Queen of the Hill
America’s top skier has history in her sights
LET’S skip Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un and turn our attention to the Olympics in Pyeongchang, where all eyes will be on one of the most astounding athletes of all time — Lindsey Vonn.
Vonn is the Minnesota-born skier who, at the age of 33, is nearing the top of an 18-year climb through the mountains of the World Cup. Today she towers over downhill racing.
Over the weekend, on the eve of the Olympics, Vonn won both the women’s downhill events at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. That brings her record of World Cup victories to 81.
It also puts Vonn just six wins away from surpassing the current record of 86 World Cup first-place finishes, held by Ingemar Stenmark. Vonn could end up the most victorious skier — male or female — since the invention of gravity. Or snow.
So relentless — and fearless — has been Vonn’s rise that she’s now proposing that the Federation Internationale de Ski permit her to enter men’s competition in downhill.
Not that she or anyone else is likely to take victory in Korea for granted. That’s because there is an intensity to Alpine competition that is mindboggling.
In one race at Garmisch, Vonn beat the Italian lightning bolt Sofia Goggia by two-hundredths of a second. In another, the Liechtenstein lass Tina Weirather was third by one-hundredth of a second.
Talk about no room for error — or fear. When Vonn is hurtling down these mountains, she can be clocked at upwards of 75 or 80 miles an hour.
Vonn, moreover, is a onewoman demolition derby. In 2013, at the Super Giant Slalom in Schladming, Austria, she went airborne and started to somersault.
Vonn was still tumbling down the ice when her screams started echoing through the valley. Cameras caught horrified spectators clasping their hands to their faces.
It was the start of a cataract of catastrophe that kept her from lugging to the Sochi Olympiad the gold and bronze she’d won at the Vancouver Games in 2010.
A recent story from NBC Sports needed more than 800 words to catalog Vonn’s crashes and injuries — a concussion, torn ligaments, facial abrasions, hairline fractures, a compound fracture, broken limbs.
One of the things that’s so amazing about Vonn, though, is her resilience. It’s not just her physical fortitude, however incredible, but her stamina of the spirit.
In 2006 at the Torino games, Vonn egg-beatered at something like 90 miles an hour. In excruciating pain, she thought she’d broken her back and would never race again.
After X-rays proved her back unbroken, two nurses discovered her trying to escape the hospital. She was headed back to the mountain wearing nothing but an open-backed medical gown.
That’s what she laughingly told David Letterman. She did make it back to the hill, where, less than 48 hours after the crash, she finished eighth in a downhill race.
A glimpse of Vonn’s joie de vivre is captured in a wonderful video of her finally meeting Stenmark, the Swedish superskier whose record total of World Cup wins is now within her grasp.
Vonn flatters. She tells Sten- mark she’s as excited as “a little kid.” She asks for a selfie. Then she slips in a question about whether he competed in downhill. Only once, the great technocrat confesses.
The young woman invites Stenmark to watch her race. When she breaks his record, he promises. He knows that it’s by no means certain. But also that, barring tragedy, she’s on track to pass him by. What’s Vonn going to do then? At first, her proposal to compete in a men’s World Cup downhill seemed a bit chimerical. Even if, unlike Bobby Riggs’ tennis challenge to Billie Jean King in 1973, Vonn’s proposal is no joke.
Nonetheless, the lugnuts at the ski federation said no. “Vonn was turned down so emphatically, there seemed little chance of a change in attitude,” Canada’s CBC reported.
Vonn, of course, isn’t taking no for an answer. She’s rounding up some of the greatest men’s skiers to back her up. “Put me in the dang race,” she says.
Now there are reports that a revived plan could result in a showdown this year or next on the Alberta slopes of Lake Louise. Wouldn’t it be something if the glass ceiling were shattered by a woman moving at 90 miles an hour?