Fear wouldn’t be a factor. As part of their therapy, Gonzalez insisted that he and Vonn spend an afternoon rewatching her worst accidents, so she could release them from her subconscious. Vonn told him this exercise wasn’t necessary. “I’m like a goldfish,” she says. “You have to have a three-second memory.” They viewed the crashes anyway: Vonn broke them down as if they were routine football plays. “She has a superhuman ability,” says Gonzalez, “to disassociate from pain.”
“I’ve got a few circuits missing,” says Vonn, in a less clinical assessment. “I love what I do. I love going fast. I don’t think that will ever change.”
In July 2024, Vonn was waking up at 3:30 a.m. every morning to ski a glacier in Austria. “Seeing her up there, pretty much in the middle of the night with the sun coming up, the smile on her face, the look in her eye, it’s like, ‘This is what she wants,’” says Riml. In New Zealand, she trained super-G with top Kiwi racer Alice Robinson and nearly matched her times while skiing in a vest and shorts. (Robinson, Vonn says, was wearing a more aerodynamic racing suit.) Word spread that Vonn was toying with a return. Norwegian skiing star Aksel Lund Svindal, the two-time Olympic gold medalist whom Vonn recently added to her coaching team, texted her about her plans. Vonn usually responds to Svindal right away. This time, she went silent. “I caught onto her,” says Svindal. “Yup, she’s definitely considering a comeback.”
