It’s only Day 5, and I’m already exhausted from the tension. And from the questions: Why did they do that? How could they do that? What were they thinking? What was going through their mind?
I have come to realize that while the Summer Olympics Games is athleticism, par excellence–speed, grace, power, technique, and courage–the Winter Games are all that plus insanity and psychosis. How could they possibly compete under those conditions, especially with the eyes of the entire world watching? And yet they do, again and again.
There will be much to talk about in the coming days, but today’s post has to start with the big topic, and I’ll get it right out there. Lindsay Vonn is a badass, and I applaud her for her efforts. I know some of you disagree, so I want to get into this a little, into the context of what Alpine skiers do, and the Olympic history that surrounds an athlete’s choices. Part of that larger context is the stress of what all these athletes must endure in making spectacles of themselves.
They have a lot of nerve.
Dare
How dare they? Nina Ortlieb of Austria crashed in the Women’s Downhill on Sunday, just over a year after crashing spectacularly in a World Cup race. It was her 23rd serious injury. Cande Moreno of Andorra crashed in the Women’s Downhill on Sunday and had to be airlifted off with a helicopter. As she starts the recovery process, she brushes off the concern, saying “I’m positive, it’s not an injury that worries me a lot because I already suffered it two years ago.”
Are they nuts? Are they reckless? Don’t they know that this is a dangerous sport, and that no one wants to see them crash?
Daniel Hemetsberger of Austria calls himself “a little bit of a psychopath.” He crashed during one of the downhill training runs, so hard that his helmet came off. They ran him through the concussion protocol. He decided that despite the black eye, busted nose, slight concussion, and injured leg that he would ski the Men’s Downhill anyway. He came in seventh.
In the Snowboard Big Air competition, athletes fly down a ramp the height of a 16-story building, then do a few somersaults and spins, landing upright. Hopefully. It makes ski jumpers look like wusses–all the jumpers have to do is take off vertically and land on two sticks, not one. No somersaults or turns at all.
Ollie Martin of Team USA just missed a medal in his Big Air jumps. He landed a 5-1/2 rotation trick (a “1920”) but not perfectly and not far down the hill. It turned out that he had to be a little conservative because he broke his arm in the X Games just ten days ago. Broke it so severely that it required surgery.
They interviewed Ollie Martin’s mother who confirmed that yes, his arm was broken but the Martins had kept it from the media to avoid speculation, and that yes she was proud of him. The only “controversy” about Martin was that his blah landings (conservative due to … broken arm) were surpassed on the last run by the previous gold medal winner, who did a similar trick but with a better landing.
Strangely enough, no one is making a huge, hairy deal about the results and fortunes of these athletes, all of whom either crashed or were injured while competing. No one has called Martin was reckless or foolhardy, but instead praised his courage. Some op-eds claimed that none of the Alpine skiers were skiing injured, but I heard commentators repeatedly say of various athletes, “she’s coming back from a XXX just three weeks ago” or he had “a fractured xxx” just last season.
Breezy Johnson took the gold in the Women’s Downhill, happy to compete because she had suffered a serious injury just prior to the previous Games. Jacky Wiles just missed a medal but recovered enough to partner with slalom specialist, Paula Moltzan, to win a bronze in the women’s combined event. Congratulations to them! USA Slay All Day!
Je ne regrette rien!
But they aren’t the story, so let’s get into The Controversy. Lindsay Vonn at 41 was competing in her last Olympics. She has three medals, having won gold first back in 2010 in Vancouver. At the time of that first medal-winning race, she was recovering from a serious shin bruise that she said was extremely painful. But she raced downhill and won, hooray! In the 16 years since, she has had 84 World Cup wins and also experienced dozens of crashes bad enough to require being helicoptered off the hill. Ain’t her first rodeo.
This is what Alpine skiing is. Downhill is dangerous. It’s why we find it interesting, and why they do it. Vonn famously once said she would be willing to compete in events against men because of the challenge. She also retired once before, in her mid-30s, but returned, making one comeback after another. In a social media post, she said she regrets nothing, that when she was standing on top about to go, it was the thrill of the lifetime, knowing that she had worked so hard just to make it there. Whatever happened, win, lose, or crash, it was worth it.
I tried. I dreamt. I jumped.
So why was the reaction so strong when Vonn crashed in her final race? Why was the immediate reaction that she was “selfish” and “reckless”? As far as I can tell in my research, she didn’t take someone else’s spot. She had earned the position from her qualifying work during the competition season and had completed all the training runs. Yes, she had crashed a couple weeks ago but had the best doctors, and they all decided she was fine. She didn’t crash because of the injury.
Why Did They Let Her?
Meanwhile, other racers have weighed: “She’s a grown woman.” “She’s an inspiration.” None of the skiers have questioned her motives. None of the other athletes wondered what the doctors were thinking or who let her compete. Why are we?
Her father said that he doesn’t want her to compete anymore if “he has anything to say about it.” He also confirmed, as she said, that the crash had nothing to do with her injury, it was just a mistake on how she took a line toward a gate. Done it before. Made a mistake. Nevertheless, he said, it was so hard to see her crash. Hard for all of us to watch. That’s probably the key here.
I was reminded of other Olympic incidents. The first was in the first women’s marathon in 1984, when Joan Benoit pounded up the blistering LA freeways to take the gold. But Gabriela Andersen-Schiess forgot a water stop and came lurching into the stadium, dehydrated. She stumbled for several minutes until finally crossing the line. After she finished, the commentators, the press, Joan Benoit’s husband, and a host of other men said that they would have stopped her, they wouldn’t have let her compete. What were those other people thinking?
Andersen-Schiess, it turned out, was perfectly fine after a little saline. She had, in fact, been assessed by medical staff when she entered the stadium, and they determined she was in no danger. She was a cross-country skier, well acquainted with distance events, and had just made a mistake. Quite embarrassed about all the fuss the next day. Still, no one liked to watch her struggle and speculation lasted for days.
Then, there was Kerri Strug. She vaulted in 1996 for a gold medal and injured her ankle on the first landing. But she vaulted again, landed perfectly, then hopped away, having destroyed her ankle for any future competitions. At the time, it wasn’t clear whether they needed the vault. Later, some speculated that she was put at risk unnecessarily and that they should not have let her. Strug disagrees. She says meeting the challenge–physical pain or not, ruined career or not–was worth it for the outcome.
The Spectacle
We want athletes to struggle and be challenged. We like that comeback story. For some reason, though, when it comes to women, and particularly women whom we’ve decided to put on a pedestal, we really don’t want to see them experience that struggle.
Pierre de Coubertin originally blocked women from competing for a specific reason. He was all for girls doing sports, even boxing, because he believed athletics were good for children. But he didn’t want to watch. He didn’t want to see women making a spectacle of themselves. The comments by those in the media who don’t ski sound awfully similar to Coubertin, especially when they start interviewing fathers. If it was the mid-1970s, perhaps Vonn’s father might have added “maybe she’ll stop all this racing and finally settle down.” Thank goodness, he didn’t apparently say that, as far as we know.
Vonn shares membership in an elite club of people. Three-time medalist, five-time Olympian, one of the few women over 40 to compete in Alpine skiing, a woman who we didn’t want to see crash, who we didn’t want to see injured. So many would prefer to see her to just go back to the Tonight show wearing a short skirt. That is also part of who she is, and she accepts the marketing that she must do in order to afford traveling and competing.
But had Lindsay Vonn completed the run or somehow miraculously won a medal, we would have been calling it the Greatest Story of the 2026 Games. She knew she was a poster child for NBC. She knew everyone would watch and be unhappy if she didn’t do well. That risk was worth it for her, even though she has to live with our disappointment. It will take a lot of courage for her to face us and our anger and shock, but I suspect she’s got the nerve to do it.
