Did torn ACL cause Lindsey Vonns crash? Ski

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Lindsey Vonn’s downhill run lasted 13 seconds. The query of whether or not she ought to have been racing at all with a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament will likely be debated for years.

What was going on in the thoughts of the legendary 41-year-old ski racer, whose violent crash resulted in her being airlifted off the course and in surgical procedure hours later Sunday with, at minimal, a fractured left leg?

Was it a calculated risk or cussed foolishness?

“She’s so tough mentally that as long as physically she was OK, she was going to do it,” said Stacey Cook, a retired racer and Vonn’s former teammate on the U.S. Ski Team. “I think the harder part is wrapping your mind around putting yourself at risk again. And that’s never been an issue for her. She’s always been willing to, like, put it on the line… She was always the, like, extra fearless one.”

What’s more, Cook said, think about what was at stake.

“It isn’t common in everyday life to go another week with an ACL injury, putting yourself at risk,” Cook said. “It’s always common to take care of it right away. But there’s more on the line for the Olympics than that.”

Dr. Neal ElAttrache, who lives in Los Angeles and is a preeminent sports activities surgeon, doesn’t rely Vonn among his current sufferers but he has scoped her knee twice to take away scar tissue. He’s also in contact with members of her medical workforce, as he educated Dr. Tom Hackett, a famend orthopedic surgeon at the Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colo., who works with Vonn to handle her knee health.

“These aren’t amateur people who were helping her make this decision,” said ElAttrache, who specializes in sports activities drugs at Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic and is famend for his treatment and research of knee, shoulder and elbow accidents.

ElAttrache said the standard risk-reward calculation was not in play.

“Everybody knew going into it that there was only one way that this was going to come out good, and that’s if she not only made it through the race, but performed well,” he said. “If she didn’t ski a Lindsey Vonn race and was at least competitive at the top of the leaderboard, it would be considered a failure. There wasn’t a lot of upside, except for Lindsey.”

This mixture of pictures exhibits American Lindsey Vonn crashing during an alpine ski ladies’s downhill race at the Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, on Sunday.

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

Vonn’s crash got here close to the top of the Olimpia delle Tofane course where she had received 12 World Cup races during her storied profession, six in downhill and six in super-G. She was on the rostrum there a whole of 20 occasions before these Olympics.

Cook said the first flip on the course, which Vonn was traversing when she bought into bother, is definitely a lot steeper falling away from the skier than it seems to be on TV.

“It’s like dipping into a double-black-diamond and trying to come back out of it for a second,” Cook said. “What the racer sees in that section is way different than how it looks on TV. The way it feels is a lot different.”

The racer is traversing the hill perpendicular to the autumn line, nearly transferring in an upward direction.

“It’s a very tough turn,” Cook said. “And the next gate, you can’t see it until you’re pretty much on top of it. You might as well put on a blindfold because you can’t see anything in front of you.”

She said you may have to be there to really perceive the problem of negotiating the flip.

American Lindsey Vonn crashes during the alpine downhill during the Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, on Sunday.

(Handout / Getty Images)

“To the average fan, you would stand on top of it and just go, ‘Um, no. Not doing that.’ ”

ElAttrache has studied video of the crash and said there’s no apparent indication the knee in query triggered Vonn to fall.

“It’s unclear that her fall was due to an instability event in her knee … and when you look at it, you don’t see that she was weight-bearing on that knee and that she had an instability event that led to the fall,” he said.

An govt from the International Ski and Snowboard Federation told reporters Monday that Vonn was merely “incredibly unlucky” in the crash.

“It was a one in a 1,000,” said Johan Eliasch, FIS president. “She got too close to the gate, and she got stuck when she was in the air in the gate and started rotating. No one can recover from that, unless you do a 360. … This is something which is part of ski racing. It’s a dangerous sport.”

Vonn had a probability to compete on one of her favourite programs and cap her profession with a significant Olympic second.

“This was not about proving anything to anyone,” said Dr. Armando Gonzalez, Vonn’s mental coach, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times two days before the fateful race. “It was more about defying the odds that were placed against her and being a competitor that always found a way, no matter what, no matter if it was pain, no matter if it was noise from the outside, she’d always find a way.”

ElAttrache made a comparability between Vonn and star NFL receiver Odell Beckham Jr., who was enjoying on a compromised ACL when the Rams received the Super Bowl in the 2021 season. Beckham understood the dangers, but was considerably at an benefit as a receiver because he knew the routes he can be working, as opposed to being a defensive back who has to react abruptly to what the participant he’s overlaying is doing.

In the first half of the Super Bowl against Cincinnati, Beckham suffered a full ACL tear and was incapacitated.

Often, ElAttrache said, an ultra-elite athlete will apply a different calculus when deciding whether or not to play with an injury such as a compromised ACL.

He said Vonn, having endured a number of accidents and surgical procedures to both knees, understood the dangers to her own physique the way in which few athletes do. And whereas most skiers can be hamstrung by a worry of injury that might endanger their profession, Vonn is an established icon prepared to settle for dangers others won’t. In short, it won’t make sense to many, but it made sense to the battle-tested Vonn, who has “earned the right” to make those varieties of selections.

What’s more, she had carried out nicely on the same course the day before.

“If you have somebody like her, who’s earned the right to try it, if that’s what she really wants to do, she was going into that race as one of the best skiers on the U.S. team,” ElAttrache said. “She was driving that ship.”