The essential background here: Less than two years ago at a hospital in Florida, Vonn underwent a robot-assisted partial replacement of her right knee, keeping an appointment she had made with herself years earlier. She was 39 years old and five years removed from her — seemingly — final World Cup Ski race, which she contested with bruised ribs, a neck strain and black eye from a fall two days before, a fitting portrait. She said afterward that she was retiring not because her competitive desire and ski racing skills were gone, but because, "My body is broken." She was tired of the pain that impacted not just her skiing, but her life. (And to be sensible here, it's not like she was cheated out of a long career; she is the oldest women's Alpine medalist in history — 33 when she won a bronze in 2018 in PyeongChang — and raced for 19 years, well more than half her life at the time of her first retirement. Her career was long enough, it just wasn't healthy enough.)
Vonn came out of the surgery revitalized, pain-free for the first time in many years. When I interviewed her about all of this a year ago, she said, "The plan was to get my life back, basically. I really didn't think about a comeback at all."
That changed. The knee felt better than Vonn had imagined. She has maintained that she did not go into the surgery with a comeback in mind, but as I wrote last year after talking at length with Vonn (for at least the fifth time in our respective careers), "her mind wandered, as minds do." In 2023, Vonn had become the first woman to ski the legendary Streif in Kitzbuehel, Austria, site of the annual men's Hahnenkamm downhill, feared as the gnarliest hill on the circuit. Vonn skied it brilliantly, and fearlessly, on borrowed skis and old boots, and even though her right knee blew up afterward, a seed was planted. She could still do this, even if only once. When surgery took away her pain, that memory propelled her forward into an unexplored world: Humans have done many remarkable things on full and partial knee replacements, but until the last year-plus of Vonn's life, none had competed at the highest level of ski racing, hurtling down mountains at highway speed.
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Her season has been called a comeback, but that is insufficient. Consider: Vonn was 34 when she retired, old for an Alpine ski racer, and she was damaged. Then she was in retirement for five years, walking red carpets and F1 starting grids, an exciting life that does not overlap with ski racing. She had moved on, and that time off alone should have slammed the door on any return. And now she races with titanium and plastic having replaced the mottled bone and lost cartilage on the outside of her right knee, far out in the medical wilderness. She has been so good that it all seems normal, but it is not. It is mind-boggling.
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her all the way. You've got to do what you've got to do at age 39.
