Lindsey Vonn recalls ‘lowest moment of my life’ after multiple ski injuries: ‘I couldn’t even get out of bed’
Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn may have retired from the sport in 2019, but she's still using her voice to raise awareness about the mental health struggles athletes face.
In a recent episode of The Squeeze, the podcast of spouses Taylor and Taylor Lautner, Vonn, 38, recalled the "brutal" decision to retire after sustaining multiple injuries to her body — including two knee-ligament injuries, in 2013 and 2014, the latter of which prevented her from competing at that year's Sochi Games.
"After my second ACL injury, I missed the Olympics and it was probably the lowest moment of my life," she said of that time. "I was in the peak of my career and I was missing the 2014 Olympics in Russia and I just, I couldn’t even get out of bed."
With the help of a therapist, who Vonn says would "throw the covers off me, grab me and force me out of bed somedays," the athlete slowly but surely found hope again when all seemed lost.
"It was pretty brutal," she said, noting that her adopted dog Leo also played a vital role in helping gain her self-esteem back. "Sometimes it's just hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Like: Why am I working hard? What am I doing here? And your mind just spins and it seems like there’s no way out."
Still, Vonn, who won a gold medal at the 2010 Winter Olympics as well as a record number of World Cup season titles (making her one of the best skiers of all time, according to some experts), says each injury has provided a "renewed perspective" about life.
"Every time I’ve been injured, it’s given me something new to be thankful for and to appreciate and to really, I dunno, grow as a person," she explained. "So, I think skiing has really, it’s obviously my passion and my love, but it's also my backbone."
Vonn retired in 2019, soon after winning a Bronze medal at the World Ski Championships. The choice to do so, she said, did not come easy.
"When I realized it was time, I locked myself in a room and I kinda had to process it on my own," she recalled. "It was a really hard decision to make, but I had had three surgeries in one summer. And it was too much, you know, my body was falling apart."
At the time, she said she had "two knee braces" with "three fractures in my knee and my leg."
"I was like, 'What am I doing here?' I want to ski with my kids one day and this isn’t worth it anymore," said Vonn, who is currently dating actor Diego Osorio and has no children. "I’m not going to be able to walk when I’m 50, so I made the decision."
"My body made the decision [to retire], over my mind," she pointed out. "After I retired was the most challenging part, because you realize that there’s no going back. I woke up the next day after my last race and I’m like, well, that’s it. There’s no more. My career is literally dead and I had to kind of go through the grieving process of figuring out what to do next."
Vonn has opened up about the physical and mental health challenges she faced in her latest memoir, Rise: My Story, in which she writes about how those struggles ultimately shaped her for the better.
”I think a lot of times in my career, I didn't realize I had pushed myself too far until it was already too late," she told Yahoo Life in Jan. 2022. "Since my first major surgery in 2013, I didn't have a 12-month period where I didn’t have surgery or a major injury until I retired. By the end, I was like, OK, it's time to say enough is enough."
Ultimately, she hopes that sharing her low moments in a public way will be an example of what resilience and self-love looks like.
"People always try to think that athletes are these super humans that don't have weakness, but we do," she continued. "We are human and we do fall apart, and I think it's how we put ourselves back together that’s the real hero in us. We don't stay down, we always get back up."
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