The fallout from Lindsey Vonn’s devastating crash in the Olympic downhill on a severely injured knee prompted a key question: Should she have been allowed on a course that is dangerous even to perfectly healthy skiers?
The resounding answer on social media was no. The answer from the skiing community remains yes.
«People that don’t know ski racing don’t really understand what happened yesterday,» Vonn’s teammate Keely Cashman said Monday. «She hooked her arm on the gate, which twisted her around. She was going probably 70 mph, and so that twists your body around.»
Vonn lost control within seconds of leaving the start house Sunday, clipping the gate with her right shoulder and pinwheeling down the slope before ending up awkwardly on her back, her skis crisscrossed below her and her screams ringing out as medical personnel arrived.
She was taken to a clinic in Cortina then transferred to a larger hospital in Treviso, a two-hour drive to the south. Vonn «underwent an orthopedic operation to stabilize a fracture reported in her left leg,» the Ca’ Foncello hospital said in a statement.
The hospital initially said it would release an update Monday then said more information regarding Vonn’s condition would come from her team.
Cashman defended what happened to Vonn, saying the crash had «nothing to do with her ACL, nothing to do with her knee» and calling the public’s assumptions «totally incorrect.»
«I think a lot of people are ridiculing that, and a lot of people don’t [know] what’s going on,» Cashman said.
Vonn, a four-time overall World Cup champion, had looked like an Olympic contender in her return to competition after nearly six years. But she ruptured an ACL and sustained a bone bruise and meniscus damage in a training crash in Switzerland on Jan. 30.
She continued to prepare for the Olympics, completing multiple downhill training runs at the Games, before Sunday’s ill-fated run.
The hours after Vonn’s crash was filled with opinions, mostly of the second-guessing nature, such as: Should someone have intervened?
«It’s her choice,» veteran skier Federica Brignone of Italy said. «If it’s your body, then you decide what to do, whether to race or not. It’s not up to others. Only you.»
American downhiller Kyle Negomir echoed that thought.
«Lindsey’s a grown woman and the best speed skier to ever do this sport. If she made her decision, I think she should absolutely be allowed to take that risk,» Negomir said. «She’s obviously good enough that she’s capable of pulling it off. Just because it happened to not pan out yesterday doesn’t mean that it definitely wasn’t a possibility that she could just crush it and have a perfect run.»
When she arrived in Cortina last week, Vonn said she had consulted with her team of physicians and trainers before deciding to move ahead with racing. The International Ski and Snowboard Federation does not check on the injury statuses of athletes.
«I firmly believe that this has to be decided by the individual athlete,» FIS president Johan Eliasch said Monday in Bormio. «And in her case, she certainly knows her injuries on her body better than anybody else. And if you look around here today with all the athletes, the athletes yesterday, every single athlete has a small injury of some kind.
«What is also important for people to understand, that the accident that she had yesterday, she was incredibly unlucky. It was a one in a 1,000. She got too close to the gate, and she got stuck when she was in the air in the gate and started rotating. No one can recover from that, unless you do a 360. … This is something which is part of ski racing. It’s a dangerous sport.»
Pierre Ducrey, the sports director for the International Olympic Committee, noted Vonn was able to train and had experts counseling her decision.
«So from that point of view, I don’t think we can say that she should or shouldn’t have participated. This decision was really hers and her team to take,» he said. «She made the decision and unfortunately it led to the injury, but I think it’s really the way that the decision gets made for every athlete that participates to the downhill.»
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
