Lindsey Vonn is home, but she’s got a long road ahead of her. Photos: Instagram
Lindsey Vonn has a long road ahead of her. The 41-year-old ski legend recently shared an update about the state of her legs after a series of horrendous crashes in the World Cup and Olympic Games. After a long stint in the hospital followed by a short stint in a hotel, Vonn is finally well enough to begin her recovery at home.
“Home sweet home,” she wrote on Instagram. “Feels good to sleep in my own bed… but wheeling through the front door without Leo greeting me like always was a very hard reality. A reality I had to face. Along with many other hard realities that lay in front of me as I move forward.”
Leo was her Swiss Shepherd mix, a beloved dog that died just one day after her Olympic fall. Despite that hard loss, she’s still very happy to be home — but Vonn knows she’s got a lot of work to do before she’s back to normal. “And just like that,” she wrote over an image of her injured legs, “all my muscles are gone.”
As of this writing, Vonn is still confined to a wheelchair. After first tearing her ACL in the World Cup race in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, she made the decision to race in the Olympics just a few days later. Unfortunately, she hit a gate early in that race, which resulted in a complex tibia fracture and compartment syndrome, the latter of which meant she nearly lost her leg.
“I’m focused now on therapy and getting healthy. It’s going to be a hard and painful journey but I am putting all of my energy into it, like I always do,” she said. “It has been quite the journey and by far the most extreme and challenging and painful injury that I’ve ever faced in my entire lifetime, times a hundred…basically I had a complex tibia fracture. I also fractured my fibular head and my tibial plateau. Everything was in pieces. The reason why it was so complex is because I had compartment syndrome. Doctor Tom Hackett saved my leg. He saved my leg from being amputated.”
Now that she’s home and can focus on her rehabilitation, her next step will be to graduate from the wheelchair to crutches. Her ACL is still torn from the World Cup race, but her broken leg is higher on the priority list right now.
“It will take around a year for all of the bones to heal,” she said, “and then I will decide if I want to take out all the metal or not, and then go back into surgery and finally fix my ACL.”
While Vonn is about as tough as they come and used to dealing with injuries, only time will tell whether she makes another amazing comeback. She’s taking it easy for the moment.
“Had a pretty hard day yesterday, everything just really hit me hard and I broke down,” she shared via Instagram on Wednesday, February 25. “I know there will be a lot of days like this… the internal mental battle has just begun but moments like this help me so much. Just miss my boy Leo. One day at a time.”
