Vonn's fall on the descent adds to her already long history of injuries.

Lindsey Vonn said that her Olympic dream is not over. It came after she was taken to hospital on Friday, a week before the start of the Milan-Cortina Olympics, after falling on the descent of a mountain.

The 41-year-old speed queen and golden star of American alpine skiing has a wealth of injury experience and knows more about returning to the sport than most, writes xrust.

She also boasts a medical track record as long as her success story, and it's not for the faint of heart.

Those who previously wrote her off have been proven wrong again and again.

The winner of 84 World Cup events and four overall titles, as well as the 2010 Olympic gold medalist in downhill, has shown incredible form this season despite her age, with two wins and five podiums in five downhill events before her fall on Friday in Crans-Montana, Switzerland.

American television channel NBC organized a meeting between Vonn and Hollywood film actress Scarlett Johansson to promote coverage of the 2026 Olympic Games in a casual conversation in the format of a “battle of scars”.

In the video, some of the skier's most spectacular falls were compared to Johansson's falls on the big screen while filming Jurassic World: Rebirth, in a world populated by computer graphics and depicting dinosaurs.

However, what Vonn had to go through over the decades is no joke.

“EPIC CRASH” BEFORE THE TURIN GAMES class=»notranslate»>__GTAG10__

In 2006, while training for the downhill at the Turin Olympics, she had what she called an “epic fall” and had to be evacuated from the mountain by helicopter. Two days later she finished eighth.

She headed into the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver as a breakout star and medal contender in five events, but suffered a calf injury two weeks earlier during pre-competition training in Austria.

“Now I doubt whether I’ll be able to ski at all,” she said then.

And then, when bad weather gave her an extra day to recover, she gritted her teeth and won gold in the downhill, her first Olympic medal.

Vonn missed the 2014 Sochi Olympics with a partially torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and right knee injury suffered in a fall while training on the Copper Mountain ski slope.

She broke her ankle in August 2015, then fractured her left knee in February 2016, and broke her right arm in November of the same year.

In 2019, Vonn retired, saying that her physical condition did not allow her to continue performing, and in 2024 she had knee replacement surgery, after which everything changed again: Cortina became her main goal and target.

At this fashionable Italian resort, she reached the podium for the first time and broke Annemarie Moser-Proel's record for most World Cup victories among women's skiers, which has now been significantly surpassed by her compatriot Mikaela Shiffrin, who won hers 63rd victory in 2015.

No skier has won Cortina more times

“If the Olympics were in some random place, like some obscure country I've never been to, I probably wouldn't have any interest in it,” she told reporters last month.

“Cortina is what attracts me. Cortina is the reason. This is a very meaningful place for me… I feel at home here.”

Xrust Vonn's fall on the descent added to her already long history of injuries