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I got up very early on Sunday morning to watch Lindsey Vonn compete in the women’s alpine downhill skiing at the Olympics. By before the sun was peaking over the hills I was sobbing on the couch.

Lindsey Vonn is a legend in the world of alpine skiing, with a ridiculous number of awards, including a gold medal in the 2010 Winter Olympics. Alpine skiing is an exceedingly dangerous sport where, as one coach put it, “injury is not hypothetical, but inevitable.”

Vonn did indeed get injured. In 2018 she announced that she would be retiring at the end of the season. "My body is broken beyond repair and it isn't letting me have the final season I dreamed of," she said at the time. "My body is screaming at me to stop and it's time for me to listen."

But it turns out that her body wasn’t beyond repair. After undergoing a full knee replacement in 2024 she announced her return to racing, saying that retirement was "harder than I expected it to be" and "nothing can fill the hole of ski racing". She was 40 years old.

I think that every physical artist and athlete I know can relate to that statement. Sooner or later the costs outweigh the rewards and this pursuit that we love, our obsession, our life’s passion, starts to eat us alive. But letting it go feels like dimming the sun, as if nothing else could ever shine so bright again.

Then Vonn defied the narrative. At 41 she returned to the slopes and, in December 2025 she became the oldest woman to ever win a downhill skiing World Cup.

I’ve been following her comeback throughout the lead-up to this year’s Olympics in Cortina. It had been my plan, right up until my knee misbehaved in November, to return from tour and start training contortion again at 51. I wanted to know what was possible now, with an older body and considerably more knowledge than I had when I was still performing. Vonn’s story is massively inspiring.

Then, 10 days before competing in Italy, Vonn crashed during a competition, ruptured her left ACL, and had to be airlifted off the slope. Despite the missing ligament, she did not plan to drop her bid for a medal.

She told the BBC, "I am going to do it, end of story. I am not letting myself go down that path - I am not crying, my head is high, I'm standing tall and I'm going to do my best and whatever the result is, that is what it is."

I listened to that interview. It lit me up. As I limp around the house, preparing for surgery, I want to believe in my own comeback and the power of determination and hard work to overcome this injury. I want to believe in unlimited possibility.

I may not be dreaming of Olympic gold, but I have my own ambitions and it is so, so hard to imagine that the body I have cultivated and honed for so many years can’t deliver just a little more time in the sun.

But that isn’t what happened for Vonn. Just 13 seconds out of the gate Vonn wrapped her arm around a gate and lost control, bashing into the hard snow at speed. The microphones picked up her screams of pain as the medics rushed to help. She has now undergone three surgeries to rebuild a complex fracture of the tibia and remains hospitalized.

The day after the competition Vonn posted a photo from the run, moments before her crash. She wrote, “Yesterday my Olympic dream did not finish the way I dreamt it would. It wasn’t a story book ending or a fairy tail, it was just life. I dared to dream and had worked so hard to achieve it…

…And similar to ski racing, we take risks in life. We dream. We love. We jump. And sometimes we fall. Sometimes our hearts are broken. Sometimes we don’t achieve the dreams we know we could have. But that is the also the beauty of life; we can try.

I tried. I dreamt. I jumped.

I hope if you take away anything from my journey it’s that you all have the courage to dare greatly. Life is too short not to take chances on yourself. Because the only failure in life is not trying… ”

On Thursday another alpine skiier, Italy’s Federica Brignone, won her first Olympic gold medal just 10 months after a severe injury almost ended her career. At 35, Brignone is the oldest woman to win gold in alpine skiing, and that with a metal rod and a handful of screws holding her left leg together. Daring greatly can pay off.

Both of these skiers put everything on the line, worked through extreme difficulty and pain, and had very different outcomes. Yet the are both equally impressive, inspiring athletes.

There is no “going back to the way I was.” That isn’t how the body works. I have learned enough about neurology, scar tissue, and the biology of aging to know that.

But what I also know is that giving up is not the answer. When we are young, fighting our way towards our own versions of Olympic gold, we hurl our bodies into training. It is a splendid, heady feeling. That feeling may be gone, but we gain experience, depth, nuance, and even a bit of wisdom. If we can let go of youth and the ways of youth and employ the tools of experience, possibility abounds.

Happy Bendings,

Kristina