Lindsey Vonn had surgery on her injured leg Sunday after crashing during the women's downhill race at the Winter Games, and she said Monday that was just the first of many operations that will be needed. The injury is a complex tibia fracture, Vonn posted on social media, saying it's stable now. It "will require multiple surgeries to fix properly," she wrote, per the Washington Post. Vonn said the crash was not connected to the torn ACL in her left knee that she's been dealing with, or any other past injuries. "Yesterday my Olympic dream did not finish the way I dreamt it would," the champion Alpine skier wrote, saying it wasn't the storybook ending she wanted. "It was just life."
The catastrophic crash seems likely to end Vonn's Olympic run, per the Post, and her father said earlier in the day that's his preference. "She's 41 years old and this is the end of her career," Alan Kildow said in a telephone interview with the AP. "There will be no more ski races for Lindsey Vonn, as long as I have anything to say about it." Kildow and the rest of Vonn's family—a brother and two sisters—have been with Vonn while she is being treated at a hospital in Treviso following her fall on the course in Cortina. Kildow addressed Vonn's emotional state. "She knows physical pain and she understands the circumstances that she finds herself in. And she's able to handle it," Kildow said, adding, "She's a very, very strong person."
Kildow—a former ski racer who taught his daughter to race—said he slept in his daughter's hospital room overnight. He said that Vonn's being well cared for and that the US Olympic Committee and the US Ski Team have a "top-notch doctor" treating her. The family saw the crash from the finish area with the other spectators. "First, the shock and the horror of the whole thing, seeing a crash like that," Kildow said of watching the accident. "It can be dramatic and traumatic. You're just horrified at what those kinds of impacts have." He added: "You can go into a shock an emotional psychological shock. Because it's difficult to just accept what's happened."
Vonn came into Sunday's race as a contender for a medal, after being third fastest in the final training run the day before. Skies were clear. "I was simply 5 inches too tight on my line when my right arm hooked inside of the gate, twisting me and resulted in my crash," she wrote. Vonn expressed no regrets, per the Post. "Standing in the starting gate [Sunday] was an incredible feeling that I will never forget," she wrote. "Knowing I stood there having a chance to win was a victory in and of itself. I also knew that racing was a risk. It always was and always will be an incredibly dangerous sport."
This file has been updated with Vonn's post.
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