Lindsey Vonn
Lindsey Caroline Vonn (née Kildow /kɪldaʊ/; born October 18, 1984)[1] is an American former World Cup alpine ski racer on the US Ski Team. She won four World Cup overall championships—third amongst female skiers to Annemarie Moser-Pröll and Mikaela Shiffrin—with three consecutive titles in 2008, 2009, and 2010,[2] plus another in 2012.[3] Vonn won the gold medal in downhill at the 2010 Winter Olympics, the first one for an American woman.[4] She also won a record eight World Cup season titles in the downhill discipline (2008–2013, 2015, 2016), five titles in super-G (2009–2012, 2015), and three consecutive titles in the combined (2010–2012). In 2016, she won her 20th World Cup crystal globe title, the overall record for men or women, surpassing Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden, who won 19 globes from 1975 to 1984. She has the third highest super ranking of all skiers, men or women.
Not to be confused with Lindsey Van.Personal information
Lindsey Caroline Kildow
October 18, 1984
St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.
5 ft 8 in (173 cm)
Downhill, super-G,
giant slalom, combined
(also slalom before 2012)
Vail SSC
November 18, 2000 (age 16)
February 10, 2019 (age 34)
3 (1 gold)
8 (2 gold)
Vonn is one of six women[5] to have won World Cup races in all five disciplines of alpine skiing – downhill, super-G, giant slalom, slalom, and super combined – and won 82 World Cup races in her career. Her total of 82 World Cup victories was a women's record until January 2023, when it was surpassed by Mikaela Shiffrin. Only Shiffrin and Ingemar Stenmark of Sweden, with 86 World Cup victories, have more victories than Vonn. With her Olympic gold and bronze medals, two World Championship gold medals in 2009 (plus three silver medals in 2007 and 2011), and four overall World Cup titles, Vonn is one of the most successful American ski racers, and is considered one of the greatest of all skiers.[6]
In 2010, Vonn received the Laureus Sportswoman of the Year award,[7] and was the United States Olympic Committee's sportswoman of the year.[8] Injuries caused Vonn to miss parts of several seasons, including almost all of the 2014 season and most of the 2013 season. While recovering from injury, she worked as a correspondent for NBC News, covering the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. In 2019, she announced her retirement, citing her injuries.
Early life and education[edit]
Born Lindsey Caroline Kildow in St. Paul, Minnesota, she is the daughter of Linda Anne (née Krohn) and Alan Lee Kildow.[9] She grew up in the Twin Cities metropolitan area in Burnsville, Minnesota. Her father is of Irish ancestry and her mother was of German and Norwegian ancestry.[10] Vonn was on skis at age two before moving into Erich Sailer's renowned development program at Burnsville's Buck Hill, which also produced slalom racer Kristina Koznick. Her father, who had won a national junior title before a knee injury at 18, "pushed" her very hard, according to Sailer.[11]
When Vonn was 9 years old, she met Olympic gold medalist ski racer Picabo Street, whom she considers her hero and role model.[12] Their meeting made such an impression on Street that she remembered the meeting and later served as Vonn's mentor in skiing. Vonn commuted to Colorado to train for several years before her family moved to Vail, Colorado in the late 1990s.[13][14]
Vonn attended University of Missouri High School, an online program through the university's Center for Distance and Independent Study.[15][16] She speaks German fluently.[17] Despite not attending a traditional 4-year university, Vonn has gone on to participate in the four-day Harvard Business School's “The Business of Entertainment, Media, and Sports” program.[18]
Vonn's mother died in August 2022 following a one year battle with ALS.[19]
Skiing career[edit]
Early years[edit]
Lindsey Kildow was taught to ski by her grandfather, Don Kildow, in Milton, Wisconsin.[20] She began skiing as a child in Burnsville, Minnesota, at Buck Hill Ski and Snowboard, and through family vacations that included 16-hour drives from Minnesota to Vail. In an interview with The New York Times, Vonn stated, "I would be in the back under a sleeping bag, and she'd (her mother) be driving and singing along to some Eric Clapton tape."[21] By the time Lindsey was 7, she had skied in Minnesota, Colorado, and Oregon year-round. When skiing in Colorado, she had lessons at Ski Club Vail (SCV), an alpine racing program (subsequently expanded and renamed Ski & Snowboard Club Vail) that taught, and still teaches skiers from ages 6 and up.[22] During her first year at SCV, Lindsey skied under "Gravity Corps" Ski Coach Colby S. Scudder, her only female coach, in Ski Club Vail's Gravity Corps "pre-age-class" program. The program was directed by Tom Krebs[23] who told the Gravity Corps coaches to not train the skiers inside gates, but instead to develop their all-mountain skiing skills and to develop their comfort in the fall line (the most direct route down a ski slope), while ensuring the kids were exposed to as much terrain as possible "versatility and exposure to diverse challenging terrain" was the directive.[24] At that time, the Gravity Corps pre-age-class skiing program consisted of multiple groups of 8–10 skiers; it was the only SCV venue open at the club to younger skiers who were not yet old enough to participate in official "age-class" United States Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) or International Ski Federation (FIS) sanctioned events.
Lindsey and other members of her gravity Corps group, placed first, second and third, in Gravity Corps unofficial races in which all gravity corps skiers participated in one collective unofficial gathering. The race was set and run by Krebs, and directed as the only time gravity corps skiers should "be in a race course".[24] At the end of that first Vail season, Lindsey's mother asked if the coach thought Lindsey was a slow skier; the answer was an emphatic "NO," Lindsey was most definitely NOT a slow skier. It was mentioned that if anyone ever said that Lindsey was slow, it was likely because that person was not recognizing that Lindsey was in a perpetual growth spurt and, that the person saying that Lindsey was slow was not considering that changes in Lindsey's height affected her center of gravity, etc., and skiing confidence, and thus that person who described Lindsey as skiing slowly was not acknowledging the differences between a growing young male skier vs. a young female skier (who by the age of 11, stood at a much taller height than her peers) - which, in the SCV Gravity Corps Coach's opinion resulted in the devastatingly inaccurate "slow" comment. The words used by Colby S.Scudder were more colorful, and much less diplomatic. Based on Lindsey's newly confirmed speed, Lindsey and her mother asked about enrolling Lindsey into the older "Age-Class" program, which they said, had previously denied their enrollment request.
The coach supported the idea of skiing with "age-class" skiers. The next season, with the final approval of Director Chip Woods, Lindsey was enrolled into the "age class program," under SCV Alpine "technical skiing Coaches Reid Phillips, Chip Woods, Todd A. Rash and Gus Pernetz,etc., who collectively perfected Lindsey's early technical skills and began her SCV "in gate" training.[25]
In the late 1990s, Lindsey and her siblings and mother stopped commuting from Minnesota to Colorado and instead moved to Colorado to ski exclusively at Ski Club Vail. During her first SCV year in Vail, Lindsey and one of her sisters skied together in the same "gravity corps" SCV group. It was during that first season Lindsey and her family were contemplating if the entire family should move from Minnesota to Colorado. "Vail was wonderful to me," Lindsey said, "but I missed all the traditional things of childhood – sleepovers, school dances, making friends in a conventional way. Halfway through the second season, Lindsey's siblings also moved to Vail. "Now all my brothers and sisters had left their friends for me. That was stressful on them. I felt so guilty."[26]
However, the move paid off because in 1999 Lindsey Kildow and Will McDonald became the first American athletes to win the "Cadets" slalom events in Italy's Trofeo Topolino di Sci Alpino.[27] In 1986, Lindsey's hero, Picabo Street, participated, but did not medal, in the same Topolino event.[27][28][29] In 1995 at age 10, Kildow met Street in person at a promotional event. A few years later, "Street was stunned watching a 15-year-old Lindsey ski for the first time in 1999. She marveled at Lindsey's knack for following the fall line. 'The faster she went, the bigger the smile she got on her face,' Street said. 'You can't teach somebody to love the fall line like that little girl loved the fall line.'"[30]
After climbing through the ranks of the U.S. Ski Team, she made her World Cup debut at age 16 on November 18, 2000, in Park City, Utah.
2002–2005[edit]
In her Olympic debut at the 2002 Winter Olympics at age 17, Kildow raced in both slalom and combined in Salt Lake City, with her best result coming with sixth in combined. On March 4, 2003, she earned a silver medal in downhill in the Junior World Championship at Puy Saint-Vincent, France.
Kildow credits a change in her attitude toward training to a bike ride with fellow ski racer Julia Mancuso and Mancuso's father Ciro when Kildow visited them at their home in Lake Tahoe, California. With little biking experience, she quickly found herself miles behind Julia and Ciro. Alone and embarrassed, she realized she needed drastic revision of her training regimen and her attitude toward training if she was going to be successful.[31]
On March 24, 2004, Kildow was the downhill silver medalist at the U.S. Alpine Championships at Mt. Alyeska Resort, Girdwood, Alaska. Earlier that year 2004, Kildow climbed onto the World Cup podium for the first time with a third-place finish in downhill in January 2004 at Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. Her maiden victory in that specialty came at Lake Louise, Alberta, in December 2004. She captured five more World Cup podiums over the next two months.
In 2005, she competed in four races at her first World Championships held in Bormio, Italy, pulling in fourth-place finishes in both the downhill and the combined. She was ninth in super-G, but failed to finish the giant slalom. She cited the unexpected appearance of her father, with whom she has a strained relationship, for rattling her before the event.[11]
Documentary[edit]
In 2019, HBO released a documentary about Vonn entitled Lindsey Vonn: The Final Season.[106] The documentary covers her final World Championship season and her rise to fame from child prodigy to three-time Olympic medalist (one gold).
Vonn hosted the single season canine reality competition series The Pack, which premiered on Amazon Prime Video on November 20, 2020.[107] Her own dog, Lucy, accompanied her on the show.
