Lindsey Vonn addresses breaking leg in downhill crash at 2026 Winter Olympics; dad wants her to retire

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Lindsey Vonn sustained a “complex tibia fracture that is currently stable but will require multiple surgeries to fix properly” after her devastating crash in the Olympic downhill, the skier said in a social media post late Monday.

Vonn posted on Instagram about her left leg injuries following her fall in Sunday’s race.

“While yesterday did not end the way I had hoped, and despite the intense physical pain it caused, I have no regrets,” Vonn said.

Nine days before Sunday’s crash, the 41-year-old Vonn ruptured the ACL in her left knee. It is an injury that sidelines pro athletes for months, but ski racers have on occasion competed that way. She appeared stable in two downhill training runs at the Milan Cortina Games.

Onlookers on social media wondered if Vonn’s ruptured ACL could have played a factor in her crash near the top of the Olympia delle Tofana course, where she has a World Cup record 12 wins. That maybe, on a healthy left knee, she would not have clipped a gate and been able to stave off a crash.

“Yesterday my Olympic dream did not finish the way I dreamt it would,” Vonn said. “It wasn’t a story book ending or a fairy tail, it was just life. I dared to dream and had worked so hard to achieve it. Because in Downhill ski racing the difference between a strategic line and a catastrophic injury can be as small as 5 inches.

“I was simply 5 inches too tight on my line when my right arm hooked inside of the gate, twisting me and resulted in my crash. My ACL and past injuries had nothing to do with my crash whatsoever.”

Vonn’s father said Monday that the American superstar will no longer race if he has any influence over her decision.

“She’s 41 years old and this is the end of her career,” Alan Kildow said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “There will be no more ski races for Lindsey Vonn, as long as I have anything to say about it.”

When she arrived in Cortina last week, Vonn said she had consulted with her team of physicians and trainers before deciding to move ahead with racing. The International Ski and Snowboard Federation does not check on the injury statuses of athletes.

“I firmly believe that this has to be decided by the individual athlete,” FIS president Johan Eliasch said Monday in Bormio. “And in her case, she certainly knows her injuries on her body better than anybody else. And if you look around here today with all the athletes, the athletes yesterday, every single athlete has a small injury of some kind.

“What is also important for people to understand, that the accident that she had yesterday, she was incredibly unlucky. It was a one in a 1,000,” Eliasch added. “She got too close to the gate, and she got stuck when she was in the air in the gate and started rotating. No one can recover from that, unless you do a 360. … This is something which is part of ski racing. It’s a dangerous sport.”

The Italian hospital in Treviso where Vonn was being treated said late Sunday she had undergone surgery to repair a broken left leg. The U.S. Ski Team has said only that Vonn “sustained an injury, but is in stable condition and in good hands with a team of American and Italian physicians.”

Pierre Ducrey, the sports director for the International Olympic Committee, noted Vonn was able to train and had experts counseling her decision.

“So from that point of view, I don’t think we can say that she should or shouldn’t have participated. This decision was really hers and her team to take,” he said. “She made the decision and unfortunately it led to the injury, but I think it’s really the way that the decision gets made for every athlete that participates to the downhill.”

Teammate Keely Cashman also said Vonn’s ACL had nothing to do with her crash.

“Totally incorrect,” said Cashman – who was knocked unconscious in a serious crash five years ago. “People that don’t know ski racing don’t really understand what happened yesterday. She hooked her arm on the gate, which twisted her around. She was going probably 70 miles an hour, and so that twists your body around. That has nothing to do with her ACL, nothing to with her knee. I think a lot of people are ridiculing that, and a lot people don’t (know) what’s going on.”

The hours after her crash was filled with opinions, mostly of the second-guessing nature. Like, should someone have intervened?

“It’s her choice,” veteran skier Federica Brignone of Italy said. “If it’s your body, then you decide what to do, whether to race or not. It’s not up to others. Only you.”

Brignone suffered multiple fractures in her tibial plateau and fibula bone in her left leg during a crash in April and made it back to compete in the Olympic downhill – finishing 10th.

American downhiller Kyle Negomir echoed that thought.

“Lindsey’s a grown woman, and the best speed skier to ever do this sport. If she made her decision, I think she should absolutely be allowed to take that risk,” Negomir said. “She’s obviously good enough that she’s capable of pulling it off. Just because it happened to not pan out yesterday doesn’t mean that it definitely wasn’t a possibility that she could just crush it and have a perfect run.”

You can read her full Instagram post here.

Lindsey Vonn’s father said Monday that the American superstar will no longer race if he has any influence over her decision and that she will not return to the Winter Olympics after breaking her leg in the downhill over the weekend.

“She’s 41 years old and this is the end of her career,” Alan Kildow said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “There will be no more ski races for Lindsey Vonn, as long as I have anything to say about it.”

Kildow and the rest of Vonn’s family – a brother and two sisters, too – have been with Vonn while she is being treated at a hospital in Treviso following her fall and helicopter evacuation from the course in Cortina on Sunday.

The hospital late Sunday released a statement saying Vonn had undergone surgery on her left leg and the U.S. Ski Team said she was in stable condition. There have not been other updates since.

Kildow declined to comment on details of Vonn’s injuries, but he did address how she was doing emotionally.

“She’s a very strong individual,” Kildow said. “She knows physical pain and she understands the circumstances that she finds herself in. And she’s able to handle it. Better than I expected. She’s a very, very strong person. And so I think she’s handling it real well.”

Kildow – a former ski racer himself who taught his daughter to race – said he slept in his daughter’s hospital room overnight.

“She has somebody with her – or multiple people with her – at all times,” Kildow said. “We’ll have people here as long as she’s here.”

Kildow and the rest of Vonn’s family watched the crash from the finish area with all of the other spectators.

“First, the shock and the horror of the whole thing, seeing a crash like that,” Kildow said of what he felt watching the scene unfold. “It can be dramatic and traumatic. You’re just horrified at what those kinds of impacts have.

“You can go into a shock an emotional psychological shock,” he added. “Because it’s difficult to just accept what’s happened. But she’s well cared for. … And the USOC and the U.S. Ski team have a very, very top-notch doctor with her and she is being very well cared for here in Italy.”

Vonn raced the downhill despite tearing the ACL in her left knee nine days earlier in another crash.

“What happened to her had nothing to do with the ACL issue on her left leg. Nothing,” Kildow said. “She had demonstrated that she was able to function at a very high level with the two downhill training runs. … And she had been cleared by high level physicians to ski.”

Kildow said the crash was less a result of Vonn’s knee injury than the way she pushed the limits of her racing line to the point where she clipped a gate early in her run and got knocked out of control.

“There are times sometimes in any race, but especially in downhill, where you have to take a little speed off,” he said. “You can give yourself a little bit more leeway on the line so you don’t put yourself in a questionable position.”

Vonn, who holds the record of 12 World Cup victories in Cortina, returned to the circuit last season after nearly six years of retirement and after a partial titanium replacement surgery in her right knee. She won two downhills and finished on the podium in seven of the eight World Cup races that she finished this season – and came fourth in the other one.

“She won 84 World Cup races. And not many people do that,” Kildow said, referring to Vonn’s victory total, which place her second on the all-time women’s list behind teammate Mikaela Shiffrin’s record 108 wins.

“And there’s a hell of a lot of the difference between a speed race, a downhill especially, and a slalom,” Kildow added.

Vonn will not return to the Olympics to cheer on teammates or for anything else, Kildow said.

“No, she’s not that in kind of situation,” he said. “She will be going home at an appropriate point in time.”

Graham reported from Bormio. AP Sports Writer Will Graves in Treviso and Daniella Matar in Milan contributed to this report.