1.Yoshiki Ideguchi, who traveled from Tokyo, watches at Dodgers spring training at Camelback Ranch in Arizona Monday.(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)2.Children lean against a fence and wait to greet players during Dodgers spring training at Camelback Ranch in Arizona on Monday.(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)3.A fan holds a World Series bobblehead while waiting to greet players at Dodgers spring training at Camelback Ranch in Arizona on Monday.(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)
MILAN — Chloe Kim came up short in her attempt to become the first person to win three consecutive Olympic snowboarding gold medals on Thursday, finishing second in the halfpipe to South Korea’s Gaon Choi at Livigno Snow Park.
Choi stormed back from a nasty crash on her first run in which she clipped the lip of the halfpipe and came tumbling almost head first onto the icy surface. She looked shaky on her second run then the 17-year-old who leads the World Cup standings threw down a near flawless 90.25-point run while fresh snow fell to jump ahead of Kim, who had 88 points on her first run.
Dropping in last as the top qualifier, Kim had a chance to grab the gold medal back. She flashed two thumbs up to her coaching team before dropping in. But she fell on a cab double cork 1080, which she had stomped in her first two runs.
At the bottom of the halfpipe, Choi threw her arms in the air. Her coach ran to hug her. Kim, after sliding to the bottom of the pipe, ran through the crowd to congratulate Choi. The new Olympic champion was celebrating with Kim’s family.
The snowboard stars have history. Kim helped Choi train at Mammoth Mountain Snowboarding Club. Choi counts Kim among one of her snowboarding idols after Kim launched herself to superstardom at the 2018 Olympics.
Kim, then 17, became the youngest woman to win an Olympic snowboarding gold medal in PyeongChang. She followed it up with a historic gold in Beijing, where she became the first woman to win two Olympic gold medals in halfpipe.
The 25-year-old Kim suffered a torn labrum in her right shoulder in early January while training in Switzerland. It was the second time she had injured her shoulder in less than four weeks after she was forced to withdraw from a World Cup competition in December.
The injury meant the Olympics were Kim’s first competition of the season.
MILAN — One short week after Lindsey Vonn crashed in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, and tore her left anterior cruciate ligament, she was tearing down the hill in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, a light knee brace warping the fabric of her racing suit the only obvious sign of anything amiss. When she finished the training run Friday, clocking the third-fastest time for a U.S. woman on the day, she casually fist bumped an American teammate at the finish line.
She made the feat look effortless. Sports medicine experts can say it’s anything but.
“It’s atypical to be able to compete without an ACL, at anything, but especially at a high level like Lindsey Vonn’s going to compete at,” said Clint Soppe, a board certified orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist at Cedars-Sinai. “So this is very surprising news to me as well.”
The ACL, which connects the shin bone to the femur, is a main stabilizing force in the knee and protects the lower leg from sliding forward. Straight-line movement doesn’t stress the major knee ligament and some day-to-day tasks such as walking are easily accomplished without an ACL. But what Vonn is doing is far from normal.
“If you add cutting, pivoting, changing directions, in 95% of humans, you need an ACL to do that,” said Kevin Farmer, an orthopedic surgeon and professor at the University of Florida’s department of orthopedics and sports medicine. “She’s obviously fallen into that 5%.”
Farmer calls the rare group “copers.” They overcome the lack of an ACL by strengthening and engaging other muscles. It’s primarily the hamstrings and quadriceps, but everything, including the glutes, calves, hips and core, counts.
Vonn will have had just nine days between the Olympic downhill race and her injury when she stands at the start gate Sunday. But the 41-year-old has had her whole career to develop the type of strength and control necessary to carry her through the Games without an ACL. She’s already done it before.
Lindsey Vonn concentrates ahead of a downhill training run in Cortina d’Ampezzo on Friday.
(Marco Trovati / Associated Press)
Vonn skied on a torn right ACL for more than a month until withdrawing just before the 2014 Sochi Olympics. In 2019, she won a bronze medal at world championships without a lateral collateral ligament and three tibial fractures in her left knee. She said this week that the same knee feels better than it did during that bronze medal run.
“She’s dealt with knee injuries in this knee before, so she’s been able to develop mechanisms and strategies,” Farmer said. “She probably doesn’t even realize that, but just from years of practicing with a knee that’s not normal, her body has developed mechanisms of firing patterns that allow her knee to have some inherent stability that most people don’t have.”
For athletes who suffer major injuries for the first time, pain often prevents them from firing their muscles, said Jason Zaremski, a nonoperative musculoskeletal and sports medicine physician and clinical professor at the University of Florida’s department of physical medicine and rehabilitation. But Vonn, whose injury history is almost as long as her resume, looked calm during training, her coach Aksel Lund Svindal told reporters in Cortina on Saturday.
So even if she’s one ACL short, Vonn’s team knows she has more than enough of the intangibles to get her not only down the mountain, but into medal contention.
“Her mental strength,” Svindal told reporters in Cortina on Saturday. “I think that’s why she has won as much as she has.”
Vonn completed her second training run Saturday with the third-fastest time before training was suspended after 21 athletes. She was 0.37 second behind compatriot Breezy Johnson, who is intimately familiar with what Vonn is attempting.
Johnson, a medal contender for the United States who led the second training run at 1 minute and 37.91 seconds, attempted to ski in Cortina without an ACL in 2022. She had one successful training run, but crashed on the second one, sustaining further injuries that forced her to withdraw from the Beijing Olympics.
Johnson, like many, gasped when she saw Vonn’s knee buckle slightly on a jump during training Saturday. She said coming off jumps on this course are especially difficult.
“There are, I think, more athletes that ski without ACLs and with knee damage than maybe talk about it,” Johnson said at a news conference from Cortina. “… I think that people often are unwilling to talk about it because of judgment from the media and the outside.”
Critics say Vonn is taking a spot from a healthy teammate or that she simply refuses to give up the sport for good. But Vonn has already come to terms with the end of her career. She said she came out of retirement with a partially replaced right knee simply wanting an opportunity to put the perfect bow on her ski racing career at a course she especially loves.
The stage is different, but the sentiment is familiar to Zaremski. The doctor has worked with high school athletes who beg for a chance to play a final game after suffering a torn ACL. Through bracing, taping and treatment, sometimes there are temporary fixes for the biggest moments.
“If we’re trying to get a huge event like the Olympics, I would never put anything past [Vonn],” Zaremski said. “She’s an amazing, once-in-a-generation athlete.”
