U.S. ski star Lindsey Vonn is in 'stable condition' after crash in Olympic downhill

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2026 Milan Cortina Olympics

U.S. ski star Lindsey Vonn is in 'stable condition' after crash in Olympic downhill

Updated February 8, 2026 4:06 PM ET
Becky Sullivan


United States' Lindsey Vonn crashes into a gate during an alpine ski women's downhill race, at the 2026 Winter Olympics, in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP

CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy — Lindsey Vonn's comeback had been years in the making, and the goal had always been the 2026 Olympic Games in Cortina. This is the site of so many cherished memories for the superstar skier in her decorated career, from her first-ever World Cup podium finish in 2004, to the Super-G race 11 years later that made her the sport's then-winningest female skier of all time ... But the slope at Cortina — the famed Olimpia delle Tofane downhill course — can be cruel, and the memory made Sunday will be devastating, as Vonn's hopes of capping her comeback with an Olympic medal ended instead with a medical evacuation by helicopter off the slope.

Just 13 seconds into her downhill run, as she skied through the fourth gate of the course, Vonn hooked her right arm and shoulder around the gate, which swung her whole body to the right as she skied off a jump. Her body spun in the air then landed — hard — on the snow and tumbled end-over-end down the slope.

That Vonn competed in Sunday's race at all made her performance a comeback-within-a-comeback— first from retirement, and then from an eleventh-hour tear of her left anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL, in a race just nine days ago. Her sheer determination and audacity to compete despite the ACL tear had turned Sunday's race into perhaps the most anticipated event of the Olympic Games.

Her crash was all the more devastating because of it. At the finish line in Cortina, at least a thousand faces in the grandstand turned in unison from anticipation to anguish, their cheers silenced, as the big screen broadcast her tumble. On television, announcers in every language cried out upon watching it unfold.

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