Lindsey Vonn: ‘My scars remind me that I’m strong and beautiful’

With a “Strong is the New Beautiful” book and mantra, she tweeted at the time: “I don’t know why these things happen to me but I know I am a fighter and I refuse to let it bring me down! I will never give up!” Lindsey Vonn among Olympic medalists in documentary about gender in sports http://olympics.nbcsports.com/2017/02/27/lindsey-vonn-tomboy-video/ A year ago, she suffered three fractures near her knee joint in a super-G crash in Andorra. She hurt her knee in training and missed two races at the 2007 worlds and managed to win the downhill during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics with a badly bruised shin. She was unable to compete in Sochi because of a serious knee injury and broke an ankle training in New Zealand in 2013.

Accomplishments 2007: Won silver medals in downhill and supergiant slalom (super-G) at world championships. 2007–08: She earned six World Cup victories and captured her first overall World Cup title 2009: She won gold medals in the downhill and supergiant slalom at the world championships, the World Cup supergiant slalom title, and her second World Cup downhill and overall titles. 2010: 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, Vonn won a gold medal in downhill and a bronze in the super-G. She followed her Olympic exploits with a third consecutive World Cup overall title in March. In addition, she captured downhill, super-G, and combined World Cup championships . 2010–11: Vonn repeated as World Cup champion in each of the three disciplines she won the previous season. 2011-12: She won the first giant slalom race of the season to become the fifth female skier to win a race in each of the five World Cup Alpine disciplines. Later that season she captured her fourth overall World Cup title. 2013: Vonn crashed during a super-G run at the Alpine world championships and tore two ligaments in her knee, ending her 2012–13 season. (Nevertheless, she managed to accumulate enough points during the season to win her sixth straight downhill World Cup title five weeks later.)  2014: A slow recovery forced her to withdraw from the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics shortly before they were scheduled to begin. She returned to racing in December 2014 and one month later won her 63rd career World Cup race to break the record for most all-time World Cup victories for a female skier. She captured World Cup season titles in downhill and super-G that year and finished third overall in the World Cup standings. 2015: Vonn took the super-G bronze medal in the 2015 world championships. 2016: Shortly after winning her 20th career World Cup title (in the downhill discipline), she fractured her leg and withdrew from the remainder of the 2015–16 season. 2017: Vonn returned in January and in the following month won a downhill bronze medal at the world championships, becoming (at age 32) the oldest woman to medal in the history of that event.