Lindsey Vonn
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
Omg this is old & has been address led publicly by breezy & also Mikaela (who agrees the drug testing is super restrictive) |
Anonymous
| She took an incredibly aggressive line, probably based on how badly she wanted to win- she was willing to risk it all. |
Anonymous
It's an issue for every single Olympic athlete. I'm a huge T & F fan and wherabouts failures are a major red flag. |
Anonymous
Everyone should watch Michael Phelps Congressional testimony on Olympic drug testing then come on back here to talk about Breezy. |
Anonymous
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Putting the ACL aside, Lindsey clearly went out intending to win, and she tried to do it in the first 10 seconds by taking a tighter, more direct line than anyone else. In hindsight, it was a questionable tactical decision. We had already seen from several racers before her that you could be ahead of Breezy through the first half of the course, but those early splits weren’t translating into podium runs. The course set and conditions suggested that the race would be decided in the final third, where maintaining speed and line through the flatter, more technical sections mattered most.
By attacking so aggressively at the top, she effectively bet on gaining a decisive advantage early rather than building the run progressively. That approach increased risk without offering much strategic upside given how the course was skiing. Unfortunately, the combination of bold tactics and her trademark willingness to push the limits, qualities that defined her entire career, didn’t align with what this race required. |
Anonymous
Wasn’t one of Vonn’s commercials in the lead-up to the Olympics comparing injuries in the line of duty with Scarlett Johansson? |
Anonymous
| I give her credit for taking a risk. |
Anonymous
Breezy herself took a much more conservative approach through the top third of the course and did not look on her way to a gold medal run at that point, but then had an extremely technically skillful remainder. I thought it was interesting after Breezy's successful run, demonstrating this approach, that Vonn chose instead to try and attack the top of the course aggressively. Jackie Wiles, the third American in the final, took a similar approach to Breezy and finished 4th, her best Olympic finish ever. Wiles also had the best time on the hill during her Friday training run. I also want to note that Wiles is not some kid -- she's 34 and this is her third Olympics. This isn't a knock on Vonn's approach, she's obviously one of the best women's downhill skiers of all time and she's going to know better than me what she should do. But given the hill conditions and Breezy's success, I wonder what motivated Vonn to try and attack the top of the hill so aggressively? Was she worried that she wouldn't be able to ski as cleanly later in the course as Breezy and others were, due to her injury, so felt she needed to open up a lead early? Or was it a decision made independently of the current standings or how other skiers had skied, and based entirely on her own instincts based on her training run? Impossible to know, but just interesting to me that of the three American women, Vonn was the only one who chose to go after the top of the course the way she did, and the other two women had career best outcomes. |
Anonymous
+1 I hope it will bring her peace during her recovery |
Anonymous
That’s not the way skiing works. They couldn’t have just swapped her out for a different American |
Anonymous
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I thought this was interesting. Janik Sinner (world #2 on the ATP -- Italian tennis player) did an interview with Vogue about the Olympic Games since his country is hosting. Sinner also was a very competitive skier in his teens, and actually took up tennis after skiing, so he has a stronger connection to these games than most -- grew up skiing Cortina and trained with some of the Italian skiers.
He was asked about Vonn skiing on her torn ACL and mentioned they are friends, and simply said "the greatest athletes -- they have a lot of courage." He also talks about how he had to decide to scale back skiing 4-5 years ago because of the risk of injury (presumably because of the potential impact on his tennis career, which makes sense) and about the difference between ski racing and tennis: With your skiing history, is there anything that you miss, or miss being able to do? I would say the adrenaline. And to be honest, that’s the only thing I really miss. I would say that skiing has this different sort of pressure, though. You need to perform well by not really knowing where you’re standing. In tennis, you have a huge hand, because you always know the score. And you know that, at times, maybe you can play at 80% just to get through. That’s enough for that day. But skiing is not like this at all. You just go, and you have no idea [until it’s done]. I hadn’t thought about that. You’ve got nothing to compare yourself to, and there’s nothing to calibrate against. You just have to go full-throttle. Yes. So you have this pressure, and [for me] this turned into mostly, also, doubts. So I think maybe I enjoyed the competition part a little bit less. But, for what I miss, I would say for sure the adrenaline. I miss going fast. |
Anonymous
That's true, but it's an individual sport and another, healthy, skier would have gotten a start in her place if she'd dropped. I'm not sure how much it matters whether that skier would have been American or not (I actually don't know and am too lazy to look it up). |
Anonymous
I think actually that there would have just been one less competitor. |
Anonymous
Nope, both wrong. Had Vonn withdrawn from the Olympics, the US would have been been allowed to sub in another qualified skier, as long as that skier was ranked within the top 30 of the FIS World Cup Start List. The US has a bunch of skiers on that list -- Allison Mollin, Isabella Wright, Keely Cashman, Haley Cutler. I know for a fact that Mollin was pretty devastated to miss out on an Olympic spot and would have jumped at the chance. We can debate whether it was right for Vonn to attempt to ski given her injury, but there's no question to me that if she'd withdrawn, another young American skier would have had a chance to ski. |