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Nearly six years after her retirement, American alpine skiing legend Lindsey Vonn returned to competition Saturday in a pair of downhill races in Copper Mountain, Colo.
The 40-year-old Vonn finished 24th and 27th, respectively, out of 45 skiers in the FIS Fall Festival runs. The event is a level below the top-tier World Cup circuit but featured several top skiers who were training for next weekend’s World Cup event in the same venue.
Vonn announced last month she intended to make a comeback almost six years after her retirement following the World Championships in February 2019. A knee injury ended her career then, but she had the knee replaced earlier this year and found herself pain-free, sparking the idea of a comeback.
She’s hoping to compete again in World Cup races and, if she can defy odds and regain something like her old form, potentially the 2026 Olympics. The women’s alpine skiing competition will be held in Cortina d’Ampezzo, where Vonn has logged 12 World Cup victories in her career.
“I’m trying not to get too far ahead of myself because I have quite a few hoops to jump through,” Vonn told the New York Times last month, adding that she “can’t say right now if it’s a possibility” to compete in Cortina.
Saturday was her first step back. In an Instagram post Friday, she called this weekend’s races a “training opportunity to keep on building” and said, “100% will come in time but not tomorrow.”
Vonn’s time of 1:07.23 in the first run was 1.44 seconds off the pace of the winner, Austria’s Mirjam Puchner, the silver medalist in the Super-G at the 2022 Beijing Olympics. In the second race, she finished in 1:07.52, 1.53 seconds behind winner Cornelia Huetter of Austria, the defending World Cup downhill champion.
Vonn is also expected to compete in Sunday’s Super-G races. Her plans beyond that have not been announced. Vonn hopes to use the lower-level FIS races to gain the necessary ranking points to enter World Cup events.
When she retired, Vonn was the most successful American World Cup skier of all time, with 82 individual event wins. That was second to Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark for the most all time in alpine skiing. At the time, a 24-year-old American named Mikaela Shiffrin sat well behind her with 56 victories. But since, Shiffrin — who was injured last week in a World Cup event in Vermont — has reeled off 43 more World Cup event wins to reset the record and sit one shy of the 100 mark.
Vonn was a member of four U.S. Olympic teams between 2002 and 2018, winning three medals, including gold in the downhill in Vancouver in 2010. But knee injuries recurred throughout her career and kept her out of the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
But with her knee free of pain and a new opportunity, Vonn is back to see where it all goes, possibly to a most unlikely Olympic bid.
“It’s been 6 years since I last raced so I still have a lot of equipment to test, finding my groove and really getting into racing form,” she said in her Instagram post. “I am having a lot of fun and want to keep on doing so!”
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(Photo: John Locher / AP)
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