Lindsey Vonn Reveals She Nearly Lost Her Leg After Gruesome Injury at Olympics

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American skier Lindsey Vonn on Monday revealed the injury that prematurely ended her time at the Olympics was much more severe than initially reported.

Just days before Vonn was set to compete at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy, Vonn crashed in another event that resulted in a torn ACL. Undeterred — and perhaps acknowledging the likelihood that these would be the last Olympic games for the 41-year-old — Vonn opted to delay surgery so that she could still compete in the Olympics.

Not long after arriving in Italy, however, Vonn suffered another hard crash and had to be airlifted to a nearby hospital. It was later announced that she broke her leg, but Vonn emphasized that the torn ACL in her knee did not contribute to the new injury. She eventually had surgery to repair everything in Italy before she was flown back home.

In a video posted online Monday, Vonn revealed that the latter injury nearly resulted in her leg being amputated. She said:

I’ll give you the full rundown. Basically, I had a complex tibia fracture. I also fractured my fibular head, my tibial plateau — just kind of everything was in pieces. And the reason why it was so complex was because I had compartment syndrome, and compartment syndrome is when you have so much trauma to one area of your body that there’s too much blood and it gets stuck and it basically crushes everything in the compartment. So all the muscle and nerves and tendons, it all kind of dies.

Dr. Tom Hackett saved my leg. He saved my leg from being amputated. He did what’s called a fasciotomy, where he cut open, like, both sides of my leg — kind of fileted it open, so to speak — let it breathe, and he saved me.

Hackett is an orthopedic surgeon who works with Team USA. As noted in a report from ESPN, Hackett was only in Italy as a precaution when Vonn chose to compete on her torn ACL.

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