Lindsey Vonn Just Won a Ski Race at Age 41—on a Reconstructed Knee

When Lindsey Vonn proclaimed her comeback to ski racing a yr ago, she was attempting something that had never been done in the history of her sport.

Not only was the American star 40 years old at the time—an age when most racers have traded their boots for après-ski. She was also returning to competition after a knee replacement.

But on Friday in St. Moritz, Switzerland, that surgically repaired knee carried Vonn back to a familiar place that now seemed out of reach: the top step of the podium.

Vonn, now 41 years old, took first place in her downhill season debut to become the oldest skier, male or female, ever to win a World Cup race. The victory capped an unprecedented return to competition for one of history’s most successful ski racers. Suddenly, Vonn is more than just a near-lock to make the U.S. Olympic team for the February’s Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. She’s now a legitimate medal contender in what would be her fifth trip to the Games.

“I’m really happy,” Vonn said. “It’s a f—great day! This is amazing. I’m so happy.””

Vonn finished the course Friday in 1 minute, 29.63 seconds. That was nearly one second faster than Magdalena Egger of Austria, who is 17 years her junior.

Vonn is nearly seven years older than any woman before her to win a World Cup ski race, and four years older than any man to manage the feat. Even one of Vonn’s coaches, retired Norwegian star Aksel Lund Svindal, is only 42. He stopped competing in 2019.

More outlandish still is that Vonn returned to top-tier competition on a knee that was partly rebuilt, something that no world-class skier had ever attempted. Every time she showed up at a race, she was venturing into uncharted territory.

The woman Vonn displaced as the oldest to win a race, Italy’s Federica Brignone, was 34 years old when she won a super G last March. But Brignone crashed and suffered a severe leg injury the next month, underscoring the risks in a sport where skiers often exceed 80 miles per hour.

Serious crashes are especially common in Vonn’s specialty, the speed events of downhill and Super G. Injuries drove her from the sport in 2019, when she explained her retirement by saying her body was “broken beyond repair.”

The biggest problem was her right knee, so ravaged by falls and previous surgeries that she couldn’t fully extend it. But in April 2024, her surgeon used robotic assistance to bolster the joint with titanium alloys and polyethylene components.

As she recovered, Vonn found that she no longer experienced pain while skiing. She threw herself into weight training and conditioning. She said she felt better than she had in 15 years.

Vonn’s first season back was up and down. She finished 19th overall in the season standings in downhill, and 13th in Super G—events in which she’d won a total of three Olympic medals. But she showed flashes of her old self and snagged a second-place finish in a Super G to cap last season.

Vonn now has 83 World Cup victories in her career. That’s second all-time among women behind American Mikaela Shiffrin’s 104, another Olympic star. Between them is the all-time men’s winner, Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark, with 86 wins.

But only Vonn is adding to her total on a reconstructed knee.

Write to Rachel Bachman at Rachel.Bachman@wsj.com

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