United States' Lindsey Vonn crashes during an alpine ski women's downhill race at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, on Sunday.The Associated Press
The media hub of any Olympics is called the Main Media Centre. It’s where a lot of journalists start their day, before launching off to the venues.
Lindsey Vonn’s comeback race happened early enough on Sunday that people hung around the centre to watch it live.
There are dozens of screens and, in deference to those who are working, no sound. So I’m not sure I’ve heard a noise like the one the crowd of journalists made when Vonn crashed. The room went from a silent hum to momentary pandemonium. Like the roof was coming in.
Something else could always happen, but I suspect that wipeout and Vonn then writhing on the hill are the images of the Games.
In the aftermath, the online scolds have come rushing in. Vonn was racing on what she said was a fully ruptured ACL, an injury she picked up days before the Olympics started. She’s 41 years old. She hadn’t competed for years.
Fans react after Lindsey Vonn of United States crashed during the women's downhill on Sunday.Aleksandra Szmigiel/Reuters
On Monday, Vonn announced that she suffered a “complex tibia fracture” during the event. According to her, it will require multiple surgeries to repair. I’m guessing that when you suffer that injury in middle age, it’s never going back to what it was.
On that basis, the internet hive mind has decided that she shouldn’t have competed. Most aren’t putting it this way, but the implication is that she did it to herself.
Well, of course she did. That’s what’s so great about it.
We have gotten to a weird place in the world where we think that no one ever ought to put themselves in danger, even professional athletes whose job is jumping off mountains.
Lindsey Vonn’s father says he hopes skier will retire for good after Olympic crash
We used to think people who did this sort of thing were physically brave, or a bit wild in a way the rest of us wished we could be. Now they are irresponsibly reckless, corrupting the youth and should be stopped by the authorities.
When we were kids, we used to play a game that had no name in which we climbed onto progressively taller and taller things – walls, garages, trees – and see what happened when we jumped off them. Eventually, someone would roll an ankle and we’d carry them home.
Many neighbours saw us doing this and said nothing aside from the occasional, “Careful there.” Nowadays, I assume they’d call the Army.
I’m all for health and safety. Hockey players should wear helmets. Motorbike racers should use those airbag suits that can save them when they start cartwheeling across the track.
That said, I also want to retain some possibility of peril. Sports without danger isn’t sports. It’s exercise.
Life without danger is even worse. It isn’t life. It’s waiting for death.
Should Vonn have raced in the Olympics on a busted knee? The only person whose opinion on that I’m interested in is Lindsey Vonn’s.
“I have no regrets,” Vonn wrote on Instagram.
End of argument.
Lindsey Vonn crashed in her final downhill before the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics on Friday and was left limping and keeping weight off her left knee — a troublesome development in the 41-year-old's spectacular skiing comeback.
The Associated Press
What if Vonn had died on the mountain? Same answer.
Bad things will happen to athletes, as they will happen to all of us. What cannot be expressed, but is very well understood, is that the possibility of real tragedy enlivens the drama of sports. You cannot watch car racing without thinking on some level that this might be it.
Is it tragic that Ayrton Senna died driving a race car? Yes, very.
Were you to meet him in the afterlife, would you feel entitled to tell him he ought not have done it? I certainly hope not.
There are limits to this. The other day, someone sent me footage of a new sports venture in which unpadded, football-sized men run at each other full speed and collide.
Things like that and that idiotic slapping league aren’t sports. They’re sadism dressed up as entertainment. It’s like kicking cats for fun, but the cats are human.
Cathal Kelly: Fragile U.S. psyche faces trial by sport in Milan
Sports has grace and skill. At its best, it is inspiring. In one particular domain – the physical – it represents the best of what we are capable of as a species.
But you can’t have the lightness of triumphs of the will without the possibility of total darkness. You’re probably not going to die playing ping pong, but if you’re doing it so hard that you’re flinging your body around, those tables do have sharp corners. I’m sure the worst has happened some time, some place.
It’s impossible to protect athletes into invulnerability. In fact, attempting to do so fosters a culture of incompetence.
If Lindsey Vonn should be so afraid to ski that she would give up on her deepest desire, why would you and I, normal people, ever attempt anything that scares us?
Is that the environment we want to live in? Where the mere possibility of a broken leg or back or head is good reason to stay home? You could break your leg deplaning. You still go on vacation.
At some point in your life, someone has told you a story about how they were planning to do something frightening, but decided not to.
What you probably said was, “Good for you for knowing what you do and don’t want to do.”
What you probably thought was, “Coward.”
Skier Lindsey Vonn’s Olympic crash, which came while she was still recovering from an earlier accident, has ignited a debate over who decides when an injured competitor is fit to compete.
Reuters
The second instinct was the right one. Nobody should do things that are stupid. Everybody – little kids, old men, the comfortably settled – should do things that are scary, and all of the time.
The only worthwhile things any of us do are the result of multiple, often catastrophic, failures. Did you marry your first grade-school boyfriend? Well, there you go.
Vonn tried and failed, badly. We should celebrate this. Not the outcome, but the attempt. Society needs more Lindsey Vonns, in every walk of life. People who aren’t afraid to do something that might not go the way they want and don’t look around for someone to blame when that’s what happens.
At the temporary cost of her health, Vonn is trying to teach us all that lesson.
“It wasn’t a storybook ending,” she wrote. “It was just life.”