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Lindsey Vonn’s Father Reveals He Wants Her To Retire After Her Winter Olympic Crash
Associated Press Television News | February 10, 2026 6:59 PM CST

Lindsey Vonn’s father said Monday that the American superstar will no longer race if he has any influence over her decision and that she will not return to the Winter Olympics after breaking her leg in the downhill over the weekend.

“She’s 41 years old and this is the end of her career,” Alan Kildow said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

“There will be no more ski races for Lindsey Vonn, at least not as long as I have anything to say about it.”

Kildow and the rest of Vonn’s family — a brother and two sisters, too — have been with Vonn while she is being treated at a hospital in Treviso following her fall and helicopter evacuation from the course in Cortina on Sunday.

The hospital late Sunday released a statement saying Vonn had undergone surgery on her left leg and the U.S. Ski Team said she was in stable condition. There have not been other updates since.

Kildow declined to comment on details of Vonn’s injuries, but he did address how she was doing emotionally.

“She’s a very strong individual,” Kildow said.

“She knows physical pain and she understands the circumstances that she finds herself in. And she’s able to handle it. Better than I expected. She’s a very, very strong person. And so I think she’s handling it real well.”

Kildow — a former ski racer himself who taught his daughter to race — said he slept in his daughter’s hospital room overnight.

He and the rest of Vonn’s family watched the crash from the finish area with all of the other spectators.

"First, you know, the shock and the horror of the whole thing seeing a crash like that," Kildow said of what he felt watching the scene unfold.

"It can be dramatic and traumatic, you know you're just horrified at what those kinds of impacts have."

Vonn raced the downhill despite tearing the ACL in her left knee nine days earlier in another crash.

“What happened to her had nothing to do with the ACL issue on her left leg. Nothing to do with that,” Kildow said.

“She had demonstrated that she was able to function at a very high level with the two downhill training runs. … And she had been cleared by high level physicians to ski.”

Kildow said the crash was less a result of Vonn’s knee injury than the way she pushed the limits of her racing line to the point where she clipped a gate early in her run and got knocked out of control.

Vonn, who holds the record of 12 World Cup victories in Cortina, returned to the circuit last season after nearly six years of retirement and after a partial titanium replacement surgery in her right knee.

She won two downhills and finished on the podium in seven of the eight World Cup races that she finished this season — and came fourth in the other one.

Vonn will not return to the Olympics to cheer on teammates or for anything else, Kildow said.


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