Lindsey Vonn, pictured right, fought back from injuries and personal loss to win a medal in Pyeongchang
PYEONGCHANG, South Korea – The hundreds of training runs. The gym workouts that would kill a lesser person. The time spent away from family and friends. The injuries.
So, so many injuries.
For eight long, often agonizing years, Lindsey Vonn focused on this day. This one run. She didn’t need another Olympic medal to secure her legacy — that was done long ago with her gold medal in Vancouver and all of those World Cup victories.
But whether you call it closure, karmic payback or something else, she wanted to prove she hadn’t been beaten. Couldn’t be beaten. She might not have won the gold medal she so desperately wanted, but no one can ever say that she lost.
“It’s all made me who I am. It’s made me a stronger person,” Vonn said Wednesday after winning the bronze medal in the downhill, her signature event.
“I’m really proud to have another medal and to be on the podium with the next generation of the sport,” Vonn said, her voice catching. “Yeah. I wish I could keep going. I wish this wasn’t my last Olympics. But it is. So I’m trying to accept that and deal with the emotions of that and enjoy the ride.”
For almost two weeks now, she’s largely managed to keep those emotions in check. After crossing the finish line, however, she could contain them no longer.
She exchanged a long, teary hug with good friend Sofia Goggia, who laid down a blistering run that neither Vonn nor anyone else could match. She sobbed during an interview with NBC. Even two hours later, her voice grew thick and her eyes watery as she talked about the family who was here and the one member of it who was not.
Vonn’s grandfather, Don Kildow, died Nov. 1. He is the reason she’s a ski racer, having passed his love for the sport on to his children and grandchildren.
“I wanted desperately to win for him today,” Vonn said. “I didn’t do that, but I won a bronze. I think he would still be proud of me.”
There are some athletes who transcend their sport simply by their sheer brilliance, their skill and success making their case for them. Then there are those whose perseverance and strength make their accomplishments all the more amazing.
Vonn is the latter.
She is the greatest female ski racer of all time, needing only six more World Cup victories to pass Ingemar Stenmark’s record of 86 and drop the modifier. She is now a three-time Olympic medalist, and her bronze Wednesday makes the 33-year-old the oldest woman to win a medal in Alpine skiing.
But it is the valleys of Vonn’s career, and her dogged persistence in clawing her way out of them, that have made her such a transformative figure.
She was a prodigy at 17, finishing sixth in the Alpine combined at the Salt Lake City Olympics. It was the best result for any American woman, in any of the five events. She was expected to be a medal contender in multiple events four years later, only to have a scary crash in training that resulted in her being airlifted to a hospital. She returned to race the downhill two days later, finishing eighth.
She blew out her right knee in the
2013 world championships, a devastating injury that would keep her out of the Sochi Olympics. She still has a metal rod in her right arm from a nasty break in
2016. There were concussions and other broken bones.
There also was a battle with depression, a divorce, an estrangement and reconciliation with her father and a much-publicized romance with Tiger Woods that robbed her of whatever private life she had left.
But while her body bears a litany of scars, her soul and her spirit do not.
“When you’re young, you ski and you win and you don’t appreciate things,” Vonn said. “I’ve been in the fences so many times. I know so many doctors on a first-name basis it’s ridiculous.
“But that’s what makes life interesting and makes you appreciate all the moments like this. Because I’ve been through the hard times,” she said. “That makes me a stronger person, and I wouldn’t change it. I would like to have a little less pain but, otherwise, I wouldn’t change it.”
Vonn might be leaving without the gold she came for. With everything she’s overcome these last eight years, however, winning a bronze more than proves her mettle.