Lindsey Vonn is an ultimate iron woman. Skiing in more races, winning more medals and coming back from more serious injuries than almost anyone in her sport - male or female - ever. Vonn’s 43 World Cup downhill victories are more than anyone in history, male or female. She’s earned more season titles in downhill (8) than any other athlete. She’s won more World Cup races, (82) overall than any woman. And she is the first skier to win a race on the World Cup circuit for 15 years in a row. All that means she’s raced more, and longer, and better, than nearly all other legends in ski history.
Born Lindsey Caroline Kildow in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Vonn was taught to ski by her grandfather, Don Kildow, in Milton, Wisconsin. She grew up in the Twin Cities metropolitan area in Burnsville, Minnesota. Vonn was on skis at age two. Her father, who had won a national junior title before a knee injury at 18, reportedly "pushed" her very hard.(1)
When Kildow was 10 years old, she met Olympic gold medalist ski racer Picabo Street, whom she considers her hero and role model. A few years after "Street was stunned watching a 15-year-old Lindsey ski for the first time in 1999. She marveled at Vonn's knack for following the fall line. 'The faster she went, the bigger the smile she got on her face,' Street said. 'You can't teach somebody to love the fall line like that little girl loved the fall line.'" (2)
Kildow commuted to Colorado to train for several years before her family moved to Vail, Colorado in the late 1990s.
The move clearly paid off when, in 1999, Lindsey Kildow and Will McDonald became the first American athletes to win the "Cadets" slalom events in Italy's Trofeo Topolino di Sci Alpino.3 In 1986, Picabo Street, had participated, but did not medal, in the same Topolino event.3 After climbing through the ranks of the U.S. Ski Team, she made her World Cup debut at age 16 in 2000 in Park City, Utah in 2000.
For the next 18 years —more than half her life—Vonn (Lindsey married Thomas Vonn in 2007, divorcing in 2011) started in 14 individual Olympic races, twenty-five World Championships and a mind-boggling 395 World Cup races. Of those 395 World Cup starts, she’s medaled on 137 occasions—more than a third of the time.
In 2008, Lindsey Vonn won the overall World Cup title. She became the second American woman to do so, following Tamara McKinney in 1983. American Bode Miller won the men's title to complete the first U.S. sweep of the men's and women's overall titles in 25 years (McKinney and Phil Mahre in 1983). She also won the World Cup season title in the downhill and the U.S. Alpine Championships combined title (downhill & slalom), marking her best ski season to date. Vonn set a new American record for the most World Cup downhill victories with ten, winning at Crans-Montana, Switzerland, on March 8.
In 2009, Vonn repeated as overall World Cup champion, repeated as downhill champion and also won the season championship in super-G by winning the final race of the season. During the season, she broke Tamara McKinney's American record of 18 World Cup victories when she won the super-G at Tarvisio in February. Her nine World Cup wins also set an American single-season record, surpassing Phil Mahre's total of eight in 1982.
In December 2011, she won all three races in Lake Louise (two downhills, one super-G) for her second career 'hat trick', and with her eleventh win at Lake Louise she surpassed Renate Götschl's record for most career wins at a single resort (ten in Cortina d'Ampezzo). Later that same month, Vonn notched her first World Cup victory on U.S. snow, at Beaver Creek, Colorado. Due to a lack of snow in France, its super-G was rescheduled in advance for a Wednesday on the Birds of Prey course. Her limited success on U.S. snow is primarily due to a lack of speed events; only three have been run in the U.S. during her career. It was the first home win by an American woman in 17 years.
Vonn won her fourth Overall World Cup Title in 2012. The season opened in October in Sölden, Austria, where Vonn had won her first giant slalom. This made Vonn the 6th woman to have won all events at least once. The seasons of 2013 and 2014 were mostly consumed with recovering from injuries and illness. Vonn even had to skip the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Japan due to a serious knee injury. In the 2015 season, Vonn made a comeback and returned to top of the podium at the Women's World Cup downhill race at Lake Louise, Alberta, winning the event in only her second race back. In January 2015, she tied and then overtook Austrian Annemarie Moser-Proell for the most World Cup wins ever by a woman.
In November 2016, Vonn announced on her Facebook page that she had severely fractured the humerus bone of her right arm in a training crash. She had undergone surgery to repair the bone. Vonn returned to the World Cup in January 2017, in the downhill race at Altenmarkt; she finished 13th. On January 20, in her second race back from injury, she won the downhill event in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, capturing her 77th win.
With Sunday’s bronze, Vonn racked up a few additional records. She became the first woman to win a medal at six different World Championships. The oldest female racer to win a World Championships medal. And she matched Annemarie Moser-Pröll’s record, set before Vonn was even born, for the number of World Champs medals in the women’s downhill.
Along the way, Vonn has had to persevere through injury after injury. Since her first World Cup victory, Vonn has sustained major injuries in more than half of her seasons. She’s sprained her ACL, gotten micro-fractures in her arm, broken her finger, gotten a concussion, torn her ACL and MCL and fractured her tibia (that was all at her super-G crash at the 2013 World Championships, as it happened), fractured her ankle, fractured her left knee, broken her arm and suffered spinal joint dysfunction.
That didn’t include her crash at the Lake Louise downhill in December 2017. At the time, she described her knee as “swollen”—an injury which, compared to her long litany of battle scars, didn’t even seem worth mentioning. But it turned out it was much more than that. “My crash in Lake Louise last year was much more painful than I let on,” Vonn revealed in her Instagram post announcing her retirement. And that made her other victories last season, including first place at the Val d’Isère super-G just two weeks after the Lake Louise crash, even more impressive.
As she frequently says herself, she either “goes big or goes home.” Unfortunately, going big, at speeds and inclines this intense, can be career-threatening. Even life-threatening. But Vonn throws it all to the wind. She goes for the fastest line, the most aggressive stance—even when it winds up with her in the nets.
Vonn announced last fall that she would retire after the 2018-2019 season. She expressed hope that she could still break the record for most World Cup wins. She didn’t quite make it. Vonn remains behind record-holder Ingemar Stenmark, but is still the leader among women. Expressing some regret on her social media accounts writing:
“However, I can look back at 82 World Cup wins, 20 World Cup titles, 3 Olympic medals, 7 World Championship medals and say that I have accomplished something that no other woman in HISTORY has ever done.”
And
“I DID IT!!!! One last medal in my final race … I couldn’t have asked for anything more!” she wrote. “Thanks everyone for the years of support, it means the world to me! I’ll post more soon but first it’s time to go home!”
Asked in 2015 if she had ever wanted to quit skiing, Vonn shared an anecdote about crashing in 50 out of 55 races she competed in at 16, according to Vail Daily.4
“I wanted to quit because I wasn’t very good, I kept falling and I couldn’t figure out how to not fall. But I made a decision that I would keep going,” she said. “I didn’t really make any money but my dad helped me and I hired a trainer, and I just kept working hard and the next season it turned around and I started to do better, and I just continued to work hard. I never really gave up, but I did question it at one point.”
Vonn in March 2008
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/08/AR2005120802039.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20180615194501/https://www.nbcolympics.com/news/bond-between-lindsey-vonn-and-picabo-street.
"Trofeo topolino" Trofeo topolino. Archived from the original on February 22, 2014.
https://www.vaildaily.com/news/vonn-spreads-message-of-perseverance/
