Lindsey Vonn, the Olympic and world champion skier who defined dominance in the sport for a generation, announced she will retire after the coming world championships in Sweden.
From Vonn's Instagram post

“My body is broken beyond repair and it isn’t letting me have the final season I dreamed of. My body is screaming at me to STOP and it’s time for me to listen.”

At the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, she won a bronze medal in downhill and finished sixth in super-G.

Vonn in her Instagram post said she had surgery in the spring but chose not to share news of the procedure. “A large portion of cartilage that had delaminated from my bone was removed,” she wrote. But she crashed again in November 2018 while training in Copper Mountain, Colo., tearing ligaments in her knee and sustaining three fractures.

“Despite extensive therapy, training and a knee brace, I am not able make the turns necessary to compete the way I know I can,” she wrote.


In October, Vonn said she would complete in the 2018-19 World Cup season, skiing the downhill and super-G, then call her career quits after 19 years. She aspired to break Ingemar Stenmark’s record of 86 World Cup race wins — Vonn stands at 82 — but said she could not continue even if she did not reach the mark by the end of the season.

She will retire with the most World Cup wins in women’s skiing history. Austrian Annemarie Moser-Proll, who retired in 1980, is second with 62 victories. The closest active skier is American Mikaela Shiffrin with 55.

“Retiring without reaching my goal is what will stay with me forever,” Vonn wrote. “However, I can look back at 82 World Cup wins, 20 World Cup titles, 3 Olympic medals, 7 World Championship medals and say that I have accomplished something that no other woman in HISTORY has ever done, and that is something that I will be proud of FOREVER!”

Vonn learned to ski as a 3-year-old and was racing by age 7. Seeing her promise on the slopes, her family moved from Minneapolis to Vail, Colo., so she could train full time. At 14, she won the prestigious Trofeo Topolino in Italy, then made her World Cup debut two years later.

She made her Olympic debut in 2002 at Salt Lake City, racing in slalom and Alpine combined, and went to three of the next four Games, missing the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia, due to injury. She ends her Olympic career with three medals, a gold in the downhill and bronze in the super-G at Vancouver in 2010, and last year’s bronze in Korea.

She won four overall World Cup titles, including three in a row from 2008 to 2010, and eight downhill titles. She also won two gold, three silver and two bronze medals in seven world championships.