Milan (Italy) (AFP) – US ski star Lindsey Vonn said on Monday she had suffered a “complex tibia fracture” when she crashed in the Winter Olympics downhill and would need “multiple surgeries.” In her first statement since the crash on Sunday in Cortina d’Ampezzo that brutally ended her Olympic comeback, Vonn said: “While yesterday did not end the way I had hoped, and despite the intense physical pain it caused, I have no regrets.”
The 41-year-old insisted that the ruptured anterior cruciate ligament she had sustained in a crash in a World Cup race before the Milan-Cortina Games “had nothing to do with my crash whatsoever.” “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,” she added on her social media, from the hospital in the Italian city of Treviso where she is being treated.
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Vonn crashed heavily just 13 seconds into her run after hitting a gate on the piste, her skis remaining attached to her ski boots as she uncomfortably slid to a halt. “I sustained a complex tibia fracture that is currently stable but will require multiple surgeries to fix properly,” she said. She continued: “My Olympic dream did not finish the way I dreamt it would. It wasn’t a storybook ending or a fairy tale, 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.”
Vonn gave no indication whether she intends to bring an end to a career that has made her one of the most recognizable faces in world sport. She has already had two surgeries to stabilize the fracture of her left leg, according to reports in Italy. Vonn won the Olympic downhill at the 2010 Vancouver Games but retired in 2019. She had resumed her career in late 2024 and was considered a strong favorite for the downhill at these Olympics after recording seven World Cup podium finishes, including two wins, before her pre-Olympics crash in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, where she damaged her ACL.
In Monday’s action, US-born Chinese freestyle skier Eileen Gu saw her chance of a historic Olympic golden treble slip away. Gu, one of the faces of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, was hoping to win the slopestyle, in which competitors must navigate obstacles and perform jumps. But Switzerland’s Mathilde Gremaud denied 22-year-old Gu the first of her gold medal targets, repeating her own victory from four years ago as she scored 86.96 in a stunning second run to edge out Gu. Gu, who also has a career as a model and studies at Stanford, has to focus on her two remaining events at the Milan-Cortina Games, the half-pipe and big air.
The newly-crowned men’s downhill champion Franjo von Allmen won a second Olympic gold on Monday when he partnered Swiss teammate Tanguy Nef to victory in the team combined event in Bormio. Von Allmen had been fourth fastest in the downhill on the Stelvio course before Nef laid down a near-faultless slalom run for a winning aggregate time. Mikaela Shiffrin, the USA’s other skiing superstar alongside Vonn, will make her debut at these Games in the women’s team combined event after being paired with downhill gold winner Breezy Johnson. They will be hot favorites.
In snowboarding, Japanese world champion Kokomo Murase clinched Olympic gold in the women’s big air competition as two-time champion Anna Gasser was dethroned.
After US President Donald Trump attacked her teammate Hunter Hess for saying he had mixed feelings about representing America at the Milan-Cortina Games, American snowboard superstar Chloe Kim called on Monday for more “love and compassion.” Trump on Sunday called freestyle skier Hess a “real loser” after the athlete said he was conflicted about representing his country while it was wracked by acute tensions over violent immigration raids. “I think in moments like these it is really important for us to unite and kind of stand up for one another, for all that’s going on, and I think that I’m really proud to represent the United States,” Kim said.
© 2024 AFP
