The cruelest truth in Lindsey's Vonn last, unexpected Olympic quest is not just that it became more difficult, when she crashed last Friday morning while racing in Switzerland, and ruptured the ACL in her left knee (not the one that was partially replaced two years ago; the other one). Although it most assuredly did become more difficult. The unexpected Olympic quest also became imperfect, a more existential reality for a 41-year-old woman for whom this outrageous comeback was foundationally about skiing—and skiing whole for the first time in many years. The two might seem linked, but Vonn has done plenty of very fast skiing in her life while injured, more than most; she just grew defeated by it and had to stop. This time she was not only chasing a fourth Olympic medal, but also escaping the physical disruption that has long accompanied every turn.

It had gone astonishingly well. This season Vonn has won two World Cup downhills and leads the downhill season standings; before the crash, she had been on the podium in seven of eight speed races (downhills and super-Gs). She was not just a medal possibility, but a medal favorite, and arguably the most compelling U.S. Olympic story on a long list that includes figure skating virtuoso Ilia Malinin, dominant speed skater Jordan Stolz; cross-country veteran Jessie Diggins, and Mikaela Shiffrin, the most accomplished Alpine ski racer in history, back at the Games after uncharacteristic disappointments four years ago in Beijing, seeking to right those wrongs.

Until Friday this Vonn narrative had not included safety netting, medical personnel or being airlifted to a hospital in a snowstorm, while dangling from a long tether attached to a helicopter a week before the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics commence. It had not included a ruptured ACL and attempting to compete in a knee brace. But it does now.

"This is not, obviously, what I had hoped for," Vonn said Tuesday at a press conference in Cortina, Italy, site of the women's Alpine races. "I've been working really hard to come into these Games in a much different position. I know what my chances were before the crash, and I know my chances aren't the same, as it stands today. But I know there's still a chance, and as long as there's a chance, I will try."

This was the press conference that Vonn opened by announcing, almost matter-of-factly, that she had, indeed, ruptured her ACL in the crash four days earlier. This was shocking, but not surprising; the crash was messy and violent and her left knee was visibly compressed at high speed, which often leads to ligament damage in ski racing.

It is also not surprising that Vonn has chosen to move forward with the three downhill training runs later this week, and potentially, the downhill itself on Sunday morning and if that goes acceptably well (a metric Vonn and her team will measure), the team combined two days later and the super-G two days after that. It is not surprising on a practical level, because Vonn says her joint is stable, and that she is not in pain. She skied earlier on Tuesday. "I feel stable, I feel strong," she said. "My knee is not swollen and with the help of a knee brace, I am confident that I can compete on Sunday."

It is also not surprising on a more ethereal level. Vonn will compete because she is Vonn. "She is the kind of person who would ski with a torn ACL," said NBC Alpine skiing analyst Steve Porino. "It's something that Lindsey Vonn would do."

All of this represents a mighty shift in the storyline. Just a week ago, Vonn was surging toward Cortina as the best downhiller in the world at an age far beyond common, and healthier than she had been in many years. Shockingly so. It was as if she had been gifted a new life. Now she is where she has so often been: fighting the hill and her opponents, and her own body. "I have always pushed the limits, and in downhill, it's a very dangerous sport, and anything can happen," she said Tuesday. "And because I push the limits, I crash, and I've been injured more times than I would like to admit, to myself, even. But these are the cards I've been dealt in my life," — she can't not push — "and I'm going to play my cards the best way I can."

The essential background here: Less than two years ago at a hospital in Florida, Vonn underwent a robot-assisted partial replacement of her right knee, keeping an appointment she had made with herself years earlier. She was 39 years old and five years removed from her — seemingly — final World Cup Ski race, which she contested with bruised ribs, a neck strain and black eye from a fall two days before, a fitting portrait. She said afterward that she was retiring not because her competitive desire and ski racing skills were gone, but because, "My body is broken." She was tired of the pain that impacted not just her skiing, but her life. (And to be sensible here, it's not like she was cheated out of a long career; she is the oldest women's Alpine medalist in history — 33 when she won a bronze in 2018 in PyeongChang — and raced for 19 years, well more than half her life at the time of her first retirement. Her career was long enough, it just wasn't healthy enough.)

Vonn came out of the surgery revitalized, pain-free for the first time in many years. When I interviewed her about all of this a year ago, she said, "The plan was to get my life back, basically. I really didn't think about a comeback at all."

That changed. The knee felt better than Vonn had imagined. She has maintained that she did not go into the surgery with a comeback in mind, but as I wrote last year after talking at length with Vonn (for at least the fifth time in our respective careers), "her mind wandered, as minds do." In 2023, Vonn had become the first woman to ski the legendary Streif in Kitzbuehel, Austria, site of the annual men's Hahnenkamm downhill, feared as the gnarliest hill on the circuit. Vonn skied it brilliantly, and fearlessly, on borrowed skis and old boots, and even though her right knee blew up afterward, a seed was planted. She could still do this, even if only once. When surgery took away her pain, that memory propelled her forward into an unexplored world: Humans have done many remarkable things on full and partial knee replacements, but until the last year-plus of Vonn's life, none had competed at the highest level of ski racing, hurtling down mountains at highway speed.

She trained surreptitiously at first, and then rejoined the World Cup circuit last winter. She was not taken entirely seriously: Some retired ski racers belittled her effort as needy or foolish. Others suggested it was just brand extension for a celebrity. Vonn said to me at the time, "I'm a girl from Minnesota who loves to ski. I realize people might not believe that. Maybe their perception will change after this. But it really is that simple." She narrowly missed a super-G podium finish in one race, but her average finish in 10 races was 13th and three times she failed to finish.

But then in the World Cup Finals on home snow in Sun Valley, Idaho, she finished 2nd in super-G, the first podium of her second career. It was a harbinger. This season has been remarkable. Vonn raced eight times before the Crans-Montana crash, won twice, and made the podium in seven (the one non-podium was a 4th). She has been fast and consistent at the highest level. Cynicism fell largely silent. Vonn was again consumed as an athlete, not as a curiosity.

Her season has been called a comeback, but that is insufficient. Consider: Vonn was 34 when she retired, old for an Alpine ski racer, and she was damaged. Then she was in retirement for five years, walking red carpets and F1 starting grids, an exciting life that does not overlap with ski racing. She had moved on, and that time off alone should have slammed the door on any return. And now she races with titanium and plastic having replaced the mottled bone and lost cartilage on the outside of her right knee, far out in the medical wilderness. She has been so good that it all seems normal, but it is not. It is mind-boggling.

All of that changed last Friday in Crans-Montana, one of the most challenging slopes on the women's circuit. Vonn was the sixth skier down the course — two of the first five had failed to finish. Nevertheless, Vonn was incautious; in the first 12 seconds of the race, her split was more than half a second faster than any of the five racers who preceded, a small but telling sample. It was probably too fast. High on the course, a jump leads to an aggressive right turn; Vonn landed on the tails of her skis, tumbled downhill and then sideways into the nets. Two-time U.S. Olympic gold medalist Ted Ligety, who will do analysis on Olympic Alpine events for NBC, described the crash in an interview: "She was inside and off-balance on takeoff from the jump so she landed inside and on edge and locked on edge, but on the opposite edge she needed to be on to make the turn, so her body’s momentum was thrown down the hill against the direction of her skis."

The race was cancelled after Vonn's crash. This created controversy. Many of the remaining skiers wanted a downhill run before the Olympics and said the hill and the conditions — slightly foggy — were not unsafe. U.S. racer Breezy Johnson was caught on a hot mic at the top of the hill saying, "What the f---?" (And later apologized). Italian Sofia Goggia, a gold-medal threat in both downhill and super-G, and a good friend of Vonn's, said, "Some athletes count more than others," presumed to be a reference to Vonn, who has always been an outsized presence on the circuit, because of her success, her popularity, and her aggressive off-snow marketing. This is all prickly. The Olympics come once every four years and there are only three medals. There are surely some racers who resent Vonn for overstaying her welcome.

(Vonn said Tuesday that criticism stung, but that many competitors had apologized. Also: She's experienced enough to absorb whatever drama comes her way, even to utilize it).

These will be Vonn's fifth Olympics; if she gets to the start house on Sunday, she will be the first female Alpine skier to compete in five Games. However: She was only healthy for the first, as a 17-year-old at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, when she finished 6th in the combined event. In 2006 in Torino, she stubbornly raced downhill (8th) and super-G (7th) after an action-movie crash in downhill training that should have ended her participation. But it did not. She won the downhill gold in 2010 in Vancouver (the first and only downhill gold by an American woman), but only after a tenuous week in which severe shin bruises ("shin bang") almost kept her out of the race. She missed Sochi 2014 altogether with a second right ACL tear, and in 2018 in PyeongChang, she won a bronze medal in the downhill as that same right knee deteriorated further.

None of these, says Vonn, were as bad as the 2019 World Championships, the last competition of her first career. She won a bronze medal in the downhill with what she later learned was a torn left LCL and three tibial fractures, and five days after a violent super-G crash that left her with bruised ribs and a black eye. Vonn mentioned that one in her press conference Tuesday. "I feel a lot better [now] than I did in 2019 for my last World Championships," she said. "And I still got a medal there."

There is something inevitable here. Vonn was not, in fact, given a new life, just a new knee. The rest is still her. Ever wounded by her own hand. Ever pushing. It is who she is.