The high temperature of 4 degrees had come and gone one Sunday afternoon last December at the base of a mountain in Lake Louise, Alberta, when Lindsey Vonn found her husband, Thomas, and buried her head into the shoulder of his puffy ski jacket.
“I’m so depressed,” she said quietly. He put his arm around her.
“Hey,” Thomas said. “That’s awesome.”
There, in a tiny six-word exchange with her husband, everything was on display: Lindsey’s talent and potential, her desire and competitiveness and her expectations, both internal and external. She won two races that weekend and came within a blink of another, the beginning of a season that includes nine pre-Olympic wins from a skier who has won the last two World Cup overall titles. She is widely considered, as Canadian ski federation president Gary Allan said, “just the most professional performer we have out here.”
“She’s not really depressed,” Thomas said. “Racing just doesn’t always go the way you expect it to go.”
So she is expecting a bounty and is guaranteed nothing. Just six American skiers have ever won two medals in a single Olympics. None has won more than that. Yet now, here comes Lindsey, a clear favorite for gold in the downhill and the super-G at the Vancouver Games, a strong contender in the combined, a threat for a medal in both the slalom and the giant slalom.
Vonn is hampered by a badly bruised right shin, but she is is getting extra time to heal. The opening women’s Alpine race, Sunday’s super-combined, was postponed. That’s because the women will not have had a chance to train on the downhill course before then: Thursday’s training run was scrapped after two racers started, and practice was canceled Friday and today.
“I’m lucking out pretty heavily because of all the cancellations,” the American said. “Normally I would be disappointed, but for my shin, I think, this is the best possible scenario.”
Three-hundredths of a second could determine whether Lindsey matches the breathless hopes that have been thrust upon her in these Games or instead returns home to Vail, Colo., or her hometown of Burnsville, Minn., another victim of buildup that proved unmatchable.
In 2008, Michael Phelps went into the Beijing Olympics with a quest for eight gold medals. He delivered. Now, historic expectations are moved from one Games to the next, from one sport to another, whether or not the analogies apply.
Lindsey is accepting of the expectations.
“What I’ve come to realize is that the only thing I can do is be prepared and – physically, mentally – do the best that I can every day,” she said. “At the end of the day, if people judge me for not succeeding or succeeding – what have you – that’s their opinion. I have to be happy with my performance and what I’ve given.”
What she has given is her life – “my whole life,” she said, almost all 25 years of it. And now, it is not just hers. Thomas was once a ski racer, too. The year of his lone Olympic appearance, 2002, was the year of Lindsey Kildow’s first, when she was 17. That year, she and Thomas began dating, though he is nine years older and her father disapproved. In 2007, they married.
Now, entering an Olympics in which she could be the marquee performer, they are rarely apart. Her career is their career, and when NBC’s cameras are trained on Vonn before a race, during a race, after a race expect a corresponding shot of Thomas’ face, smiling or sullen. If she wins multiple events, they will have done it together. If she fails to earn even a single medal.
“Being married has really changed her,” said Linda Krohn, Lindsey’s mother. “It’s made her so much calmer. It’s really cool.”
Ski racing involves significantly more stewing than actual racing, with individual runs lasting two minutes at most. Days and months and years of preparation build to an occasionally unnerving tension in the moments before a race, when skiers gather at the top of a mountain, waiting their turn to churn through the starting gate.
Lindsey has won 31 World Cup races and is the most successful female American ski racer in history. Last February, when she climbed to the top of a downhill course in Val d’Isere, France, she was the woman to beat. She had won the super-G just six days earlier. Yet faced with this prospect – the speedy downhill, her best discipline – she was a wreck.
“I just got to the point where I couldn’t function,” Lindsey said. “Literally, I was shaking. I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ ”
So the call went out over a radio: “Thomas, I need you.”
This is the on-the-mountain portion of the most unique partnership in skiing. Fellow competitors, friends, rivals seem to marvel at how this 34-year-old former World Cup skier – a classic tinkerer with equipment, “Mr. Technology Guy,” his wife called him – works with this sturdy, 5-10 natural talent who can win on ability alone.
“She’s way more of the free spirit, like, doesn’t pay attention to details,” Thomas said. “She just has the raw talent and drive to do it. And I’m way more of the technical guy.”
Thomas guides almost every aspect of Lindsey’s career. Lindsey’s father, Alan Kildow, moved his family to Vail from the Minneapolis suburbs when Lindsey was 11. But according to Lindsey, he became overbearing when she reached the World Cup level. Kildow did not attend the 2006 Olympics or his daughter’s wedding, and is not in contact with Lindsey.
Thomas, clearly, is the confidante through which every decision – be it about equipment or scheduling or appearances – runs.
But the relationship wasn’t perfect from the start. Thomas first joined Lindsey on the road full time more than three years ago, with plenty of advice for his then-girlfriend’s career. That didn’t always sit well with a skier who had already won races her way.
“She wasn’t always receptive,” Thomas said. “It was kind of like a reprogramming process, because she was always used to operating a different way, just totally winging it. ‘Oh, I’m good this week, and not this week,’ and not knowing why.
“It took a whole lot of battling from us in the beginning to where she trusted what I said. ... It was frustrating for both of us.”
By the time Lindsey’s knees knocked atop that mountain in Val d’Isere, those frustrations had melted away. Only a team remained.
“He’s so real,” Lindsey said. “He’s always straight with me. He doesn’t tell me what I want to hear. He tells me what I need to hear.”
But he also knows enough to listen. It was Thomas’ idea to treat the 2009 World Championships, Alpine skiing’s most significant event outside of the Olympics, as a test run for Vancouver. Here, then, at the start of the downhill, was a moment from which they could learn.
Thomas arrived at the top of the mountain and found his bride, who had seen what she considered to be a perfect run by Switzerland’s Laura Gut and knew she had no margin for error. Thomas joked, talked, “gave me perspective,” Lindsey said.
Fifteen skiers after Gut left the starting gate, Lindsey shot down the hill. The nerves were gone. She won by more than half a second.
Lindsey’s last Olympics are defined not by the numbers attached to her races – eighth in the downhill, seventh in the super-G, 14th in the slalom and a DNF in the combined – but by the following series of events: a violent crash during a downhill training run, an emergency helicopter flight to the host city of Turin, a stay in a hospital during which she contemplated the end of her career, and then a return to skis less than 48 hours later.
The video of that accident has been shown widely in NBC’s commercials leading up to the Games. The gravity of the situation – doctors told her she might have broken her back or her hip or both – gives it weight as she heads to Whistler, the mountain less than 80 miles outside Vancouver that will host the Alpine events.
“It was kind of a defining moment for me, personally,” Vonn said. “That was the first time I had ever thought that I might not be able to ski again because of what the doctors were saying. It really was a wake-up call. I never wanted to miss another opportunity, and I never wanted to be in the finish and think that I could’ve done better or could’ve worked harder.”
Now she does spinning workouts on a stationary bike for nearly two hours daily. Her summertime, dry-land training sessions are legendary among her teammates and competitors. Former U.S. coach Patrick Riml said: “The talent was always there with Lindsey. Now, the focus is there, too.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
