Unstoppable Lindsey Vonn can achieve sports immortality on Sunday

Veteran sportswriter Richard Deitsch takes an international view of the Olympics.

The Olympics have always been a star-making vehicle. If you find gold in the right event, you can go from today’s unknown to tomorrow’s pitchwoman.

But Lindsey Vonn is a unique figure at the Milano-Cortina Olympic Games. She is already a very famous person — an Olympic champion with 2.8 million Instagram followers — who enters Sunday’s competition with the possibility of achieving sports immortality.

A week after rupturing the ACL in her left knee, Vonn, at age 41, goes for Olympic gold at 5:30 a.m. ET at the Olympia delle Tofane downhill course. It is preposterous that she is even competing in 2026. Vonn had a partial titanium replacement inserted in her right knee in 2024 and then returned to ski racing last season after nearly six years of retirement.

Her World Cup downhill crash in Switzerland last week should have been the end of her medal comeback but there she was on Friday and Saturday in Cortina d'Ampezzo, putting in successful training runs. Vonn finished in third position on Saturday, 0.37 seconds behind leader and teammate Breezy Johnson, and declared herself ready to go. The edge is there too — she spent some time on Saturday going off on a USA Today opinion writer. 

Lindsey Vonn finishes 3rd in final Olympic downhill training run

Just competing on Saturday given her injury is an incredible achievement. If Vonn were to hit the podium on Sunday? Well, that’s sports story-of-the-year potential. A gold medal? That would make her an Olympic immortal. 

There are others to watch: Italy’s Sofia Goggia, who won gold in the downhill at the 2018 Olympics and silver in Beijing in 2022, lit the cauldron in Cortina to conclude Friday’s