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

CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — The image loops in collective memory: Lindsey Vonn clipping a gate 13 seconds into the Olympic downhill, catapulting skyward, then crashing onto her right side before a worldwide audience. While viewers held their breath, the 42-year-old former champion was living every athlete’s worst nightmare — agony amplified by a lens.

What happens in the seconds, weeks and months that follow such a public trauma? The Athletic spoke to competitors who have endured similar moments under the harshest spotlight.

Simon Jones still fields questions about the knee injury that derailed his 2002 Ashes debut. Chasing a boundary at Brisbane’s Gabba, the England quick’s studs caught, twisting his right leg gruesomely. “I heard the crowd gasp when the replay hit the big screen,” Jones recalls. A heckler pelted abuse — and an object — as he was stretchered off with a ruptured ACL. “You just want the physio,” he says. “Everything else is noise.”

Jones spent 10 days in Australia before a 20-hour flight home, leg braced, career in limbo. Rehab consumed 18 months; he returned via a low-key Glamorgan second-team match that somehow drew 50 reporters. “They wanted to see if I’d collapse again,” he shrugs. Jones fought back to help England reclaim the Ashes in 2005, yet the first question strangers still ask is, “Are you fit?” Two decades on, the inquiry stings.

British gymnast Becky Downie remembers the hush at the 2017 European Championships when she missed a bar catch and landed on an already-damaged elbow. “I couldn’t put weight on my knee, so I stuck my arm out — snap, ligament gone,” she says. Downie flew home cradling her arm, underwent full reconstruction, then rewatched the footage because gymnastics demands athletes revisit every skill. “You can’t always invent new moves,” she explains.

For Katarina Johnson-Thompson, the pain in Tokyo 2021 was psychological as much as physical. A ruptured Achilles ended her heptathlon medal bid. “I felt I’d failed everyone who helped me,” she says. Sports psychologist Sarah Cecil notes that athletes who blame themselves — or others — struggle most to process trauma. “The crowd or cameras rarely haunt them; culpability does,” Cecil says.

Vonn’s modern twist is living the recovery in real time. Since February 8 she has posted seven updates — surgical photos, travel logistics, even the death of her dog Leo the day after the crash. Cecil believes public disclosure can aid meaning-making, “but private words to a psychologist are often very different from the social-media script.” Jones understands the urge to stay visible: “Out of sight, out of mind in sport. But you must take the trolling with the sympathy.”

Each athlete confronts the same blank page after the fall: Will I return? Will I be the same? The answer arrives in small victories — Jones jogging without swelling, Downie re-grasping the bar, Johnson-Thompson rising for another heptathlon. Vonn, meanwhile, begins the quiet months where every conversation starts with “That Moment,” the blanket of sadness she admits she has yet to shake.

Their shared message: the world moves on after the replays end; the athlete’s real race starts when the spotlight fades.