“I’m wary of just going with what the first person tells me is the right way forward,” she says. “I want to know why, I want to know what the plan is.”
That wariness came from experience. Years earlier, she says, she was given bad information about an injury and made decisions based on it. “It cost me a lot,” she says, her voice quieting. She says if she’d known how to read an MRI then, she would have pushed harder. “I would have maybe asked more questions instead of just taking what they told me as the truth.”
This kind of agency in your own health care can be difficult, especially for women. But chronic pain is a ruthless teacher. And Vonn had been living with it for over a decade.
By the time she found Martin Roche, MD, a knee surgeon in South Florida, she knew exactly what she needed: a minimally-invasive, robot-assisted partial knee replacement. Dr. Roche used robotic precision to replace the most damaged section with titanium, but without touching muscle, tendons, or ligaments, allowing for a speedier recovery. A month later, she could do leg-strengthening drills she hadn’t done in eight years.
“It could not have gone better,” she says. The results speak for themselves. Her coach and equipment strategist, Olympic champion Aksel Lund Svindal, who competed in many of the same races as Vonn for years before coaching her comeback, says she’s technically better now than she was in her final seasons before retirement. “She’s much more symmetrical,” he explains. “Left side, right side—no big differences. She’s strong, and that makes her technically better.”
When she finished second in the super-G (which combines the speed of downhill racing with the technical turns of a giant slalom) at the World Cup Finals in Sun Valley, Idaho, in March 2025—becoming the oldest woman to ever podium in a World Cup race—it felt vindicating. “It definitely felt nice to prove people wrong,” she admits. “But…you know yourself better than anyone else. And you have to listen to what you know you can do, and I knew I could do it.”
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