'I was ready': Vonn harboring no Olympic regrets

LOS ANGELES -- Knowing all she knows today, Lindsey Vonn would do it all again. She would return to ski racing after six years of retirement. She would line up for the Olympic downhill in Cortina d'Ampezzo at age 41, despite tearing her ACL two weeks earlier and suffering a violent crash 13 seconds into the race that resulted in the five-time Olympian nearly losing her left leg.

"I was strong no matter my age, and I was ready," Vonn told ESPN on Tuesday in her first sit down outside of her home in Park City, Utah, since the Olympics. "I made a small error and that's the price I paid, but I would do it all again if I had the chance. As hard as it is for me right now, and there have been some very, very low moments, I don't regret it."

Vonn was the top-ranked downhill skier in the world heading into the 2026 Olympics. She had won two World Cup races and landed on the podium in three others. But she crashed in the final World Cup downhill race before the Olympics, in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, and later revealed she'd "completely torn" the ACL in her left leg. Despite the injury, Vonn said she was ready to race in Cortina. She clocked the third-fastest time in training one day before the Olympic final.

Nearly two months after her catastrophic crash, after undergoing five surgeries, spending two weeks in the hospital in Italy and using a wheelchair for more than a month, Vonn is now able to walk short distances with crutches. She spends more than two hours a day in rehab and focuses on making small gains like doing pull-ups in the gym.

"What's going to make me happy is just being a normal person," said Vonn, who is in Los Angeles promoting an educational campaign with the biopharmaceutical company Invivyd around antibodies and disease prevention. "You really take for granted things like taking a shower, carrying things, getting up in the morning and making myself breakfast. So far, I can't do that."

Vonn said her broken right ankle is healed and the complex fractures in her left leg are on the mend. "My muscles are great. I have control. But I still need one more surgery to remove the hardware and then I have to fix the ACL at the same time," she said, adding that she's prepared for a long recovery. But doesn't mean she has closed the door on stepping back into a start gate someday.

"I was so focused for the last two years on the Olympics that I still haven't processed the fact that my Olympics are over. My season is over. I may never race again," Vonn said. "But I haven't made any determinations on the future because I still have to process what's happened in the past six weeks."