How skiing icon Lindsey Vonn lost control in just 12.5 seconds

Lindsey Vonn knows the Olympic downhill course better than anyone.

She's won a record 12 World Cup races on the Olympia delle Tofane track — split evenly between six downhills and six super-Gs — and has a total of 20 podium results there, stretching back to her very first year on the entire circuit in 2004.

So how did the 41-year-old American standout lose control just 12.5 seconds into her run and crash so spectacularly at the Milan Cortina Winter Games on Sunday?

Here's what happened and why:

The highlight of the downhill course is the Tofana schuss, a narrow chute between two walls of Dolomite rock where the skiers accelerate to 130 km/h.

But the real key to the Olympia delle Tofane track comes above the schuss, where there's a key right turn that includes an uphill stretch. That's where Vonn went down.

"It's incredibly reverse banked," said Kristian Ghedina, the Cortina native and former racer who grew up in a home just below the finish line. "That's where your speed for the rest of the course gets determined and if you don't take the right trajectory it makes a huge difference because you end up going uphill."

Lindsey Vonn airlifted to hospital after serious crash during Olympic downhill

Vonn was fighting that reverse bank and trending slightly uphill when she got rocked into the air by a bump, causing her to clip the fourth gate with her right side.

That's when the real disaster started to unfold.

Vonn tried to twist and regain her balance in mid-air but landed awkwardly with her skis perpendicular to the fall line, ensuring a brutal fall. She tumbled over, got bounced into the air again and landed on her neck area and slid down a ways before coming to a stop in the middle of the course, away from the safety