Vonn has ninth operation after Olympic crash

On the eve of another operation, Lindsey Vonn posted a video from a place that looked like progress: a hydrofoil, with Vonn sailing across the water. It was not skiing, but she described it as a step toward it. Two days later, she was back under the knife.

The alpine skier underwent her ninth surgery on Nov. 9 to repair her left leg, a reconstruction that she hopes will be the last in a sequence that began with a torn ACL and became far more complicated when she crashed during the women’s downhill at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. The procedure was to remove the plates and screws holding her fractured tibia together and replace the ACL that could not be reconstructed while the bone was still healing.

That distinction matters. Vonn did not simply injure her knee during the Olympic race. She had already completely ruptured the ACL during a World Cup race a week before the Games, then chose to compete anyway. During the downhill on Feb. 8, she clipped a gate 13.4 seconds into her run and went off course at the Tofane Alpine Skiing Centre. The impact left her with complex fractures in the two bones of her lower left leg.

The immediate medical response was more severe than the race result suggests. Vonn was airlifted to a hospital in Treviso, Italy, where she underwent four operations to stabilize the leg. In the following weeks, she needed an emergency fasciotomy, a procedure for acute compartment syndrome, in which pressure around muscle groups threatens blood flow and can damage muscle, tendons and fascia. Colorado-based surgeon Tomas Hackett performed the operation that Outside reported saved her leg from amputation. Doctors placed three plates and as many as 20 screws in the leg, but had to wait for the fractures to heal before attempting ACL reconstruction.

The nine operations counted in the latest reports are not nine identical repairs. They represent a staged medical strategy: stabilization, treatment of the compartment syndrome, repeated procedures in Italy and then the United States, and finally removal of the stabilizing hardware alongside reconstruction of the knee. Vonn said her bones had healed, allowing the ACL work to proceed. Removing the screws, however, leaves holes in the bone that must also heal. She expects another six to nine months of recovery, with roughly four weeks on crutches and at least six months of rehabilitation.

Her public life during that wait has looked unusually normal for someone recovering from injuries that nearly cost her a leg. She attended award shows, exercised, took European vacations and made her runway debut at Paris Fashion Week in September.

The uncertainty is not confined to the operating room. Vonn has described this operation as hopefully her last, but she also warned that things could change during surgery. The recovery timetable is long enough that a successful procedure would not settle the larger question: whether she can return to elite skiing. Her age, 42, and the severity of the injuries make that a different proposition from the comebacks that built her career. The evidence supports a return to activity, not a return to the Olympic downhill course.

What the latest surgery does establish is a more concrete milestone. If the reconstruction holds and the bone holes heal, Vonn will have moved from repeated stabilization to a defined rehabilitation phase. If complications arise, the sequence could extend again. For now, the hydrofoil image is an accurate description of her position: moving forward, but not yet back on snow.