Chasing Her Dreams-Lindsey Vonn
Photos Courtesy of Juergen Skarwan/Red Bull Photofiles
Vail’s Lindsey Vonn races toward skiing records
For Lindsey Vonn, a ski-racing veteran who at the advanced age of 24 has been through the wars of her sport, there are definitely varying degrees of disappointment. Last season saw her suffer the sweetest of setbacks when she couldn’t appear on the Late Show with David Letterman because of a writers’ strike.“I really wanted to do that, so I was bummed out,” says Vonn. But she was only in the running to appear because she had won the overall World Cup title in March, which somewhat eased the pain of not being able to hang out with Dave.“It was really lame,” deadpans the relentlessly goal-oriented Vonn, who did appear on CNN, FOX and ESPN last spring.
Then there was last summer’s bittersweet loss to professional basketball player Candace Parker in the ESPN-ESPY Awards competition for Best Female Athlete. True, Vonn lost (so did racecar driver Danica Patrick), but it was remarkable she was even nominated given the low profile of ski racing in America, where even some residents of ski towns have no idea what it means to win an overall World Cup title (total points accumulated throughout the course of an entire season).
“When I’m home I get a bunch of random people recognizing me, but it’s not quite the magnitude of when I go to Europe,” says Vonn, who still lists Vail as home on all of her U.S. Ski Team profiles despite her new Park City address, mainly because she spent her formative years training with Ski Club Vail beginning in 1997 and remains connected to the community. Now she owns a home in Utah but is rarely there because the epicenter of the sport — and by far the most media attention — is in the alpine nations of Europe.
To jog an American’s memory of who Vonn is (she changed her name from Lindsey Kildow last year after marrying U.S. Ski Team veteran Thomas Vonn in September), just remind them of the women’s downhill racer who had the spectacular “agony-of-defeat” crash during a training run at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Italy.
She spent a night in an Italian hospital with her childhood idol and now mentor, Picabo Street, at her side, then recovered enough from a battery of injures to return to the snow and heroically finish 8th in the Olympic downhill and seventh in the super-G. Those are the types of disappointments that tend to drive Vonn onto much greater things — the setbacks that gnaw at her psyche and push her to future greatness.
For instance, at the World Championships in Bormio, Italy, in 2005, Vonn was a favorite to win at least one of those prestigious medals but was thrown off her game. She wound up just off the podium in fourth place in two events but used that crushing disappointment to propel herself to two silver medals at the 2007 Worlds, her first hardware of any kind in the so-called “big events” of the Olympics or World Championships.
But those twin silvers came with a price when she suffered a knee injury training for another event at those same Worlds in Are, Sweden, and missed the rest of the regular World Cup season. Again though, that devastating blow lit a fire that saw her train with renewed passion for last season, and the result was six World Cup wins and the overall title.She received the crystal globe for her overall title, arguably the most coveted ski racing prize, at the World Cup Finals in Bormio last March. 
Lindsey’s legacy
Vonn is acutely aware Street won a gold, and that she needs one to validate her own career, especially in the fickle eyes of American fandom, which pays attention to her sport only every four years. Street won hers in super-G in Nagano, Japan, in 1998, the year after Vonn’s family uprooted from Minnesota and moved to Vail so Lindsey could fully focus on ski racing under the tutelage of the Ski Club Vail coaches.
Now Vonn is fiercely focused on the 2010 Games in Vancouver, where she hopes to forever exorcise her Olympic demons. Vancouver would be her third Olympiad after turning in the best result for an American woman as a 17-year-old at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games (sixth in combined), but she clearly wants to do much more than merely make an appearance in Canada.
And at least one all-time great agrees she needs that Olympic gold to make any kind of a splash in the States. “Winning the overall World Cup is a much more difficult task than winning one race, and I believe most skiers would consider the overall a greater achievement than Olympic gold,” explains Phil Mahre, who won three consecutive overall titles between 1981 and ‘83 and an Olympic gold in slalom in ‘84.
“However, the chances of winning an Olympic medal are much more difficult, as you only get that chance every four years. In the skiing world, Vonn will always be known as a World Cup overall champion, but to the general public it doesn't get noticed in this country. With that said, a medal in 2010 would really help solidify her legacy in the sporting world and to the general public.”
Only four Americans, male or female, have ever won the overall, with Tamara McKinney joining that short list with Vonn, Mahre and Bode Miller. McKinney, who won it the same year Mahre did in ’83, never won an Olympic medal but did claim 18 World Cup wins — the most ever for an American woman. But Vonn now has 13 wins after taking six last season. Another performance like that and she’ll pass McKinney.
“For the future, Tamara McKinney’s 18 wins is a big goal, and I don’t want to sound egotistical, but I really would like to break other records as well. I just want to try and keep winning as much as I can and see where it takes me,” Vonn says. “All-time World Cup victory leader Annemarie Moser-Proll is number one with 60-something wins [62]. That’s a lot of wins, but you never know. If Denver gets the Olympics in 2018 and I keep going, it’s definitely possible.”
That kind of understated confidence and drive impresses Mahre: “The best thing about Lindsey is she just goes about her business and let's her results do the talking. That quiet demeanor has been the trademark of a lot of World Cup overall champions. She's young and has several years of competitive skiing ahead of her. It will be interesting to see how she holds up to the pressure that comes with being the reigning overall winner this season.”
To put some perspective on the record of Moser-Proll, the Austrian great who retired in 1980, Vonn would have to win five races a season for the next decade to surpass her. Vonn says her goal was to continue to race through the 2014 season so she can ski in her fourth Olympic Games (in Sochi, Russia, that year). But the failure of Vail and Beaver Creek to secure the 2013 World Championships last summer has her rethinking that timeframe.
“It all depends really on how my body is holding up. If Vail gets the 2015 World Championships, I definitely would be trying hard to stick around,” notes Vonn, who would be 30 that year. “That’s a very reasonable age. Girls nowadays are going to 32, 33, so as long as my knees are holding up it’s definitely possible.”
Another curveball could come in the form of a Denver bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics, which is totally dependent on whether Chicago is awarded the 2016 Summer Games.
“That would definitely be very interesting,” Vonn says of a Denver bid. “I’m pretty much at the point where as long as I’m still having fun and my body is still healthy and I’m skiing well, then I’m going to keep going, and if Denver gets the Olympics, then maybe I’ll just have a kid before that — maybe take a half a year off for that, I’m not sure — because I really wanted to start a family around the age of 30. But 33 isn’t that bad either.”
Family Matters
Family is clearly a big deal to Vonn, who acknowledges how hard it must have been for her four brothers and sisters (three of them triplets) to leave Minnesota (where Vonn first made her mark with the renowned Buck Hill Ski Academy) and relocate to Vail, all to further her career. Vonn remains very close with her mother, Linda Krohn, an attorney in Minnesota who likes to occasionally jump on media conference calls after Vonn’s victories.
Though her own marriage ended in divorce after the family moved to Vail, Krohn says the institution clearly agrees with her daughter: “I think she seems more confident; she seems more serene and that everything is OK, and for a mother that’s a wonderful thing.”
Vonn’s success doesn’t surprise Krohn, but it does all seem a bit dreamlike. “It is totally surreal, but I have four other kids, so I can’t dwell on Lindsey. I see her in People magazine and I can’t even believe she’s my daughter — although I’d like to travel with her,” Krohn says with a laugh, referring a global travel schedule that Vonn often seems to dread. Krohn acknowledges there was very little glamour in the early days, but it was all part of her daughter’s dream from a very young age.
Krohn was on her way to Italy when her daughter had her horrific training crash at the 2006 Olympics, but she chooses to focus more on the fact that Vonn rebounded from the injuries and still raced — which earned her the Olympic Spirit Award — than the fact that her childhood dream of Olympic gold was deferred to 2010.
“When I went to see her in the hospital, she looked so good and her cheeks were rosy and I knew she was OK, and then everyone went to dinner and she said, ‘Mom, I don’t know if I can do this,’ and I said that’s OK. Of course, Picabo said a real champion would get out there, but that’s Picabo.”
Based on the fact she decided to race and cracked the top ten in both speed events, that’s clearly Lindsey, too.
Longtime Vailite David O. Williams is a freelance journalist and founder of realvail.com.
Reader Comments:
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