When Lindsey Vonn talks about her comeback, she wants you to know one thing: This isn’t that kind of story.
She didn’t wake up one day feeling empty without the rush of racing down a mountain at 80 miles per hour. In fact, the life she built after retiring in 2019—the one she’s currently putting on hold to train for the 2026 Olympics—is the best one she’s ever had.
“I definitely wasn’t missing anything,” Vonn tells me in November over Zoom from her home in Utah. She’s catching a rare moment of stillness before the season ramps up. “I didn’t come back because there was some hole or gap in my life that I felt like skiing was gonna fill. I was fully, one hundred percent retired. I built an amazing life for myself.”
That life includes advising investment funds, sitting on philanthropic boards, and spending time with her dogs Chance and Leo, and—perhaps most importantly, a circle of accomplished women friends she didn’t have time to cultivate during her ski racing career of more than three decades. It’s a career that made her the most decorated female skier in World Cup history, with 82 victories, four overall World Cup globes and three Olympic medals.
When the ski world started whispering that she must be missing something to want to come back, Vonn had to set the record straight. “It’s actually really the opposite,” she says. “I’m missing a lot by coming back to ski racing.”
So why is she doing it?
The answer is simple: because her body finally let her.
In April 2024, Vonn got a partial knee replacement. She was 39 years old—decades younger than the typical candidate—and living with chronic pain that had plagued her since her first ACL injury in February 2013, which sidelined her for months and marked the beginning of a cycle of surgeries and setbacks. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, she said she struggled to walk even short distances, and her knee injury triggered pain in her hip, back, and neck. The partial knee replacement was meant to give her a pain-free life—the ability to walk her dogs, play tennis, and surf again—not an Olympic comeback. But when things that used to hurt stopped hurting—when she could straighten her leg for the first time in a decade—her mind went somewhere most people’s wouldn’t.
“In my mind, you know, logically…the next step would be to try ski racing.”
Most people wouldn’t call that logic. Vonn does. It’s practically muscle memory to want to do something that you’ve done every year since you were three years old. Especially because the 2026 Olympics are being held in Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy—a place she describes as home. It’s where she got her first podium in 2004 and where she broke the women’s World Cup win record in 2015, earning her 63rd victory and surpassing Austrian legend Annemarie Moser-Pröll. It’s a place where she’s won more than anywhere except Canada’s Lake Louise.
She even has a Margherita pizza named after her there, called The Lindsey Vonn.
“I don’t think I would have even gone down that road if the Olympics weren’t in Cortina,” she admits.
And now she’s doing something no one has ever done: competing at the Olympic level in alpine skiing with a partial knee replacement at 41 years old.
Some didn’t think she’d be competitive.
“I definitely opened their minds to the possibility,” she says. “To what’s possible.”
The surgery itself was the culmination of a two-year search. Vonn got multiple opinions—many of them conflicting. She learned to read her own MRIs and kept asking questions until the answers made sense.
“I’m wary of just going with what the first person tells me is the right way forward,” she says. “I want to know why, I want to know what the plan is.”
That wariness came from experience. Years earlier, she says, she was given bad information about an injury and made decisions based on it. “It cost me a lot,” she says, her voice quieting. She says if she’d known how to read an MRI then, she would have pushed harder. “I would have maybe asked more questions instead of just taking what they told me as the truth.”
This kind of agency in your own health care can be difficult, especially for women. But chronic pain is a ruthless teacher. And Vonn had been living with it for over a decade.
By the time she found Martin Roche, MD, a knee surgeon in South Florida, she knew exactly what she needed: a minimally-invasive, robot-assisted partial knee replacement. Dr. Roche used robotic precision to replace the most damaged section with titanium, but without touching muscle, tendons, or ligaments, allowing for a speedier recovery. A month later, she could do leg-strengthening drills she hadn’t done in eight years.
“It could not have gone better,” she says. The results speak for themselves. Her coach and equipment strategist, Olympic champion Aksel Lund Svindal, who competed in many of the same races as Vonn for years before coaching her comeback, says she’s technically better now than she was in her final seasons before retirement. “She’s much more symmetrical,” he explains. “Left side, right side—no big differences. She’s strong, and that makes her technically better.”
When she finished second in the super-G (which combines the speed of downhill racing with the technical turns of a giant slalom) at the World Cup Finals in Sun Valley, Idaho, in March 2025—becoming the oldest woman to ever podium in a World Cup race—it felt vindicating. “It definitely felt nice to prove people wrong,” she admits. “But…you know yourself better than anyone else. And you have to listen to what you know you can do, and I knew I could do it.”
To understand why Vonn operates this way, why she researches obsessively, why she needs answers, why she pushes through—you have to understand what shaped her.
She's the oldest of five kids. The youngest three are triplets.
“I’m like the classic eldest sibling,” she says. “I’m like the captain of the ship.”
Her parents were both lawyers, and though they had babysitters, Vonn was often the one in charge. Once she had her license, she drove her siblings to school. She made their lunches a lot of the time. She changed diapers. "My mom having triplets, you know, she can’t hold all of them at the same time. You don’t have three arms."
When the family moved from Minnesota to Colorado when she was 12 to support her skiing, it was hard on everyone, especially her siblings. Vonn felt the weight of that sacrifice in everything she did. “It gave me a sense of responsibility to my family,” she says. “My family’s making a big sacrifice for me, and I need to make this time worth it, because I’m taking away resources from four other people.” That responsibility shaped everything. She went to bed early, woke up early, didn’t go out. “I wanted to always make sure I was giving my best.”
Even now, at 41, that eldest-daughter programming hasn’t left her. The difference is that this time she seems to be letting more of that energy land on herself.
One of the most unexpected gifts of retirement was more space for real friendship. “I’m used to being in an environment where we’re all competing against each other, and there’s no room to really, like, help each other grow in that way,” she explains.
Retirement in 2019 changed that. She met Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and CEO of Bumble, through skiing—Wolfe Herd’s son loves the sport—and through her, Vonn was pulled into a circle of women who had built big things and still wanted to build each other up. Founders. Investors. Entrepreneurs.
Wolfe Herd has become her biggest hype woman. She sent Vonn cookies with her 2025 Time magazine cover printed on them to celebrate her comeback. “She’s so unwavering in her decision-making, and what she believes in, and the direction she’s going in,” Vonn says. “Sometimes if I’m not sure about something, I call her, and she’s like, ‘Oh, hell no—you’re right.’”
These friendships are now central to Vonn’s life. Which makes the comeback even more complicated. “Most of my friends are like, ‘What do you mean? You're not available until after February?’” she says.
Vonn is genuinely excited to get back to that life: the dinners, the travel, the ease of being with people who know you and don’t need anything from you. “I’m really excited about life after this chapter that I’m in, because it’s so fulfilling and rewarding.”
But first, she has to put it all on hold.
There’s one other thing that makes these Olympics different: “I have never been single going into any Olympics in my life,” she says, and I can hear the curiosity in her voice. “So I’m excited to try that out.” (She was married to fellow skier Thomas Vonn from 2007 to 2013, and later engaged to NHL star P.K. Subban, though that relationship ended in 2020.)
She’s one hundred percent focused on her skiing right now, and she doesn’t have time for anything else—even if she kind of wants to. “It’s been really nice to just be focused on myself,” she says.
If there’s one constant in Vonn’s life, it’s that people have told her she’s not good enough. That she doesn’t have the right body type, the right skill set. That she won but she’ll never win again. “It’s been that way my whole life,” she says. “And off the slopes as well. It’s really never-ending.” However, she’s developed thick skin and her philosophy is simple: “I never stop believing in myself.”
She evaluates negativity like a data point. “What is it actually doing for me? It’s actually doing nothing. It just erodes my self-confidence.” So she blocks out the noise and comes back to what she knows to be true.
Talk to Vonn long enough and you start to see how she’s built routines that make the intensity of being an Olympic athlete survivable.
Every morning: three eggs, half an avocado, and a cinnamon-raisin bagel. Lunch is usually rice, broccoli, some steamed vegetable, and chicken. Dinner is steak or salmon, salad with quinoa and avocado and veggies. “Super, super boring,” she says, laughing. But it’s efficient.
Her comfort food? Ice cream. Ben & Jerry’s Half Baked or Mint Chocolate Cookie. She has a very specific ritual learned from her mom: heat the pint in the microwave for 15 seconds, scoop it into a mug, eat it while watching Law & Order or Saturday Night Live, then put the pint back in the freezer immediately. "If I leave it out of the freezer, it's gonna be consumed," she admits.
Law & Order: SVU is her reset button. “I like feeling like something has been solved,” she explains. “The world is a little bit better, Olivia Benson captured and locked away the criminal, and it just kind of resets me.”
She even used Olivia Benson as her travel alias—until TMZ alerted her that her cover was blown.
Vonn is adamant about one thing: Cortina is the end.
When I ask if she could keep racing after 2026, she laughs. “No, no, no. That’s all she wrote.” In her mind, life after this season is already queued up: her friends, her dogs, the intentional life she built after retirement.
“This is 24 years after my first Olympics. I’ve won everything I could have ever won. I’m not doing this to prove anything to anyone. I’m doing this because I think I can do well, it’s a meaningful place for me, and I think I can make a positive impact.”
She pauses.
“But I don’t have to.”
That’s the hinge: She wants this, but she doesn’t need it.
“I’m going to stand on the starting gate with a lot of clarity, and a lot of perspective, and a lot of wisdom and knowledge that you don’t have when you're younger,” she tells me. “I think my age in this scenario is an advantage, and I’m gonna use that to the best of my ability.”
Photographer: Agata Serge
Stylist: Amy Mach
Hair: John D
Makeup: Denika Bedrossian
Manicurist: Jolene Brodeur
Production: Leigh Culbertson
Writer: Erica Chidi
