Lindsey Vonn

Lindsey Caroline Vonn (née Kildow ; born October 18, 1984) is an American alpine ski racer. She won four World Cup overall championships with titles in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2012. Vonn won the gold medal in downhill at the 2010 Winter Olympics, the first one for an American woman. 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.

Vonn is one of six women to have won World Cup races in all five disciplines of alpine skiing – downhill, super-G, giant slalom, slalom, and super combined – and (as of January 22, 2026) has won 84 World Cup races in her career. When she retired in 2019, her total of 82 World Cup victories was a women's record that stood until January 2023, when it was surpassed by Mikaela Shiffrin. Only Shiffrin and Stenmark have more victories than Vonn, with the record held by Shiffrin. 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 greatest alpine skiers of all time.

In 2011, Vonn received the Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year award, and was the United States Olympic Committee's sportswoman of the year. 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. Vonn returned to competitive skiing in November 2024, and became the oldest downhill skiing World Cup winner at the age of 41.

Early life and education

Born Lindsey Caroline Kildow in Saint Paul, Minnesota, she is the daughter of Linda Anne (née Krohn) and Alan Lee Kildow. 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. Kildow 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.

When Kildow was 9 years old, she met Olympic gold medalist ski racer Picabo Street, whom she considers her hero and role model. Their meeting made such an impression on Street that she remembered the meeting and later served as Kildow's mentor in skiing. On watching Kildow ski for the first time in a 1999 event, Street marveled at her knack for following the fall line, and was quoted as saying: "The faster she went, the bigger the smile she got on her face. You can't teach somebody to love the fall line like that little girl loved the fall line." Kildow commuted to Colorado to train for several years before her family moved to Vail, Colorado in the late 1990s.

Kildow attended University of Missouri High School, an online program through the university's Center for Distance and Independent Study. She speaks German fluently. Despite not attending a traditional 4-year university, she has gone on to participate in Harvard Business School's "The Business of Entertainment, Media, and Sports" four-day program.

Skiing career

Early years

Lindsey Kildow was taught to ski by her grandfather, Don Kildow, in Milton, Wisconsin. She began skiing as a child in Burnsville, Minnesota, at Buck Hill, and through family vacations that included 16-hour drives from Minnesota to Vail, Colorado. In an interview with The New York Times, Vonn later stated, "I would be in the back under a sleeping bag, and she'd (her mother, Linda) be driving and singing along to some Eric Clapton tape."

In the late 1990s, Kildow 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, Kildow and one of her sisters skied together in the same "gravity corps" SCV group. It was during that first season that she and her family were contemplating if the entire family should move from Minnesota to Colorado. She later said, "Vail was wonderful to me, but I missed all the traditional things of childhood – sleepovers, school dances, making friends in a conventional way." Halfway through the second season, her 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."

However, the move paid off because in 1999, Kildow and Will McDonald became the first American athletes to win the "Cadets" slalom events in Italy's Trofeo Topolino di Sci Alpino. 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

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 a drastic revision of her training regimen and her attitude toward training if she was going to be successful.

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, 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.

2006–2007

At her second Winter Olympics in 2006, Kildow clocked the second-best time in the first practice run yet crashed in the second training run for the downhill race on February 13, 2006, in San Sicario, Italy; she was evacuated by helicopter to Turin and was hospitalized overnight. Despite a bruised hip and strong pains, she returned on the slope 2 days later to compete and finished eighth. The gritty performance earned her the U.S. Olympic Spirit Award, as voted by American fans, fellow Team USA athletes, former U.S. Olympians, and members of the media for best representing the Olympic Spirit.

Kildow earned her first "big race" medals with silver in both downhill and super-G at the 2007 World Championships in Åre, Sweden. A training crash before the slalom caused her a low-level ACL sprain to her right knee, ending her season 4 weeks early. Nevertheless, she finished third for the season in the women's 2007 World Cup disciplines of downhill and super-G.

2008–2010: Winning the overall World Cup for three consecutive years

In 2008, Lindsey Vonn won the overall World Cup title. She became the second American woman to do so, following Tamara McKinney in 1983. American Bode Miller won the men's title to complete the first U.S. sweep of the men's and women's overall titles in 25 years (McKinney and Phil Mahre in 1983). She also won the World Cup season title in the downhill and the U.S. Alpine Championships combined title (downhill & slalom), marking her best ski season to date. Vonn set a new American record for the most World Cup downhill victories with ten, winning at Crans-Montana, Switzerland, on March 8.