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Main Olympic storyline today: Lindsey Vonn’s harrowing crash in DH
Vanderbeek, a Canadian Olympic skier and now analyst, was emotional when watching the American skier’s crash at Milano Cortina 2026.
The American had to be airlifted off the women’s downhill course earlier this morning — the second time in nine days — leaving the crowd at the bottom of the course in Cortina d’Ampezzo in silence.
(Warning: the first few seconds are hard to watch.)
Seconds after kicking out of the start gate, Vonn clipped a gate with her right shoulder and lost her balance, falling to her inside ski, before losing full control and ragdolling down the slope.
Several metres later, given how steep that section of the course is and the speeds the racers are travelling at, she painfully came to a stop on her back. Her knees were buckled with her skis beneath her. She was unable to unclip her own bindings. Then, viewers could hear her agonizing screams, as she was in visible pain.
“I don’t claim to know what she’s going through, but I do know what it is to be here, to be fighting for the Olympics, and to have this course burn you and to watch those dreams die,” her teammate and Cortina downhill champion, Breezy Johnson, said after Vonn went down.
Johnson became only the second American woman on Sunday to win the Olympic downhill (after Vonn). It’s the same course where she was injured in 2022 and forced to pull out of the Beijing Olympics.
“I can’t imagine the pain that she’s going through. And it’s not the physical pain — we can deal with physical pain. But the emotional pain is something else,” Johnson said.
– With files from The Associated Press
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