Lindsey Vonn says she nearly lost her leg after a second brutal injury at the 2026 Winter Olympics.
In the lead-in to the 2026 Games, Vonn tore her ACL in a separate event but opted out of immediate surgery so she could compete in Milan. Shortly after arriving, however, she suffered another crash that led to a broken leg. She was airlifted to a hospital and had surgery before heading back to the States.
In a new social post, Vonn explained that the break was much worse than was previously reported.
“I’ll give you the full rundown,” Vonn started. “Basically, I had a complex tibia fracture. I also fractured my fibular head, my tibial plateau — just kind of everything was in pieces. And the reason why it was so complex was because I had compartment syndrome, and compartment syndrome is when you have so much trauma to one area of your body that there’s too much blood and it gets stuck and it basically crushes everything in the compartment. So all the muscle and nerves and tendons, it all kind of dies.”
She added: “Dr. Tom Hackett saved my leg. He saved my leg from being amputated. He did what’s called a fasciotomy, where he cut open, like, both sides of my leg – kind of fileted it open, so to speak – let it breathe, and he saved me.”
Vonn came out of retirement for the 2026 games and has suffered a number of high-profile injuries throughout her career, facing everything from broken bones to serious knee ligament tears. She originally retired from professional skiing in February 2019 after winning gold and bronze medals at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and a bronze medal at the 2018 Pyeongchang games.
Following the initial crash, the Olympic winner made it clear that her ACL injury “had nothing to do with my crash whatsoever” that led to her broken leg and airlifting out.
“I tried. I dreamt. I jumped,” she said. “I hope if you take away anything from my journey it’s that you all have the courage to dare greatly. Life is too short not to take chances on yourself. Because the only failure in life is not trying.”
