‘She’s a grown woman’: skiers defend Lindsey Vonn’s decision to race despite crash | Lindsey Vonn

Lindsey Vonn’s fellow skiers defended her decision to compete in the women’s downhill at the Winter Olympics while dealing with a torn ACL.

The American fell early in her race on Sunday. She suffered a broken leg and was airlifted from the course. Some social media users said she shouldn’t have been running just a week after injuring her knee. But those who know the risks of skiing were most supportive of Vonn’s decision.

“People who don’t know ski racing don’t really understand what happened yesterday,” Vonn’s American teammate, Keely Cashman, said Monday. “She hooked her arm on the door, which caused her to turn around. She was probably going 70 mph, and so that makes your body spin.”

Cashman, who herself suffered a serious fall five years ago, said Vonn’s fall had “nothing to do with her ACL, nothing to do with her knee,” and that anyone who thinks otherwise is “totally wrong.”

“I think a lot of people ridicule that, and a lot of people don’t. [know] what’s going on,” Cashman added.

Vonn was in the midst of a remarkable comeback, coming out of a six-year retirement in 2025 following a knee replacement. There were doubts about the 41-year-old’s ability to compete at the highest level again, but she stood on the podium in all five World Cup downhill races she competed in before the Olympics, including two victories. However, the accident in late January that ruptured her ACL raised questions about whether she was risking her life as she sought to win her second Olympic gold medal.

Italian Federica Brignone, two-time world champion, rejected these criticisms. “It’s his choice,” Brignone said. “If it’s your body, then you decide what to do, whether you want to run or not. It doesn’t depend on others. Only you.”

Another of Vonn’s American teammates, downhill specialist Kyle Negomir, also had no problem with her decision to replicate her gold medal she won at the 2010 Olympics.

“Lindsey is a grown woman and the best speed skier to ever play the sport. If she made her decision, I think she should absolutely be allowed to take that risk,” Negomir said. “She’s obviously good enough to be able to pull it off. Just because it didn’t work yesterday doesn’t mean there was absolutely no way she could just crush it and have a perfect race.”

International Ski and Snowboard Federation President Johan Eliasch said it was common for athletes to compete while suffering from injuries.

“I strongly believe that this has to be decided by each individual athlete,” Eliasch said Monday. “And in her case, she certainly knows her injuries on her body better than anyone. And if you look here today with all the athletes, yesterday’s athletes, every athlete has a little injury of some kind.

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

Vonn’s American teammate, Breezy Johnson, won gold on Sunday. She explained why skiers choose to compete in such a dangerous sport.

“I know how hard it is to ski this course and how sometimes, because you love this course so much, when you fall on it and it hurts like that, it hurts you even more,” she said. “…I can’t imagine the pain she’s going through, and it’s not physical pain, we can handle physical pain. But emotional pain is something else.”