Shin injury might force Vonn to Olympics sideline

Neither snow nor serious injury nor frightful crash has stayed alpine racer Lindsey Vonn from the swift (really swift) completion of her appointed rounds the past two seasons. At least, not so far.

But when Vonn, the most accomplished female in American skiing history and the blonde star upon whom NBC was hanging its Olympic ratings hat, showed up in Vancouver this week, it was with a deep shin bruise she called "the most painful injury I've ever had"- a real threat to her hopes of winning from three to five gold medals.

Today, when she is scheduled to take her first training run on the Olympics' Whistler Mountain course, Vonn may discover she will be unable to compete at all. Such a last-minute withdrawal by the most prominent U.S. athlete would be a repeat of the 2006 Turin Games, when figure skater Michelle Kwan was forced to the sideline by a training injury the morning after the Opening Ceremonies.

Vonn argued for her resilience, reminding us she is "no stranger to injury." In fact, the 25-year-old winner of the past two overall World Cup titles has thrived with the only acceptable attitude for her touch-and-go enterprise: Reckless abandon.

When she was 17, she had her driver's license revoked for speeding. When she joined other competitors' complaints that Turin's downhill course originally was too easy for Olympic competition in 2006, she specified that there was nothing about it "to make you poop in our pants."

She subsequently was knocked silly, two days before Turin's competition commenced, by a fall on that toughened trail and had to be airlifted off the slopes. After failing in one hospital escape attempt wearing her hospital gown, she was released to compete in four of her five planned races, managing top-10 finishes.

"Skiing is a dangerous sport," she said. "I'm not it in to go slow. I'm in it to go fast. If you go fast, sometimes you might get hurt."

Or, she might fulfill predictions of dominance. If so, Vonn will find rare public recognition in a sport virtually ignored by American spectators, though she has been filling trophy cases since she made her Olympic debut in 2002 as Lindsey Kildow. (She married former U.S. ski racer Thomas Vonn in 2007.)

Vonn carried a winning streak of six consecutive downhills into late January, and a fifth-place finish then was followed the next day by a victory in the Super-G slalom, the last women's World Cup race before the Olympics. She already is a celebrity in Europe and, by the time NBC is finished with her, Vonn's fairly humble skiing roots - this flatlander who became a mountain athlete - will be chronicled and she likely will be a familiar name to the American public.

Though her father had been a national junior ski champion, Vonn was born on the Minnesota plains and introduced to skiing on Buck Hill, what has been described as not much more than a speed bump, near the interstate south of the Twin Cities. As a child, she raced slalom there, under the lights from 7 to 9 every evening - a pale imitation of what she later would find in the majestic, challenging Alps on the European tour.

Just prior to her teenage years, she relocated to Vail, Colo., to further her ski career, and has lived part-time in Park City, Utah, at the ski venues of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.

Her husband recently was quoted about his desire to teach Vonn to "maybe be a little afraid . . . She's going at it fearless . . . If you're always rolling the dice, eventually that will catch up with you . . . How many times can you get up and walk away from a crash that's so big?"

Vonn's sport consists, basically, of sailing over the edge of a cliff at speeds in excess of 80 miles per hour, dealing with freakish angles and literally slippery slopes. To her and other practitioners of the endeavor, though, it sounds not so terrifying as bracing. And there might be a big reward at the bottom of the mountain.