Lindsey Vonn has returned to the gym just weeks after revealing she nearly had her leg amputated following a crash at the Winter Olympics. The 41-year-old American skier sustained a complex tibia fracture in her left leg during the Olympic downhill earlier this month, requiring multiple surgeries in Italy before being flown back to the US for further treatment.
In an Instagram post on Monday, Vonn said the crash led to compartment syndrome, a condition where excessive pressure restricts blood flow to muscles and nerves. “When you have so much trauma to one area of your body so that there’s too much blood and it gets stuck and it basically crushes everything,” she explained. She credited Dr Tom Hackett, an orthopedic surgeon working with Team USA, with saving her leg by performing a fasciotomy to relieve the pressure.
Vonn noted that Hackett was in Italy monitoring her recovery from a torn ACL sustained before the Olympics. “If I hadn’t had done that, Tom wouldn’t have been there [and he] wouldn’t have been able to save my leg,” she said. She also broke her ankle in the crash and expects a full recovery to take about a year, including potential further surgery to remove metal implants and fix her ACL.
Despite the ordeal, Vonn expressed no regrets about competing. “I showed up and did what most thought was impossible at my age with a partial knee replacement,” she wrote. “These memories I’ll have forever and I’m grateful for every one of them. Every moment was amazing. Every moment was worth it.”
