After Vonn’s Winter Olympics crash, sports stars explain what it’s like to be injured on a global stage

Those who watched Lindsey Vonn’s crash during the women’s downhill in Cortina d’Ampezzo a week ago will never forget it. Whether live from the foot of the Olimpia delle Tofane course or via a screen, the millions who saw her clatter a gate 13 seconds into her run and fly through the air before landing heavily on her right side will recall the feeling.

It’s the same one you get seeing a boxer hit the canvas and stay there, watching a serious crash in Formula 1 or noticing the panic on a footballer’s face when they frantically beckon medical staff to attend to an injured team-mate or opponent.

You can’t speak. Can barely take a breath. Time stops. Seconds feel like hours, minutes like days.

All you want to know is: are they OK?

How does it feel to be the athlete at the heart of such a situation, though – the one enduring their worst nightmare in full public view? The one having their cries of agony played and replayed in homes around the world? Are they cognisant of being observed by so many eyes and camera lenses? Do they hear and feel the hush of a crowd who, moments earlier, were screaming their name? Or does the pain of injury blunt all other senses?

What are the months (sometimes years) that follow like for them, when every conversation eventually includes “That Moment”? And no matter what you do next, it covers you like a blanket of sadness you cannot escape?

‘An Australian fan threw something at me’

Former England cricket fast bowler Simon Jones spent the majority of his sporting life being asked one thing: “Are you fit?” He could be out for a drink with friends or in a supermarket doing the weekly food shop, it didn’t matter. At some point, that question would always come.

“I hated it in the end,” he tells The Athletic. “Towards the end of my career, it used to trigger me and I’d have to control myself to not be angry at them. It’s such an open-ended question, and is it required? Do you really need to ask me that question?”

Jones, now 47, was playing in his first Ashes Test match against Australia, in Brisbane in November 2002, when, during the second session of the home side’s first innings, he went into a slide while chasing a ball to the boundary. His studs caught in the grass, forcing his right knee to bend awkwardly, and he knew immediately that it was bad.

He can’t recall whether the crowd was silenced by his injury, only that when it was replayed on the stadium’s big screen, there was an audible intake of breath among the spectators. Jones did not raise his gaze to see the cause of their reaction. “There are a lot of things going through your mind at the time,” he says. “You just want someone to come on and check you out — you want to see your physio.”

As he was carried off on a stretcher by England team-mate Steve Harmison and Australia fast bowler Jason Gillespie, Jones’ attention was caught by a home fan shouting in his direction: “Weak Pommie b*****d.”

“He actually threw something at me,” recalls Jones. “Steve wanted to go and have a few choice words with him, or maybe something a bit stronger.”

Time has mellowed Jones’ feelings about the heckler.

“He didn’t know how serious the injury was,” he reasons. “I think he just saw it as an opportunity to have a go at the Poms (as Englishmen are known in Australia) and make his mates laugh. It wasn’t ideal. But you take it on the chin.”

In the England dressing room, Jones lay on the physio table as the team doctor carried out checks on his knee before giving him the bad news: he had damaged the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee. Today, elite athletes can be back in action from a serious ACL injury nine to 12 months after surgery, but in 2002, far less was known about the recovery timetable, or whether it was even possible to return to elite sport.

“‘Is my career over?’. You start thinking that way,” says Jones. “It’s a feeling of worry and anxiety; a fear of the unknown. I didn’t know what would happen in my career after that. You’re putting your future in the hands of specialists, physios, doctors.”

Jones’ parents were watching the match live on late-night TV from the United Kingdom, but his father went straight to bed after seeing what had happened to his son. In the dressing room, Jones was visited by team-mates and Australia bowler Shane Warne before an ambulance took him and England’s chief medical officer to a local hospital for scans, which confirmed that he had ruptured the ACL.

He spent the next few days trying to process it, spending a lot of time lying in his room, with his leg, which had been placed into a large brace from the middle of his shin up to the middle of his thigh, elevated. The physiotherapy team encouraged him to go back to the stadium to watch the rest of the five-day match. It wasn’t easy. He was young and had started the game well, taking Justin Langer’s wicket with his ninth ball of the morning. He desperately wanted to be a part of the action.

“It was a distraction tactic,” says Jones. “It was the physios being mindful that if I spent too much time on my own, I’d overthink.”

After a few days, Jones was sent to Adelaide, where the English cricket board has an academy, to try to reduce the swelling in his knee before the long flight to the UK. Some 10 days later, he was on a plane, facing 20 hours with his own thoughts and fears. Even worse was the jet lag once he got home. Unable to sleep, he’d watch the continuing Test series against Australia through the early hours.

It took Jones almost a year and a half to return to playing. During that time, he spent so much time (“hours and hours, six days a week”) with the physio of his county team, Glamorgan, that the pair became best mates. He temporarily gave up alcohol, determined that if his knee was to swell up, he wanted it to be for the right reasons, not because he’d had a few pints.

England arranged for him to have some sessions with a psychologist, which he did “because they suggested it”, but Jones says that he “wasn’t overly affected by the injury”. He never slid when fielding again, though. “That was from a personal choice. At the end of the day, if the ball was going to go to the boundary, I was going to leave it go.”

It also changed his mindset. Before the injury, he’d been desperate to make an impression. “I was young and doing everything at 100 miles an hour. And it woke me up to the fact that, ‘Mate, just chill. Relax a bit more. Saving that one or two runs isn’t that big’.”

When Jones was ready to return, he wanted it to be low-key. No media, no extra pressure. It was arranged for his comeback to take place in a second-team game for Glamorgan. It was kept so hush-hush that even his team-mates didn’t know he would be involved until the day of the match.

But someone leaked it.

“When I got to the game, there must have been 50 or 60 reporters sitting on the bank (surrounding the field of play). I just looked at the physio and said, ‘This is not ideal, is it?’.

“That was the last thing I needed to see: a load of press. They were just hoping that maybe they’d see me go down in a heap and they’d have a story to do. There would probably have been some wishing me all the best, but because the injury was so serious, a lot of them had written me off.

“There were commentators saying, ‘Oh, that’s a nasty injury. Is he going to come back?’. You have to have that gumption to think, ‘I am going to prove these people wrong’, and that’s what I did. It’s always nice then to look that person in the eye, shake their hand and say, ‘Yeah, I’m back’.”

Jones returned to the England fold for their West Indies tour in 2004, and the following year played a key role in their first Ashes series win since 1987. That tour to Australia would include his final international Test appearance, though, as injuries blighted the rest of his career.

‘It’s a conscious choice to take that risk’

Jones has only ever seen footage of that 2002 incident in Brisbane once, and says that’s plenty.

For Vonn and other athletes suffering high-profile injuries in an era when content is king, such moments are far more difficult to avoid rewatching. Not only because the footage is replayed constantly in the days and weeks afterwards across all forms of media, but also because many athletes remain active online throughout their recovery.

Since Vonn’s crash on February 8, she has posted seven updates on social media at the time of writing, informing the world of her surgeries, state of mind, and the journey home to the United States from Italy. The most recent was about the death of her dog Leo, who passed away a day after her Olympic fall.

“People tell the world very quickly how they think they’re feeling now,” says Sarah Cecil, who has been the lead sports psychologist at the UK Sports Institute for the past 20 years and spent a portion of that time working in the Team GB intensive rehabilitation unit.

“As a sports psychologist, it’s interesting to read what people say on social media afterwards. What’s probably much more relevant is what they’d say to you in private. And those two things may be very different.”

Cecil says it can be a positive step for athletes to post updates after an injury, especially if it shows they have already started to “make sense of the experience”. She points to Vonn’s post from the day after her crash in which she said she “knew racing (with a torn ACL in her left knee) was a risk. It always was and always will be an incredibly dangerous sport”.

“It’s a conscious choice to take that risk,” says Cecil, “and it’s very healthy to remind yourself of that.”

Reflecting on why some athletes are so present online after an injury, Jones suggests there might be an element of “trying to stay relevant” by posting on social media — something he can understand. “You’ve lost your way of being in the spotlight because you’re injured,” says Jones. “It’s letting people know that you’re still around, because that’s the danger with sport – you’re a long time retired. People do forget about what you did and who you were.

“So I can see the benefits of doing it, but if you do, then you have to take the rough with the smooth. You’re going to get the odd idiot that sees it as an opportunity to stick the knife in.”

‘I knew straight away my ligament had gone’

British gymnast Becky Downie has had her share of injuries, but she can still remember the first one she suffered in front of a crowd. It came in 2017 at the European Championships in Cluj, Romania, when she was the defending European champion on her favoured apparatus, the uneven bars. Throughout the competition, her pre-existing knee condition worsened. On the morning of the bars final, the knee was so swollen that Downie was struggling to walk, but she was determined to compete.

The medical team drained it to remove some of the swelling, and during Downie’s warm-up, they placed as many mats as possible beneath the bars to protect the affected area when she landed from her dismount.

Downie was last to compete and started her routine well. But an attempted release move (where the gymnast lets go of the bar, performs an acrobatic movement in the air, then re-grasps either that same bar or the one alongside it) went wrong. Downie missed the catch and fell badly.

“In gymnastics, it’s a golden rule that you don’t put your arms out straight if you fall, because it generally ends up with broken bones,” she explains on a call with The Athletic. “But when I missed the bar, my immediate thought was, ‘I can’t put my knee down’.”

Instead, Downie’s arms went out, and she immediately felt something snap in the right one, followed by intense pain. She knew exactly what she’d done.

“I had a bad ligament in that elbow. It had been getting to the point where it just didn’t feel like my arm was very stable anymore. To get through those championships, it was strapped to keep it from bowing on the bar. So as soon as I put my arm down, it was the same pain that I’d felt before, but just intensified. I knew straight away my ligament had gone.

“If I hadn’t had the rigid tape on, I probably would have broken the bone.”

Was Downie aware of the thousands of eyes on her at that moment? Or the hush that would have fallen over the arena when she fell? “I don’t hear the crowd massively when I’m performing,” she says. “I was just trying to process what I’d done and get off the podium as quickly as possible.

“I do remember people clapping as I came off. I think they were just pleased that I was OK to a degree, and in one piece.”

Similarly to Jones, Downie then had to wait before she could fly home (only two days later in her case). It was not the most comfortable of journeys, spent essentially “carrying” her bad arm and trying to make sure nobody bumped into it. Once home, scans confirmed the ligament had snapped. It was in such bad shape that a full elbow reconstruction was recommended, including taking a graft from her wrist and building it into her elbow.

Downie has watched her incident back, but says that some athletes never want to revisit those moments. In gymnastics, however, it can often be a necessary way to see what might have gone wrong and learn from it.

“In our sport, most of the time, what you get injured on, you have to revisit,” she says. “You don’t really have the option to not do it again. So you have to go back to those specific skills. Sometimes you can avoid it and pick new ones, but you can’t always do that.”

Psychologist Cecil says rewatching footage from a serious injury might help someone move on from it. “Every individual will respond differently (to injury),” she says, “but you always have to process the experience, the injury, the event, and there are lots of different factors which determine how you process it.”

In Cecil’s experience, whether there was a crowd or broadcast crew present at the time is not usually a big concern for athletes: “The ones who always got stuck and were unable to process the experience were either blaming themselves or blaming others.”

‘I didn’t want my competitors to know’

For British heptathlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson, it was a feeling of having failed not only herself but everyone in her team (coaching and medical) that sent her into a dark place after the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.

Johnson-Thompson was the reigning world champion in the heptathlon — a seven-discipline event that tests athletes’ strength, speed, explosiveness and endurance over two days — having won her first global outdoor gold medal at the 2019 World Championships. But then Covid-19 hit and delayed the 2020 Games, where Johnson-Thompson knew she had a great chance of winning her first Olympic medal, by 12 months.

When the Olympics were rescheduled for 2021, she threw herself into training, only to suffer one of the most devastating injuries for an explosive athlete: a ruptured Achilles tendon on what was her takeoff leg for the high jump and long jump events.

With eight months to go until Tokyo, Johnson-Thompson pushed her mind and body to the limit to make it to the start line. She also hid her injury from the public (only those in her training group and closest to her knew the truth), posting pictures on social media pretending she was training, not wanting word to get out that she was unable to walk and making good use of her grandmother’s stairlift.

“It’s hard to explain exactly why I decided to do that,” Johnson-Thompson wrote in her 2024 book, Unbroken. “At the start, it was partly to do with the fact that, when my Achilles ruptured, I was in the process of renegotiating my contract with Nike — I didn’t know what impact it could have on things if they found out I was injured.

“I also didn’t want my competitors to think I wasn’t going to be there (in Tokyo). I wanted them still to see me as strong, not as someone who needed sympathy or a fuss made of them.”

Against all odds, Johnson-Thompson did make it to those Olympics and was in fifth place after three disciplines, with one of her strongest events up next: the 200m. When the start gun sounded, she burst from her blocks, running one of the best bends of her life. But as she came out of it, a sharp, intense pain soared through her right calf and she fell to the ground, curling herself up into a ball to try to block out the reality of what was happening.

There were no huge crowds in the stadium — the Tokyo Games took place while Covid-related restrictions were still impacting public events — and the eerie quietness allowed Johnson-Thompson to hear the sound of people approaching her. They had brought a wheelchair to help her off the track.

She shook her head and rose to her feet before hobbling away from them towards the finish line. After giving her all to reach the start line for that heptathlon, she was determined to finish the journey on her own two feet.

While the stands might have been empty, it was still an Olympics, with the broad reach of one, and Johnson-Thompson’s story was big, given her arrival in Tokyo as a gold medal favourite. Returning home to the UK, she was in a dark place, feeling she had failed herself and all those who had worked tirelessly to help her.

For a long time afterwards, Johnson-Thompson struggled with people being overly sympathetic. “Even though it came from a good place,” she says in the book, “I couldn’t bear to see their faces feeling sorry for me as they offered their well-meaning best wishes. I hated that, ‘Oh God, wasn’t it such a shame?’ look.”

She references British runner Derek Redmond, who was part of a gold-medal-winning 4x400m relay team at the 1991 World Championships but is best remembered for being helped down the home straight of the 400m semi-finals at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 by his father, who came down from the crowd to do so, after his hamstring popped 250m from the finish line.

It’s a moment that caused Redmond anger for two years afterwards but has since become one of the most iconic scenes in Games history, used in adverts for Visa, Nike and the International Olympic Committee itself.

“I don’t go out of my way to watch it, but it isn’t painful anymore,” he said in 2012.

Johnson-Thompson didn’t want Tokyo 2021 to be her Moment. She didn’t want a version of Redmond’s incident, as memorable as it has been for him, to define her career: “I didn’t want it to represent a heartbreaking story, or to be associated with pity. I wanted my moment to be a moment of unquestionable strength.”

Perhaps that is the insult that compounds the injury when it happens on one of sport’s biggest stages: in people’s minds, you are forever linked with that scene of despair.

If you then go on to achieve something great (as Johnson-Thompson did in winning her second world title in 2023), it is always placed in the wider context of what you have come through to do it. If it marks the end (or start of the end) of your career as a professional athlete, then it’s always going to be the moment that broke you.

Nobody yet knows what Vonn’s moment at the 2026 Winter Olympics will mean for her future. But it will live with her forever, regardless of what comes next.

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