CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy — Here in the Dolomites, with the 2026 Winter Olympics finally underway, there is one sentence heard in recent days more than any other: "If anyone can do it, Lindsey can."
That Lindsey is, of course, Lindsey Vonn, the 41-year-old skiing superstar whose genuinely epic comeback from retirement to compete at these Olympic Games was suddenly thrown into jeopardy just over a week ago when she crashed during a race and tore her left anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL.
Most athletes would bow out after such a serious injury. Instead, Vonn stunned the skiing world by announcing this week that she would compete anyway.
By Saturday, Vonn had successfully completed two official training runs on the course at the Tofane Ski Center, where the women's alpine events are being held, setting the stage for Sunday's race.
"She knows she'll have to push harder tomorrow," said her coach Aksel Lund Svindal after Saturday's training run. "You're not going to get away with a medal unless you push hard, and I think she's ready for that."
How can a skier ski on a torn ACL?
The ACL, or the anterior cruciate ligament, connects the femur to the tibia and helps to stabilize the knee as it pivots — meaning it is key to athletes in sports like soccer, hockey and football, said Dr. Timothy Lin, an orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine doctor at Dartmouth Health who has worked with the U.S. ski team.
In other sports, like football, an ACL tear can end an athlete's season. "In the NFL, you are constantly cutting and pivoting," Lin said. "Although you can tear your ACL skiing pretty easily, skiing is not necessarily a cutting and pivoting activity in and of itself."
That's especially true of downhill, the straightest and fastest of the alpine disciplines. Skiers must turn and jump but spend much of the race skiing in line in a tucked position. Because of that, skiing in the downhill race, as Vonn plans to do Sunday, could be less risky than if she was competing in moguls or slopestyle.
In skiing, it's the unexpected crash, he says, that can twist the knee and cause the ACL tear.
But for Vonn, whose specialty is downhill racing — the fastest, straightest form of ski racing — he says, it's less risky than in other disciplines.
"She's going to go side to side, but she's not planting her foot and pivoting on it, hopefully," he said. "You can engage your quads and hamstrings to stabilize the knee in a predictable way."
"It feels stable. I feel strong. My knee is not swollen. And with the help of a knee brace, I am confident that I can compete on Sunday [in the downhill race]," Vonn told reporters earlier this week.
An injury with precedent in skiing
As a result, it's not unheard of for a skier to race after tearing their ACL. In 2022, Team USA skier Breezy Johnson tore hers in January before the Winter Olympics in Beijing, but decided to keep competing.
"I felt like it was totally possible. I knew that it was risky," she told reporters in October. The risk is that the next crash could cause even more severe damage to the knee — which happened to Johnson a few weeks later, forcing her to pull out of the Games.
"There are, I think, more athletes that ski without ACLs and with knee damage than talk about it," Johnson said this week. "People are often unwilling to talk about it because of judgment from the media and the outside."
Key to persevering, said fellow Team USA skier Bella Wright, is Vonn's psychological strength.
"We all know how strong of a skier she is. But I think that her mental game is what makes Lindsey Lindsey," said Wright, who tore her ACL in 2016. "That is what it takes to get through injuries, to get through the trauma, to get through the crashes."
Vonn's successful training runs on Friday and Saturday
Before the ACL tear, Vonn was the season leader in the FIS downhill standings and had a genuine chance at an Olympic gold medal, which would be the second gold and fourth overall Olympic medal of her storied career.
She acknowledges the chances are no longer as good. But she is determined to compete in the Olympics, and in doing so, complete a comeback story that would be monumental for any athlete in any sport.
"I'm gonna do it. End of story," she said earlier this week. "I'm not crying. My head is high. I'm standing tall. I'm going to do my best, and whatever the result is, that's what it is. But I can never say I didn't try."
On Friday, Vonn successfully completed her first official training run with a time of 1:40.33. It wasn't perfect — she favored her right ski at times, and she took one turn too wide and had to course-correct to pull herself back between the blue lines. Still, out of more than 40 skiers, she finished with the 11th fastest time of the day. Then, Saturday, she skied it even faster, crossing the finish line in 1:38.28.
Svindal felt she showed clear improvement from Friday to Saturday, he said afterward, important because Saturday's conditions were more race-like. The course at Tofane features a handful of jumps that require a hard, flat landing, he said, and a symmetrical landing, with equal weight on both feet, is important to ski the course safely and quickly.
He was nervous then and will be nervous again tomorrow, he said, but in a different way: "Yesterday was about, 'Let's please let this be okay,'" he said. "Tomorrow is like, 'Let's go and be fast.'"
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