It’s been six years since one of the most decorated skiers in the world, Lindsay Vonn, stepped away from competitive skiing due to a series of injuries to her left leg in 2018.
As NPR’s Bill Chappell reported, Vonn holds numerous records, including the most World Cup victories by any skier — male or female — in both the downhill and the super-G events. With 82 World Cup wins, she ranks just behind American Mikaela Shiffrin and Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark. Vonn and Shiffrin are part of an elite club of female skiers who have won World Cup events in all five disciplines: downhill, super-G, giant slalom, slalom and combined.
And it seems she’s wasted no time getting back in the swing of things. On Sunday, at age of 40, Vonn made headlines by becoming the oldest woman to earn a medal in a World Cup race, following her performance in the World Cup finals held in Sun Valley, Idaho, where she placed second in the Super-G race.
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There was a lot of uncertainty surrounding Vonn’s return to the sport Sunday.
But she quickly reclaimed her form by finishing in second place in the World Cup Super-G race, just behind Switzerland’s Lara Gut-Behrami.
Vonn has now become the oldest female racer alpine ski racer to stand on the podium at a World Cup race, beating out Austrian Alexandra Meissnitzer’s record at nearly 35 years old in 2008.
“It was (expletive) hard,” Vonn told the Associated Press. “This is not easy what I’m doing. It just felt really good to say I did it. That I can still do it.”
Looking ahead, Vonn will continue her journey to the 2026 Winter Olympics, where she hopes to conclude her career in a meaningful manner. She expressed her excitement to NBC sports stating, “This is the road now to Cortina next year. And it’s begun, I’m positive, I’m happy. This is why I’m here: So I can ski in front of my home crowd, my family, and do my country proud.”
Source: www.npr.org