USA’s downhill threat Breezy Johnson has learned to live with doubt and fear | Skiing
IIn December 2024, Breezy Johnson slid into the starting gate on the Stifel Birds of Prey downhill course atop Beaver Creek in Colorado, a sight for sore eyes and a bundle of nerves. “The anxiety will always be there until I get downhill,” the 30-year-old said at Team USA’s pre-Olympic media summit in October. “Under no circumstances can I [I tell myself], I have this thing.”
Out of the World Cup for 14 months after location failures, she moved to Birds of Prey as bib No. 32 among 45 runners – all female for the first time in the legendary venue’s history. With a few bends of her rebuilt knees, she crossed the timing wand, charged through the Abyss (one of the steepest terrains in Birds of Prey), and continued to make her way across the icy 2.7km drop. Overall, it was a strong stretch for Johnson, a 13th-place finish at home to restart his World Cup scoring streak. And that’s how the future American standard bearer of the slopes started playing again.
The spotlight will be on Johnson again this weekend when she competes in the women’s Olympic downhill at the Milan Cortina Games. Since a breakthrough four World Cup downhill podiums in 2020-21 that propelled her to second in the world rankings, the Wyoming-born, Idaho-raised Johnson — who legally changed her birth name, Breanna, to her nickname, Breezy — has been heralded as a global threat, next in the line of terrifyingly talented American skiers behind Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin.
The fact that Johnson finished in the top 14 in his 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics debut, at the age of 22, only underlined the threat. But like many others in her chosen profession, she would fall victim to the inevitable dangers of her daredevil sport and suffer further from its indomitable aggression. But until recently, it was his body that paid the highest price.
Three years into her World Cup career, she broke her leg. within nine months, ligaments in both knees tore, forcing Johnson to withdraw from the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing. “As athletes we are used to very good control over our bodies,” she said earlier this week in Italy. “We can participate in extreme sporting events, and then all of a sudden you can’t even, you know, activate a muscle and walk.” The injuries were just the pretext for the hardest blow she had ever dealt – not to bones or tendons, but to her reputation.
World Cup skiers must check in daily to predetermined locations and 60-minute windows for random drug testing. But Johnson left his testers suspended three times (once in 2022 and twice in 2023), triggering an automatic World Anti-Doping Agency violation that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency upgraded to a 14-month ban. (Prior to that, she had never failed a drug test.) In a May 2024 Instagram post, Johnson apologized for disappointing her fans and called the missed tests “human error,” added that she was “paying the consequences” and vowed, “See you in Birds of Prey!”
Johnson has long spoken about the psychological toll of skiing — self-doubt, perfectionism, fear of failure, and intense therapy for all of it. She talked about the inner voice that whispered to her during her long runs off the slopes – “maybe you suck” – and how fear rises with her on the chairlift, always ready to plunge her into an existential crisis.
Recalling her suspension, she told the Washington Post: “You feel like a criminal. It was very lonely.” But instead of letting time spiral out of control, she turned it into an engine for self-improvement. Drawing on the mental toughness forged during previous injury rehabilitations, she trained on her own and watched her rivals improve their numbers from afar. “At the end of the day, I want to win a gold medal,” she said in October when asked about the growing number of potential world champions. “I want to be the best of everyone, not just in the United States.”
As promised, she served up that encore in Birds of Prey, delighting fans with a strong World Cup re-entry. From there, Johnson continued his momentum: first and third in super-G at the European Cup in Sarntal, Italy, bronze podium at a World Cup tune-up in Kvitfjell, Norway. Then, three months after Beaver Creek, she took on her biggest personal challenge at the 2025 World Championships in Austria, teaming with longtime friend Shiffrin for the United States’ first-ever team victory in mountaineering and standing on the podium in the women’s downhill for her first individual gold medal at Worlds. “I was excited because I knew I had skied my best,” she said afterward. “I’m just going to enjoy this because I’ve had a lot of moments that weren’t like that.”
The results solidified Johnson’s place on Team USA and as Shiffrin’s speed complement. And now, with Vonn’s recent ACL injury adjusting America’s medal hopes (even if her box jump display wasn’t impressive), Johnson also provides a bit of reassurance – ironic given her own medical history. With everything needed to ski in Cortina, Johnson charges for free again – this time with no headwind in sight. “At this point, I’m like, you know, your next Olympics are definitely not guaranteed,” she said this week. “We never know when the journey will end, so we must seize the opportunities that present themselves to us. »
