Lindsey Vonn (USA) suffered a hard crash during the Olympic women's downhill on Sunday in Cortina.

Moments into her run, she clipped a race gate and lost her balance. She fell hard on the Tofane Alpine Skiing Centre snow and tumbled down the piste until coming to a stop.

A course hold was put into place and medical personnel rushed to attend to the 41-year-old.

After about 15 minutes, Vonn was airlifted off the slope for further evaluation.

U.S. Ski & Snowboard provided a statement on Vonn:

"Update: Lindsey Vonn sustained an injury, but is in stable condition and in good hands with a team of American and Italian physicians."

Vonn's sister Karin Kildow watched the frightening events unfold from the grandstands. 

"That definitely was the last thing we wanted to see," Kildow told NBC correspondent Cara Banks. "It happened quick. When that happens you’re just like immediately hoping she’s okay. It was scary, because when you start to see the stretchers being put out, it's not a good sign. But she really, we were just saying, like the Man in the Arena, she just dared greatly. She put it all out there, so it's really hard to see.

"[Lindsey] always goes 110%. There's never anything less. I know she put her whole heart into it, and sometimes, things happen. It's a very dangerous sport, and there's a lot of variables at play, so I don't really know exactly what happened, but it did look like a pretty rough fall. We're just hoping for the best."

It was the second time in two weeks that a helicopter carried the all-time great off of a mountain. Vonn initially sustained a "completely ruptured" at a World Cup event in Crans Montana, Switzerland on Feb. 8.

Despite the ailment, she remained confident that she would be able to race the Olympic downhill, participating in intense workouts and completing multiple downhill training runs. She actually finished with the third fastest time in Saturday's training.

Vonn retired in 2019 due to chronic arthritis in her right knee. After undergoing a successful partial knee replacement surgery in 2023, she decided to return to the sport with the goal of competing at the 2026 Winter Olympics.

“I wouldn’t even try this if it wasn’t in Cortina,” she told Olympics.com.

Vonn claims to have raced the Tofane course upwards of 40 to 50 times. She earned her first-career podium there, broke the then all-time Cup wins record and collected 12 Cup victories. No other skier has more.

Sunday's crash was a heartbreaking chapter of her 2026 Winter Olympic story.