Opinion | I’m not done cheering for Lindsey Vonn

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

My 4-year-old was on my lap when Lindsey Vonn crashed on Sunday. Her run ended early and abruptly, taking any chance at a final Olympic medal with it.

As the crash aired over and over, I was surprised to feel tears well up — startled by how much her comeback mattered to me.

I’ve been waiting for a classic Hollywood ending to Vonn’s story for nearly three decades. I first saw her on a small ski slope outside of Minneapolis, where she skied much, much faster than me. I hung up my skis as a mediocre high school racer in 1999, then switched to cheering her on from the sidelines. I took her wins as my own, and when she retired in 2019, I thought that was the end of the story.

But earlier this year, her comeback recast her as an underdog in a surprise third act. There’s something irresistible about rooting for someone who’s injured and doubted, their win no longer inevitable — working against the odds to a finish that is both exciting and cathartic.

So when I narrated the women’s downhill to my kids — my daughter kept calling Vonn my “best friend” even though our “relationship” has always been one-sided — I realized how much I was waiting for proof that hard work pays off. That Vonn’s story wasn’t over and that by extension, neither was mine.

The promise of hard work is something I echo in my own home, praising my 10-year-old for his effort instead of just his grades. But when that contract is broken, the story leaves us with something harder but truer. Perseverance doesn’t guarantee payoff, and meaning isn’t found at the finish line.

Skiing down the side of a mountain at more than 60 miles per hour isn’t a Hollywood movie, even though, as a culture, we keep demanding the same kind of endings from our sports heroes. Physics doesn’t care about narrative arcs. Bodies don’t respond to effort alone.

What made this comeback different wasn’t just her age (though that was impressive) or her existing injuries (which have been highly scrutinized), but the shift in how we saw her. After that first time she beat me, and everyone else in the race, her winning felt inevitable — she was just so much better than us, and we’d come to learn that she also worked longer and harder than anyone else. We didn’t pin our hopes on her, we pinned our expectations. Watching her win was thrilling, but also, like the ending of a Hollywood movie, it was a foregone conclusion.

With this comeback, and everything that was stacked against her, that was all stripped away. Her vulnerability of showing up anyway made rooting for her feel electric.

I’ve told my kids that sometimes hard work doesn’t pay off — at least not in the form of gold medals. But Vonn’s career shows us that the hard work is the reward. And that’s easy to cheer for.