Lindsey Vonn, at 41, qualifies for 2026 Winter Olympics: ‘An amazing feeling’

When Lindsey Vonn announced her return to competitive skiing just over a year ago, she wasn’t sure if making it to the 2026 Winter Olympics was even a possibility. Now, it’s a reality.

Vonn, the 41-year-old American Alpine skiing star who came out of a five-year retirement in November 2024, has qualified for the U.S. Olympic team in the downhill discipline after a pristine start to the World Cup season that has solidified her as the clear best American speed skier once again.

“I’m definitely very excited with how things are going,” Vonn said Monday by phone. “… It’s been a pretty great couple weeks.”

Vonn was referring to the back-to-back weekends in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and Val d’Isere, France, this month to start the World Cup season. In five races between the two, Vonn finished on the podium four times and won a downhill. Her worst result was fourth place.

It’s left her as the overall World Cup leader in the season’s downhill standings, and far enough ahead of her American teammates that she’s assured herself one of the four spots on the team, U.S. Ski & Snowboard confirmed Tuesday, for the Olympic competition in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, in February.

The national governing body’s criteria also allows room for discretionary selections, which could have given Vonn an alternate pathway even if the results weren’t stellar, but she left no doubt on the slopes.

“It was very important to me that I qualified based on my performance and results this season,” Vonn said, “and not based on what was done in the past. My skiing had to earn this spot, and I’m proud to have done that.”

Vonn has been a near certainty to make the team ever since her strong return last season. She finished 2024-25 as the second-best American speed skier — behind rising star Lauren Macuga, who was injured in training last month and will miss the Olympics. Vonn has not officially qualified yet in the other speed discipline — super-G — but she’s the best American in that right now, too — No. 3 in the overall standings.

“Lindsey qualifying for the 2026 Olympic team is a testament to her resilience and dedication, and the remarkable results she’s delivered on the World Cup this season,” Sophie Goldschmidt, U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “She’s proven once again that elite performance isn’t just about past success, it’s about rising to the moment, race after race. We’re thrilled to cheer her on at the Olympics.”

Vonn was the winningest women’s Alpine skier of all time when she retired in February 2019. She had 82 World Cup wins — second overall to Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark, who won 86 in his career in the 1970s and ’80s — and won downhill gold at the 2010 Vancouver Games and two other Olympic medals in her career. (American Mikaela Shiffrin has since passed both Vonn and Stenmark in World Cup wins.)

But as Vonn pursued Stenmark’s record, a career full of injuries took its toll. When the 2018-19 season began, she announced that it would be her last. A March 2018 downhill win in Sweden was, at the time, her final World Cup victory. She walked away after the 2019 world championships, a bronze medal in the downhill serving as her send-off result.

A knee replacement in 2024 changed everything, and she returned to the circuit that winter in St. Moritz, finishing 14th in a super-G. A few weeks later, she finished sixth in a downhill and fourth in a super-G in St. Anton, Austria. The following two months, though, were filled with DNFs and finishes in the teens and 20s. It wasn’t clear then which direction this comeback would go.

“It’s hard when things aren’t working with your equipment, it feels like you’re fighting so hard against the grain, nothing’s really working for you or with you,” she said. “And now I feel like finally everything is working for me, with me, my equipment, my team, physically, everything is going in the right direction. That’s an amazing feeling.”

All along, Vonn preached patience. She said she needed more time to reacclimate — to the sport, to the equipment — after a half-decade away. Then, at the year-end World Cup finals in March, Vonn had her best result yet, finishing second in the super-G in Sun Valley, Idaho.

“I felt like I was on the right track last season at the finals,” Vonn said. “I knew I wasn’t even close to where I wanted to be, and I was still skiing pretty fast. I just knew it was a matter of time before I figured it all out.”

A full offseason of training followed in South America, some of it with new coach Aksel Lund Svindal, a former champion Alpine racer himself. There, Vonn found another gear. A “light switch went off,” she said.

After a Christmas break, Vonn said she’ll have a training camp at home, then plans to race all three remaining World Cup speed events before the Olympics, plus have one last training camp before the last of those races, in Crans Montana, Switzerland, a week before the Games.

“We have plenty of races between now and Cortina to get the kinks out and make sure we’re really running on all cylinders by the time we get to February,” she said.

Vonn also confirmed that she will finish out the World Cup season, which runs to the end of March, after previously planning to retire after the Olympics.

“I thought I would for sure be retiring on Feb. 12 (after the super-G at the Olympics),” she said. “But I’ll keep racing this season, the way things are going. Having the World Cup lead in downhill … I definitely hoped to be skiing well, but I had by no means planned that.”

Might she reconsider her retirement timeline, given her success?

“I feel like I’m rolling the dice enough as it is, being 41 and putting myself through this,” she said. “So this is a one-season, final season. I know I already did a documentary (called) ‘The Final Season’ (in 2019), but this is really the final season.”

With her results this season, Vonn is set to be a major contender for gold in Cortina, especially with the havoc at the top of the speed-racing ranks. Macuga, who finished last year ranked fourth in the downhill, is out. So is Switzerland’s Lara Gut-Behrami, last year’s super-G World Cup champion, who was also injured in training. Italy’s Federica Brignone, last year’s downhill and overall World Cup champion, is trying to recover from a bad injury in April in time to return for the Olympics, but she hasn’t competed yet this season, and her status remains unclear.

Asked to assess her skiing so far this year, Vonn deemed her downhill win in St. Moritz “awesome.” She critiqued her errors in the races since — a fall off a jump in the second St. Moritz downhill, a conservative ski in the super-G there, more mistakes in Val d’Isere, but all of it still encouraging.

“I’m figuring it out,” she said. “I’m making improvements, I know where I’m going wrong. I know where the time is. … I’m very close to winning all these races, which is important for me. … The main point is that I’m fast.

“For Cortina,” she said, “things are looking pretty f—ing awesome.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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