Lindsey Vonn had dreams, and hers had a definite expiration date. She had one last legitimate crack at an Olympic downhill medal because she is 41 years old, and she had to be perfect because the infrastructure of her knees seemed to have just celebrated their 70th birthdays. It was a romantic tale, one hailing the echoes of past greatness in the face of medical imperatives, and it would be a commercial and social bonanza if she could pull it off.
But the actuarial tables are always a heavy favorite, nonetheless, due to the weight of the logic. The fantasies of possibility are always prohibitive underdogs to the intractable nature of long odds. Thus, her crash and broken leg during the opening stages of her run Sunday served as an abject lesson for those who underestimate the amorphous nature of adversity. And, yes, age is part of adversity, especially when it is perched atop battered legs.
Indeed, she had barely been medevac'd off the hill en route to surgery when the tut-tuts of the practiced know-it-alls began. Romance is great and all, but when the pocket aces beat the seven-deuce the way they almost always do, well, the accompanying cautionary tales follow within seconds.
“Tragic, but it’s ski racing, I’m afraid,” Johan Eliasch, the head of the skiing and snowboarding federation, told reporters. "I can only say thank you for what she has done for our sport, because this race has been the talk of the Games and it’s put our sport in the best possible light."
Well, yes, if you are willing to include the law of averages. The ultimate winner, the delightfully named Breezy Johnson, who herself is well-seasoned at age 30, had missed the 2022 Beijing games because of a knee injury of her own, incurred a month before those Olympics. She considered skiing on it anyway but recognized reality as it shouted in her face and opted for surgery instead.
Vonn, though, had no such option, because 45-year-olds are that much less well-positioned to cheat the reaper, knee strength notwithstanding. You can give your middle finger to the calendar once, maybe, but when you throw on two bad knees, well, eventually you run out of fingers.
That she gave it her best and last go is to her credit, even if you might have wearied of the story from all its breathless retellings. That it ended so precipitously is hardly cause for the rain of I-told-you-sos that comes with the wisdom of those people who predict the final score after the game ends. But we are who we are, just as Vonn was who she was, defying the percentages in the hope that there was one last burst of joy left in her.
That the percentages won in the end is almost beside the point, and if you are among those who feel bad that Johnson's win might be obscured by Vonn's injury, well, you're the stage manager of your own perceptions. Sometimes there isn't a villain except bad luck born of short odds, and you just have to be O.K. with the story that ends with, "Well, she fought the numbers and the numbers won."
Update (2:07 p.m. ET): This story has been updated to reflect that Vonn broke her leg in Sunday's crash.
