn finished the session in 9th place out of 15 competitors and was just a second off the leader.
She will compete in her first of three scheduled events, the women's downhill, on Sunday.