CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Lindsey Vonn knows the Olympic downhill course better than anyone.
She’s won a record 12 World Cup races on the Olympia delle Tofane track — split evenly between six downhills and six super-Gs — and has a total of 20 podium results there, stretching back to her very first year on the entire circuit in 2004.
So how did the 41-year-old American standout lose control just 12.5 seconds into her run and crash so spectacularly at the Milan Cortina Winter Games on Sunday?
Here’s what happened and why:
Critical early section
The highlight of the downhill course is the Tofana schuss, a narrow chute between two walls of Dolomite rock where the skiers accelerate to 80 mph (130 kph).
But the real key to the Olympia delle Tofane track comes above the schuss, where there’s a key right turn that includes an uphill stretch. That’s where Vonn went down.
“It’s incredibly reverse banked,” said Kristian Ghedina, the Cortina native and former racer who grew up in a home just below the finish line. “That’s where your speed for the rest of the course gets determined and if you don’t take the right trajectory it makes a huge difference because you end up going uphill.”
Bumped into the air and clipped a gate
Vonn was fighting that reverse bank and trending slightly uphill when she got rocked into the air by a bump, causing her to clip the fourth gate with her right side.
That’s when the real disaster started to unfold.
Vonn tried to twist and regain her balance in mid-air but landed awkwardly with her skis perpendicular to the fall line, ensuring a brutal fall. She tumbled over, got bounced into the air again and landed on her neck area and slid down a ways before coming to a stop in the middle of the course, away from the safety netting but clearly in serious trouble.
Hours later, Vonn underwent surgery for a broken left leg and was in stable condition.
“It’s super flat after it so the goal is to be as close to that gate as possible and she really nailed the turn but she was too close to it so she got hooked into it,” Norwegian skier Kajsa Vickhoff Lie said of the gate. “But that’s how it is with the Olympics, you really want to be on the limit and she was a little bit over the limit.”
While it’s always bumpy in that section, this year the final bump is “more of a kicker,” Lie noted, which is why Vonn got popped up suddenly into the air.
“I watched the video, and probably like anybody else, saw that she went through that panel, that uphill double, and for sure kicked her in the air and there was a pretty significant fall after that,” head U.S. ski coach Paul Kristofic told The Associated Press.
Organizers defend course preparation in section where Vonn crashed
Women’s race director Peter Gerdol said the section where Vonn lost control was “not really more different than other years.”
“This is the Cortina downhill and this year we’re talking about the Olympics,” he told AP. “It’s awarding Olympic medals so has to be somehow challenging.
Had attention been paid to controlling the size of that bump?
“Not severely,” Gerdol said. “Because actually today, all the athletes went through quite easily. Lindsey made a mistake and it happens. It can happen in any section of the course. It happened there but it could have been in another.”
Mandatory air bag inflated under Vonn’s racing suit
When she came to a stop, Vonn’s skis were facing in opposite directions, still attached to her bindings. She then moved her left arm toward her body and was laying there alone and virtually immobile until help arrived after some tense moments. She received care for long minutes before she was airlifted away by helicopter.
The mandatory safety air bag inflated under her racing suit during the crash, supplier Dainese confirmed to The AP. The air bag, which is triggered by a complicated algorithm when racers lose control, may have softened her landing.
It was evident that the air bag had opened, because Vonn’s chest appeared puffed out when she was lying on the snow.
Marco Pastore, who works on the safety system for Dainese, said the air bag deflates after about 20 seconds, so that likely happened while Vonn was lying on the snow after her crash. Eventually, Dainese will try to retrieve a sort of “black box” sensor that could reveal data on the fall.
“She was wearing it when they took her away in the helicopter,” Pastore said. “So we haven’t gotten the data yet.”
