Lindsey Vonn's injured right knee has not recovered sufficiently and she will not defend her Olympic downhill title at the Sochi Games in Russia, a loss that will rob the United States of much of its star power next month. One of the best known winter sports athletes in the world, with a celebrity enhanced by a yearlong relationship with the golfer Tiger Woods, Vonn said through her publicist that she would have surgery soon to repair the knee damage, sidelining her for the rest of the ski racing season.
Vonn tore two knee ligaments in a crash at last year's world championships but appeared ahead of schedule in her recovery for the Olympic Games until a training crash in Colorado on Nov. 19. At that time, she said that she had partially torn her anterior cruciate ligament and vowed that she could still compete in the Olympics. Seventeen days after the training spill, she returned to racing in a World Cup downhill at Lake Louise in Canada. She raced three times, finishing 40th, 11th and 5th, but she declared that she was still on a pace to participate at Sochi.
Then, skiing in another World Cup on Dec. 21 in Val d'Isère, France, Vonn tried to pressure her right knee through a turn, and it buckled. With Woods watching her at the bottom, Vonn skied off the course. After the race, Vonn for the first time conceded that the injury to her A.C.L. was more severe, acknowledging that she had no ligament left.
She has not been on skis since.
On her Facebook page Tuesday, Vonn wrote: "I am devastated to announce that I will not be able to compete in Sochi. I did everything I possibly could to somehow get strong enough to overcome having no A.C.L. but the reality has sunk in that my knee is just too unstable to compete at this level. I'm having surgery soon so that I can be ready for the world championships at home in Vail next February. On a positive note, this means there will be an additional spot so that one of my teammates can go for gold. Thank you all so much for all of the love and support. I will be cheering for all of the Olympians and especially Team USA!"
Vonn was the downhill Olympic champion at the 2010 Vancouver Games and also won a bronze medal in the super-G. She has won four overall World Cup titles and has 59 World Cup victories, only a handful short of the career record.
Sochi was to be Vonn's fourth Olympics. She raced in the 2006 Torino Games days after a horrific training crash and finished without a medal.
Vonn's departure will be a blow to NBC, which was planning to make Vonn's comeback story one of the features of its Olympic coverage. For NBC, attention will now turn to other American stars, like the 18-year-old slalom favorite Mikaela Shiffrin and Ted Ligety, the three-time world champion in 2013.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/sports/olympics/lindsey-vonn-wont-ski-at-the-sochi-games.html