Four-time World Cup overall champion and 2010 Olympic gold medalist Lindsey Vonn will rejoin the U.S. ski team more than five years after claiming, in her retirement announcement, that her “body is broken beyond repair and it isn’t letting me have the final season I dreamed of.”
Vonn, 40, decided to give professional skiing another try after having knee-replacement surgery earlier this year.
“Getting back to skiing without pain has been an incredible journey,” Vonn said in a statement released by U.S. Ski & Snowboard. “I am looking forward to being back with the Stifel U.S. Ski Team and to continue to share my knowledge of the sport with these incredible women.”
In October, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation announced revisions to its wild-card regulations that allow for former champions who have not raced in at least two years to receive entries into events if they come out of retirement, even if they have not accumulated enough ranking points in lower-level races. This gives Vonn a pathway back into World Cup races.
Vonn has 82 World Cup victories, which at the time of her retirement was a women’s record that has since been surpassed by former Granite Stater Mikaela Shiffrin, who has 97. At the 2010 Vancouver Games, Vonn became the first American woman to win Olympic gold in the downhill. She also won bronze in the super-G in Vancouver and another bronze in the downhill at the 2018 PyeongChang Games.
But the wear and tear of professional skiing proved too much for her body to overcome. In the spring of 2018, she had unpublicized surgery to remove cartilage from her knee and then suffered a crash in November of that year while training in Copper Mountain, Colorado, tearing ligaments in her knee and suffering three fractures.
“Despite extensive therapy, training and a knee brace, I am not able make the turns necessary to compete the way I know I can,” she wrote in announcing her retirement in February 2019. In her final event, that year’s world championships in Sweden, she won bronze in the downhill. Then 34, she was the oldest woman to win a medal at a world championship and the first female racer to medal at six world championships.
Vonn told the New York Times that she was not ruling out a fifth Olympic appearance at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Games. Between 2008 and 2018, Vonn won 12 World Cup races on the course in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, that will be used by the 2026 Winter Games.
“I think everyone knows how much I love Cortina,” she said.
