Lindsey Vonn also describes a terrible injury accident that she narrowly escaped without a leg.
Lindsey Vonn has also bared the extent of the devastating crash at the Milan-Cortina Winter Games including the fact that she was just a hair away of losing her left leg in an experience she has termed as the most difficult battle she has ever had in her career.
His Olympic dream was ruined almost immediately at the event of the women downhill final in Cortina when the 41-year-old finished. Only 13 seconds into her run, Vonn flew over a gate and hit it hard in the snow, fracturing it complexly in her tibia, a type of fracture that was later determined by doctors to need more than one operation.
The crash itself was only a few weeks after another great setback. Vonn was just back after ruptured ACL injury in a World Cup race on January 30 and had been given the green light to race only to be viciously cut short in her Olympic campaign.
In a reflection on the moment in an Instagram post on February 9, she had admitted the painful fact of how her Games were terminated.
It was not the happy ending that I had dreamed of, Vonn wrote. It was not storybook but it was life.
Vonn has now disclosed that the situation was worse than initially believed as she is on her way back to health. She attributed her leg saving to the work of the U.S Snowboard Team doctor, Dr Tom Hackett who performed a vital emergency surgery to her.
Vonn explained she has her leg not amputated because of the saving of Dr Tom Hackett. He has done a fasciotomy and has opened both sides of my leg, to relieve the pressure. That’s what saved it.”
Vonn thinks her previous ACL injury was the determining factor in this case as a twist she calls fate.
I have always felt that something always happens, said she. But, he says, without tearing his ACL, Tom would never have been there, and he would not have been able to save my leg.
The road ahead remains long. Vonn predicts that it will take approximately a year before the bones in her leg are healed and she also disclosed that she had broken her right ankle during this crash, which would make her spend part of her time on the wheelchair.
It was, by no means, the first or the last, but by far the most radical, painful and difficult injury she ever experienced, she confessed. It has been such a struggle and it is not the ending that I wanted my Olympic storey to have.
Her father, Alan Kildow has hinted out the crash as the end of her career in competition.
Checking on his part, he said to the Associated Press, “She is 41, and this is the end. No more ski races of Lindsey Vonn, as long as I have a say in the matter.
Despite this, he commended the strength of his daughter saying that she also knows pain, has comprehended the fact of her circumstance and is handling it better than anticipated.
It is not clear that Vonn will ever come back to racing, but this last chapter is one of the most sobering and defining ones in a fantastic career.
