Rise

The memoir of Olympic gold medalist and alpine ski racer Lindsey Vonn opens at the starting gate of her final race: the downhill, the fastest discipline in alpine skiing, at the 2019 World Championships in Åre, Sweden. Vonn was more nervous than she had ever been, torn between honoring the moment and treating it as just another race. She describes the mental demands of the sport: clearing one's mind at speeds up to 80 miles per hour, the razor-thin margin for error, and the unique fearlessness required of speed skiers. When the countdown reached zero, she launched into her final run. The narrative then rewinds to the beginning.

Born on October 17, 1984, in Burnsville, Minnesota, Vonn grew up in a family defined by resilience. Her father, Alan Kildow, a former junior skiing champion and part-time coach, put her on skis at age two and a half. She trained at Buck Hill, a tiny ski area with only 262 feet of vertical, under Austrian coach Erich Sailer. Erich ran a high-volume program of up to a thousand turns per day and told Vonn never to change her natural lean: "You're fast the way you are" (17). Her grandfather Don Kildow built his family's house by hand at age 12, served in the Korean War, and grew a construction business from nothing. Her mother, Linda Krohn, had a stroke during Vonn's emergency cesarean birth and never fully recovered physically, yet remained relentlessly positive, inspiring Vonn through every injury of her career.

At age nine, shortly after meeting her idol, Olympic ski racer Picabo Street, Vonn announced to her father that she wanted to compete in the 2002 Olympics. Together they created a detailed ten-year plan. When Vonn was 12, the family uprooted to Vail, Colorado, so she could train in faster alpine disciplines that were unavailable on Minnesota's small hills, including downhill and super G (a speed event with more turns than the downhill). The children were devastated, and Vonn carried guilt that her dream had become the family's burden. At summer camps she met her first major rival, Julia Mancuso, a confident California skier. After years of comparison, Vonn resolved to focus on herself and won the 1999 Trofeo Topolino, the most prestigious international junior race, becoming the first American female to do so.

Vonn joined the U.S. Ski Team at 14 as its youngest member, enduring rigid hierarchies and a fractured education that ended with a GED in 2002. Before the Salt Lake City Olympics, she overheard coaches dismissing her potential in favor of Julia, a moment that became a career-long template: She channeled doubt into fuel. She made the 2002 Olympic team and finished sixth in the combined, a two-part event mixing a speed run with a technical slalom run, as the top American female finisher.

After the Olympics, Vonn entered a period of crisis. Her coaches demoted her to the Europa Cup, the level below the World Cup. Her parents divorced. She began dating Thomas Vonn, a fellow team member, and was diagnosed with depression, though she kept the diagnosis secret for years. At her father's initiative, she spent six grueling weeks with fitness guru Jacques Choynowski in Monaco. She earned her first World Cup podium, third place in the downhill at Cortina, Italy, in January 2004.

A catastrophic training crash at the 2006 Olympics in Turin, where she landed on her back after launching off a jump at high speed, threatened to end her career. Scans revealed only bruising, and she raced the downhill two days later, finishing eighth and vowing never to take her physical ability for granted. She married Thomas in September 2007 and entered a dominant stretch, pioneering the use of stiffer men's skis and winning decisively on difficult courses. At the 2009 World Championships, she won gold in both the super G and the downhill.

At the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Vonn overcame a broken wrist, a severe shin contusion, and enormous media pressure. With Julia Mancuso leading by nearly a full second, Vonn delivered one of the best runs of her career and won gold in the downhill. She later added a bronze in the super G. The gold fulfilled the dream she had announced at age nine and validated every sacrifice her family had made.

Post-Vancouver fame brought endorsement deals but also body image insecurity that contributed to a slow 2010-2011 season. She divorced Thomas in 2011-2012, and after the Chicago Tribune published a column questioning whether she could succeed without a man, she responded with 12 wins and 4 titles, the strongest season of her career. In late 2012, she went public with her depression in a People magazine cover story, a disclosure that helped her accept her condition and invite support from loved ones, including her mother, who shared her own experience with depression.

A crash at the 2013 World Championships in Schladming, Austria, tore her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and medial collateral ligament (MCL) and fractured her tibia, beginning a punishing cycle of knee surgeries. Close friend and physical therapist Lindsay Winninger took over her rehab. Vonn returned to snow after seven months but reinjured the knee and withdrew from the 2014 Sochi Olympics. A second ACL surgery followed, and Winninger began working for Vonn full-time, sometimes physically pulling her out of bed during her darkest days. The adoption of a rescue dog named Leo provided emotional stability.

In January 2015, Vonn broke Annemarie Moser-Pröll's 35-year women's record of 62 World Cup wins with her 63rd victory at Cortina. Subsequent seasons brought more injuries: a tibial plateau fracture in 2016 and a humerus fracture that caused nerve damage in her dominant hand, temporarily leaving her unable to hold a pencil. As the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics approached, her grandfather Don died at age 88, having held on in hope of seeing her compete in Korea, where he once served. After another crash, Vonn told her father she might retire; he replied that they were not quitters and traveled to Europe to steady her. At the Olympics, she sprinkled her grandfather's ashes on a Korean mountaintop and raced to a bronze in the downhill, sobbing on the podium.

Her final season was a grinding campaign of surgeries and diminishing returns. A torn lateral collateral ligament (LCL) and three tibial fractures forced her to miss Lake Louise for the first time. She returned to race in Cortina, but her leg gave out. At the 2019 World Championships in Åre, the scene from the prologue, she raced one final downhill. Ingemar Stenmark, holder of the all-time record of 86 World Cup wins that she fell short of breaking, met her at the bottom with white flowers. Vonn won the bronze and stood on the podium for the last time, finishing her career with 82 victories.

In retirement, Vonn struggled with depression and a loss of identity before finding stability through brainspotting therapy with psychologist Dr. Amando Gonzalez, a method that releases stored emotional trauma through focused neurological processing. She built a new career in venture capital and beauty product development. Nearly two years later, she returned to skiing recreationally in Deer Valley, Utah, and discovered she could love the sport without needing to compete. Standing at the top of the mountain, she reflects that the promise of possibility she once felt only in the starting gate now extends to all of life.