Around six weeks after her fateful accident at the Winter Olympics in Italy, Lindsey Vonn spoke in detail for the first time about the fall and the dramatic hours afterwards.
“I was in so much pain,” the 41-year-old told Vanity Fair magazine when she talked about being admitted to the hospital.
While she was lying in a computer tomograph, the painkillers suddenly stopped working. “I screamed at the top of my lungs: Get me out of here! It just wouldn’t let up. It wouldn’t stop. It’s burned into my brain.”
Vonn suffered a serious knee and lower leg injury in the accident on the descent. The US team doctor Tom Hackett accompanied the ski racer to the clinic, where the situation worsened a few hours after the first operation.
“It’s getting worse and she’s not responding to huge amounts of fentanyl, morphine, oxycodone – just any narcotic you can think of,” the doctor recalled.
Dangerous swelling: like “sausages on the grill”
The athlete developed a so-called compartment syndrome; This means that the pressure in the tissue around the injury increases extremely. You can imagine it like “hot dogs or sausages on the grill,” Hackett described in the magazine. “They swell more and more. And at some point they burst.” With an emergency operation, Hackett and other doctors who were called in at short notice managed to relieve the pressure and prevent serious damage to the leg or even amputation.
After a rescue flight brought her to the USA, the hernia was operated on a fourth time. Only then was she able to return to her home in Park City, Utah. Vonn began rehab there.
Another comeback conceivable? “No idea”
The former speed queen – Olympic champion and 84-time World Cup winner – is annoyed that the accident outshines everything. “I don’t want people to fixate on the fall and be remembered for that,” she said. “Nobody has ever done what I did before the Olympics. I was number one in the rankings. Nobody remembers that I won.” After her comeback, she was actually the best downhill skier in the world again.
When asked by Vanity Fair if she was thinking about returning to the World Cup, Vonn replied: “I don’t want to close the door because you never know what’s going to happen. I have no idea what my life will be like in two, three or four years. Maybe I’ll have two children by then. Or I don’t have children and want to race again. Maybe then I’ll live in Europe. I could do anything.”
