In her 41st year of life, alpine ski racer Lindsey Vonn has entered into an arrangement under the terms of which she is able to once again do things that she never thought her body would allow her to do again. And so she has thrown herself in. If you were offered that deal, you would do the same thing, wouldn’t you? Given the chance to run again or to jump or to throw; to see clearly, to sing, to dance, to love for the first time or to see a dear friend for the last. Any of those things that time and life take away. You would take that deal, right? But would you throw yourself in? Vonn skied fearlessly fast down steep hills and won more often in her speed specialties than any woman before or since. And she loved it more than she hated the pain, until there was too much pain, and even then loved it still. Ski racing was not about Vonn, it was of her. So she will not waste a second chance.
She retired from the sport — resignedly, but stubbornly — on a sunny morning at the 2019 World Alpine Ski Championships in Åre, Sweden, after winning a bronze medal in the downhill, the coda to a great career (or so it seemed). Vonn first had started a race in Åre, a Swedish resort 350 miles north of Stockholm, in 2002, when she was 17 years old. Her body didn’t hurt then. But on that last day she raced with pains both old (primarily but not only two damaged knees, the right much worse than the left) and new (bruised ribs, a neck strain and swollen black eye from a face-first crash at 40 miles per hour in the super-G five days earlier, prompting NBC analyst and former World Cup ski racer Steve Porino to say, memorably, that if he had fallen similarly, “You wouldn’t see me for a week”).
It was in all a brave and unexpected performance. Before those 2019 Worlds began, Vonn had announced that she would retire after the event, and described her body as “broken beyond repair,” which has become the go-to callback in her story. Her words, after all. In the finish corral after her bronze medal run, she said, “That’s the best I could have done today. There’s not another gear.” And that was that. After 393 World Cup races and a then-women’s record 82 wins across all events (since shattered by Mikaela Shiffrin, who has 99), after three Olympic medals (including a downhill gold in Vancouver in 2010) and eight World Championship medals, Vonn was done with professional skiing at age 35.
In retirement, Vonn sustained a cultural presence: On social media at sporting events, on red carpets, in exotic locations –“An amazing life,” she says — and also, notably, often in the workout room, grunting. She kept sponsorship deals with Red Bull, Under Armour, Rolex, Land Rover/Jaguar, HEAD (Skis) and others, and continued to work with her foundation for girls from underserved communities. Skiing remained a central part of her life, and her business; most successful alpine racers stay on the hill long after the racing stops, for pleasure and for income, as resort “ambassadors,” celebrity instructors or corporate guests. But Vonn remained hindered by the same pain and damage that ended her career. She had been talking about knee replacement since her late 20s, often with a gallows-humor delivery; now it was no joke (in truth, it never was, but Vonn often kept it light). “It was always my plan,” Vonn says. “I just didn’t know when.”
Vonn researched knee replacements endlessly, and in the summer of 2020, roughly 18 months after her last race, connected with freeskiing legend Chris Davenport, who had undergone a partial knee replacement in 2017, at age 46. Davenport is well-known in the ski world, a former alpine racer and longtime hill announcer at the Olympics and World Cup races, but most significantly, one of the most respected extreme skiers in history, with a long résumé of harrowing descents on some of the steepest, rockiest terrain in the world. By his 40s, Davenport had transitioned into ski guiding and had started a business organizing and leading ski tours. But even when he dialed back the intensity of his skiing, he says his right knee was “angry and swollen” after three ACL reconstructions (meaning he twice tore a reconstructed ACL after tearing the original). After his partial knee replacement surgery, he was nearly pain-free. “And I’ve been pushing the boundaries, full gas,” he said earlier this month from Japan, where he was teaching a group of 25 U.S. amateur skiers to ski deep powder. “This is my life.”
Vonn talked to Davenport a few times, and talked to many others, as well, although Davenport was her best comp: A brilliant skier in her approximate age group who underwent partial joint replacement to get rid of pain and stay active. Like Davenport, she had undergone multiple ACL repairs on her right knee (two in her case, since a catastrophic blowout at the World Championships in 2013). Two years passed after Vonn’s retirement, then three, then four, then five. She kept punting the inevitable, which is what prospective knee replacement recipients always have done (although that is changing — keep reading), because the surgery slams a door behind the patient. There is no going back. Last April, she underwent the surgery: A robot-assisted partial replacement of the lateral (outside) compartment of her right knee, performed by Dr. Martin Roche at Hospital for Special Surgery in Fort Lauderdale.
It’s important to clarify something here: Vonn underwent the surgery to chase away the pain and the limitations that came with it. “The plan was to get my life back, basically,” Vonn says. “I really didn’t think about a comeback at all.”
But it’s complicated. Vonn wasn’t expressly pursuing a return to ski racing, but her mind wandered, as minds do. And then her body would interrupt the reverie. “Cortina (the site of alpine skiing at next winter’s Milan Cortina Olympics) was always something that I was sad about,” says Vonn, “that I wouldn’t be able to compete there. But my body reminded me every day that I wouldn’t be able to do that.” In January of 2023, with the support of Red Bull, Vonn became the first woman to ski the Streif in Kitzbuehel, Austria, site of the annual men’s Hahnenkamm Downhill, understood to be the gnarliest race hill in the world. Vonn skied it beautifully — at night — and none too cautiously, on skis borrowed from U.S. racer Ryan Cochran-Siegle.
Her knee swelled so badly afterward that she had to bail out of a gala later that night; the damaged joint was good for big one run and one run only. But, important but: More than a year later when she began to feel good after surgery, the Kitzbuehel run came back to her. The knowledge that she still had it, however briefly — a seed planted. “That night in Kitzbuehel, I hadn’t skied downhill in four years,” says Vonn. “I went on new boots, somebody else’s skis, and it all came back to me so quickly. And if I hadn’t done that, I don’t know if my brain would have thought about a comeback so quickly after the surgery.”
Her comeback has aged into a very real phenomenon at age 40. This week, a year away from the 2026 Winter Olympics, she was in two places at once: physically in Saalbach, Austria, for the World Alpine Championships, where her most notable finish was 15th in the downhill, and abstractly, in uncharted territory. In the fall, she re-entered the international drug-testing pool, a requirement for any athlete considering a return to competition in an Olympic sport, and in November she told The New York Times that she was returning to World Cup competition.
Vonn since has competed in seven World Cup races (in addition to the World Championships), the highest level of the sport. Her results have been inconsistent: Twice she has failed to finish – a super-G fall Jan. 19 in Cortina, Italy; and a missed gate Jan. 25 in Garmisch, Germany. But before either of those, in consecutive races in St. Anton, Austria in early January, she finished sixth and fourth (behind rising U.S. star Lauren Macuga, who won her first World Cup race) in a downhill and super-G, respectively, results that stunned the ski world. “Those were a surprise,” says Vonn. “I’m much further ahead than I expected.” Her plans also have crystalized: “My goal, ultimately, is next year in Cortina.” And if she gets that far, Vonn says she will retire after the Games, and for good. So her story is both a comeback and a farewell: Two of sports’ most powerful tropes blended into one, with the Olympic Games as a backdrop.
In all of this, it’s important to step back and consider: What Vonn is doing — and attempting to keep doing — is seemingly unprecedented in professional sports history. No other athlete is known to have competed at the top level of a pro sport following a total or partial joint replacement. Vonn widely has been compared to other (relatively) geriatric athletes like LeBron James, Tom Brady, and Serena Williams. But there are significant differences: None of them took four seasons off, and none of them underwent joint replacement surgery. She is sui generis.
In a phone interview last week from Austria, Vonn said, “My knee feels amazing. I keep saying it over and over again, and nobody believes me. I don’t have pain, it’s not stiff, it doesn’t ache. It literally feels perfect. I feel rejuvenated. I feel like I felt when I started ski racing when I was seven years old.”
These are exciting things for Olympic fans to consume and for Vonn to experience. This is what the deal has given her. But deals come with fine print and with clauses and exceptions. Vonn is spending this winter in the same arresting locations where she grew up and became famous, but she is there not as a rising prodigy or a dominant star or a G.O.A.T. (that would be Shiffrin, if you insist on using that limiting acronym), but a once-retired athlete in her fifth decade of life. Her knee feels good, but her body is older. She’s vowed to use this mulligan wisely — “I feel no pressure, and nothing to prove,” she says — and that means keeping the next-level competitiveness that drove her all those years under control. For now. (As for Vonn and Shiffrin: They overlapped, they’re distinctly different in personality and athletic style, and they have never been good friends. More was made of that last part than seemed notable.)
The fine print says that other skiers will have fun with your birthdate, and the time warp jokes flow like a stream. Slovenian downhiller Ilka Stuhec calls Vonn “grandma,” and Stuhec is 34. “My teammates have been really sweet,” says Vonn. “But yeah, lots of comments about where somebody was when I did this or that, like I raced in my first Olympics before Lauren Macuga (22 years old) was born, and sometimes I’m like okay, we can stop on the time references now.” And even since she rejoined this team of younger skiers, the team’s Cortina prospects have jumped forward: Veteran Breezy Johnson, 29, won the Worlds downhill, and Shiffrin, also 29, is coming back from a November incident when she suffered a puncture wound from a giant slalom gate.
More pointedly, other retired skiers have questioned:
Her sanity: Michaela Dorfmeister of Austria, who won two Olympic gold medals and whose career overlapped with Vonn’s by 5 years, said, “Does she want to kill herself?”
Her motivation: Pirmin Zurbriggen, a Swiss downhiller who won 40 World Cup races but was done a decade before Vonn started, said, “I have the feeling that she hasn’t recognized the meaning and purpose of her other life in recent years. She has probably suffered from no longer being a celebrated champion.” (Aside: Who wouldn’t?)
Vonn has been through enough drama in her life, on and off the snow – most recently, the death of her mother two years ago — to absorb the extracurriculars. Indeed, if this comeback endures, Vonn will arrive in Italy as among the most celebrated athletes at the Games, and along with that, one of those with the most to gain, both statistically and materially. “Huge potential earning power,” says Davenport, who has been embedded for decades in skiing’s wild west economic world. As to off-snow motivation, Vonn sighs. “I’m a girl from Minnesota who loves to ski. I realize people might not believe that. Maybe their perception will change after this. I’m not sure. But it really is that simple.”
One thought: There are safer paths to brand extension than racing down icy mountainsides on long planks at 60 miles per hour.
Total knee replacement dates to the late 1960s, as a treatment for bone-on-bone arthritis; partial replacement followed quickly but only became transformative with the advent of robot-assisted techniques in the early 2000s. The difference is exactly as it sounds: A total knee replacement resurfaces all three arthritic compartments of the knee — the medial (inside), lateral (outside) and patella-femoral (front), and nearly in all cases, the anterior cruciate and posterior cruciate ligaments are removed in the procedure. In a partial knee replacement, only one of the three compartments in the knee is resurfaced with metal and a small polyethylene insert acts as the cartilage separating the bones, ideally allowing for smooth movement. Robotic assistance allows for precise matching of the hardware to the patient’s anatomy. Critically, the ACL and PCL are preserved in partial.
According to Dr. Sean Rajaee, Director of the Outpatient Hip and Knee Center at Cedars-Sinai Orthopedics in Los Angeles, “With the robotic-assisted partial knee replacement, a lot of the structures of the knee are not damaged, so that means, for instance, with a skier who is actively bending their knee, firing their quadriceps, and trying to listen to their body, they’re going to have more natural proprioception, the sensation of how the knee feels. Whereas in a total knee replacement you are going to lose a lot of that feel.”
Vonn noticed this immediately. “Within a few weeks of the rehab, I was doing things that had given me pain for 10 years. I could jump and sprint; I hadn’t done those things in years.” Healthy parts of her body had been compromised to escape the pain in her knee; they felt better, too. She committed to exploring a comeback, and told almost no one. “I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, and then let them down.”
In July, she took four days of pre-dawn snowmobile rides onto the Rettenbach glacier that overlooks Soelden, Austria, and drilled with two of her former coaches: Chris Knight and Patrick Riml. From there they went to New Zealand and then back to Austria and to Colorado, all off the grid. For the last several years of Vonn’s career, the issue had not been skill, but volume. She couldn’t train. That had been fixed, Knight says: “In the past, we always had to be careful with the number of training runs and conditions, and not get Lindsey into the red zone, pain-wise.”
I surprised myself,” says Vonn. “I kept waiting for something to go wrong. I was always hoping, but I didn’t expect that things would get to where they are today.”
There is an atmospheric worry that Vonn is risking her health by skiing after partial knee replacement.
Rajaee, the Cedars-Sinai surgeon, says, “There is a pretty low risk for catastrophic implant failure. But if you look at the product labels for these devices, they have not historically been meant for high-impact activity: Running, basketball, skiing. However, due to improved surgical techniques, many people are doing things like that, even on total knee replacements. There would be increased concern about the longevity of the implant.” (Vonn is aware of this: “I know I’m going to need new parts.”)
Dr. Nicolas Piuzzi, an orthopedic surgeon and co-director of the Musculoskeletal Research Center at the Cleveland Clinic, says, “First of all, in terms of safety, what she does wasn’t safe before she had a partial knee replacement, right? So there is that. I don’t have a concern about how the joint replacement will work for her, because she’s done this her whole life. Long-term, we just don’t have a lot of data regarding patients who perform high-level activities for a long period of time. But [Vonn] can definitely be a pioneer, to show what’s possible.”
Rajaee: “I do think there’s going to be a shift in the next 10 to 20 years. We’re finding out that limited arthroscopic meniscus surgery is becoming less and less promising, so partial knees and advanced replacement procedures are going to become more utilized. But at the end of the day, no one should get the idea that a doctor can rebuild you to where you started. It’s never that good.”
There is more for Vonn to manage than her knee. Equipment is an arcane topic, but central to the sport: Vonn is racing on the same HEAD men’s skis she used for most of her career, but the company significantly changed its boot model shortly after Vonn retired, and boots are the foundation of ski dynamics. The new boots are more vertical and less angulated, which sounds wonky, but it’s crucial. Vonn said it was boot issues that led to her crash into a super-G panel at last week’s Worlds. “It’s a process, and I have a year,” says Vonn. “But right now I’m testing [ski-binding-boot] set-ups in the warm-up area, and that’s not ideal. The puzzle just isn’t complete yet.”
She continues to time travel her body. “I live in Miami,” she says. “I was training for a Miami beach body. I was not looking to be strong to race down those hills.” It is like she is playing an NFL season without training camp; that will be different next year. As long as there is a next year.
The Olympics are a year away, but that year rushes past like a train. In the spring, Vonn will test equipment, and then in the summer and fall she’ll train in Oregon, Chile, New Zealand, Austria and Colorado, a grind that she hasn’t endured in five years. The volume will stress her mind, body and prosthesis. Olympic Time is compressed; by the time Vonn turns 41 in October, much of the work will be done, and realistic expectations established.
But along the way, there are races and standings and Vonn will be judged as a finished product, not as a work in progress, reality notwithstanding. The comeback will be evaluated in apocalyptic terms. It’s in the job description. Also, the top of the world downhill and super-G standings are similar to when Vonn retired plus Macuga and Johnson, all strong racers. “It won’t be easy to crack,” says Knight, but he adds, “People like Lindsey, Mikaela [Shiffrin], Sofia [Goggia], they’re different. They’re champions.”
It’s difficult to know whether to apply a past tense to Vonn here. She doesn’t know either. Only this: “I’m lucky. And I’ve already far exceeded my expectations.” Will those expectations change? No athlete has been where she is, or is going where she is pointed. She is less pioneer, more explorer. What she’s getting is a second chance, not a second certainty.
Tim Layden is writer-at-large for NBC Sports. He was previously a senior writer at Sports Illustrated for 25 years.
