Vonn is so grateful for her doctors and nurses in Treviso, but she’s still haunted by her stay. It was one thing to be in the most constant, excruciating pain, even under an extreme amount of medication. Then add in the realities of being in an ICU: Nurses woke her up every three hours, speaking a language she couldn’t understand. She shared a room with other patients, with only a thin curtain dividing them as she experienced the near-amputation of her leg. The lights stayed on until 11 p.m., and the exit sign stayed on all night. “It took everything I had for it to not drive me insane,” she says.

After the fourth surgery closed up Vonn’s leg, Hackett cleared her to fly back to Vail, Colorado, on a transatlantic medevac. “I couldn’t move out of my bed, let alone somehow manage to get on [a regular] airplane,” she says. “I still had a catheter.”

On February 20, Hackett performed a six-hour surgery at the acclaimed Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colorado, to actually fix the fracture: “The definitive, big-dog surgery,” as he calls it. Finally, on March 1, almost a month after her crash in Cortina, she returned home to Park City. Letters poured in from David Beckham, Jannik Sinner, Tom Brady, and even Prince William. (“The way you wrote about stepping into the starting gate with courage and no regrets says so much about your resilience,” the royal wrote.) But the one that carried the most meaning was from Diane Sawyer: “You can’t have courage and comfort at the same time.”

When Vonn first started to think about getting back in the game, she studied women’s ski races: “From what I observed, ski racing hadn’t really changed since I left.” She thought she could still compete, and in November 2024, she announced that she was coming back to professional skiing at 40 years old.

It made global headlines. By returning, Vonn joined a small cadre of professional athletes—Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Tom Brady—who’ve attempted to compete at an elite level in their 40s. “Everyone thought I was crazy,” she says. For a while, it looked like she was. Her first few races were unremarkable. But then she started winning.