there wasn’t time to wait for her to actually win an Olympic medal.
Lindsey’s script was penned months ago by writers of
the round table and should her skis take turns for the Whistler worse,
well, in the snow business there’s always white-out.
Usually in America you need to first cry through
your national anthem to activate the Olympics gold card, but Vonn’s
forward momentum could not be contained.
She is the drink of these Vancouver Olympics (
“Lindsey is authentic,”
executive producer for the Olympics, says of her star power. “She’s
very telegenic. She’s the best woman skier in the world. Lindsey has
the whole package — athletic ability, personality. She’s the sort of
person that is made for television.”
Vonn is 25, already transcendent, already a commodity and already the greatest female U.S. skier in history.
The “yodelers” and cowbell ringers overseas already
know what prime time in Peoria is about to discover. Vonn has 31 World
Cup victories — an astonishing nine this season — two shy of breaking
Bode Miller’s American record of 32.
Vonn ranks eighth on the all-time World Cup victory list, amazingly halfway to Austrian Annemarie Proell’s record of 62.
Let’s cut, though, to the chalet scene, with Vonn looking forlornly at her empty Olympic trophy case.
At age 17, she finished sixth in combined at the
2002 Salt Lake City Games. Four years later, a head-over-boots training
crash probably cost her something shiny and special.
Vonn, battered and bruised, returned from her
hospital bed to finish eighth in downhill, seventh in super-giant
slalom and 14th in slalom.
Since
“Everyone is out there essentially to beat me,” she said on a pre-Olympics conference call from
“It’s hard. It’s hard to be consistently fast, day in and day out.
Vancouver is going to be no different. It will be tough to deal with
all the expectations, not just from the media, but from myself.”
background. A five-event skier, Vonn is being promoted by some as the
Michael Phelps of the Winter Olympics.
Photographers have dressed her up in evening gowns
for cover shoots. Travelers in window seats know her as the cover girl
on Midwest Airlines Magazine.
Vonn has traded quips with
Vonn is actually from a snowy background and hails from chilly
Lindsey resents being labeled the “anti-Bode Miller,” but her fresh face and toothpaste smile serve as the anti-venom to
Scandal and Vonn have yet to be introduced. OK, her
marriage to an “older” former ski racer after the 2006 Games caused an
initial ripple.
“We as a staff are very protective over the kids,” U.S. women’s Coach
athletes to make sure they’re not distracted and taken out of their
games, so to speak.”
Love, in Lindsey’s case, has been a splendored thing, with Vonn’s career going bells and whistles after matrimony.
“He’s the main reason why I’ve had a lot of success the last couple of years,” Vonn recently said of Thomas.
The Vonns look like wedding cake figurines. Also,
they did not bolt the U.S. Ski Team to run their own program. Lindsey
still trains with America and offers inspiration and instruction.
“She’s so professional,” U.S. teammate
planned, prepared. That’s the amazing part. We get to ski with the best
skier in the world every day.”
says Lindsey is a game changer. Watching Vonn viciously slice-and-dice
a training run a few years ago, Richardson uttered in awe, “Oh my gosh,
she’s skiing like a dude!”
Then, Vonn fixes her hair and becomes a runway model, the kind of glamour and grit combination that makes her so sex-appealing.
A rep for one of her sponsors called Vonn “the perfect storm of nice.”
“I want to be a good example,” Vonn said during a lengthy breakfast interview with the Los Angeles Times last summer in
“I think it’s rare in this day to find people who are honest and moral
and aren’t arrested for something. Know what I mean? It’s hard for kids
to look up to people because you never know what they’re going to do.
I’m not out there just playing the game. I’m out there trying to do a
good job and be a good person. That’s really important.”
TMZ, give it your best shot.
Last February, she cut tendons in her right thumb
grabbing a broken champagne bottle while celebrating victory at the
world championships.
She read one Facebook comment that boasted: “you’re the best party girl ever! That’s awesome.”
Vonn was horrified.
“That’s not who I am, that’s not what happened, and
it really bummed me out,” she said. “It was a freak accident, it wasn’t
that I was partying so hard. It was 6 o’clock at night, right after the
awards ceremony. I had zero alcohol, whatsoever, in my body.”
Scandal?
Austrian coaches were quoted as saying Vonn was so successful in speed events because she was heavier than other skiers.
Lindsey answered by sweeping three races in
Vonn is so protective of her image she won’t drink a cup of coffee that she herself hasn’t ground and poured.
“What if a deranged fan wanted to get you, put a
powder in your drink?” she said. “I will not touch anything I haven’t
already seen before.”
The problem with setting someone up for Olympic success, as Miller learned, is that it can be a powder keg.
Thinking Vonn can be Phelps is a slippery slope because ski racing and swimming are so different.
For Phelps, the pool size never changes. In ski
racing, every course set-up is different. A change in snow conditions,
or a temperature drop, even what bib number you draw, can win you — or
cost you — the gold.
“Michael competes in an extremely controlled
environment,” Tracy, the U.S. coach, said of Phelps. “When you’re
outdoors, Mother Nature is always going to decide how the game is
played. Always. The weather plays so much of a role in what we do and
how we do it, and when we do it.”
Vonn is considered a medal contender in five events: downhill, super-giant slalom, combined, giant slalom and slalom.
In reality, she will be a prohibitive favorite in
two events: downhill and super-G, with a chance to medal in the super
combined.
Vonn is a longer shot in the technical events — GS
and slalom, mostly because of a left arm bruise suffered during a crash
in December that causes discomfort when she plants her pole on gate
turns.
Vonn is trying to temper the talk.
“My life goal is to win a gold medal,” she said.
“But if I never win an Olympic medal, I’m not going to say my career
was pointless.”
That horrific training-run crash may have cost Vonn a medal at the 2006
“It’s impossible to imagine anyone could even get
out of bed after that,” Neal said of her crash in Sestriere. “The
journey culminating for her in
If you could put a title on Vonn’s reality show?
Neal: “Call it ‘Unfinished Business.'”
—
(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
