Olympic champion skier Lindsey Vonn began her commencement address to University of Southern California graduates by recognizing how far she’s come since crashing at this year’s Winter Games in Italy.
“Whoa! I think this is the first time that the accomplishment is just walking up to the podium instead of stepping onto one,” Vonn said to applause from members of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism Class of 2026.
At 41, she’d hoped to cap a surprising comeback with more Olympic gold.
“I had crawled my way back to No. 1 in the world. And I knew I had a legitimate chance to win. The happy ending to finish my career was just two minutes away down the mountain,” Vonn told the graduates. “But then, I crashed.”
Seconds into the race, her arm caught a gate and “just like that, I was cartwheeling through the air, landing with my leg fractured into pieces, staring up at the sky knowing it was all over,” she recalled.
After being airlifted from the Cortina downhill course, Vonn underwent multiple surgeries and even an emergency procedure that saved her leg from amputation. Her ACL, ruptured in an earlier crash during a World Cup race, has yet to be repaired.
‘You’re going to fall and it’s going to hurt’
Vonn didn’t dwell on the grueling rehabilitation that now allows her to walk unassisted, instead focusing on what she learned from that and other ordeals through a skiing career that’s included five Olympics, starting with the 2002 Winter Games in Utah.
“I’m not up here to tell you how to win,” Vonn, a key member of the organizing committee for Utah’s 2034 Winter Games, told the graduates. “I’m up here to tell you how to keep going when you fall and why, if you do, the winning will come.”
It takes belief and hard work to achieve success, Vonn said, a combination that allowed her to tune out critics saying she’d “never make it, that my style was wrong, that I was too aggressive, that I didn’t have the right body type, that I simply didn’t have what it took.”
Even so, there were still “moments where defeat almost consumed me,” Vonn acknowledged, citing other physical injuries over the years as well as personal struggles with the end of a marriage, body image, depression and anxiety.
“One of the few guarantees in life is that you’re going to fall and it’s going to hurt. In that moment, how you respond will matter more than anything else,” she said, advising the graduates to ask, “What can this teach me? Then get back up. Apply what you learned. And go again.”
Why Vonn has no regrets
Lying in a hospital bed in Italy the night of her horrific crash, Vonn realized her “Olympic dream didn’t finish the way I dreamt it would. It wasn’t a storybook ending. It was just life. But here’s what I know about life, and about ski racing and about anything worth doing. We take risks.”
And sometimes, she said, “we fall. Sometimes our hearts break. Sometimes we don’t achieve the things we know we could have. But we can try. And that, the trying, is the whole point. I have no regrets.”
Standing in the starting gate at her fifth Olympics, “knowing I had earned the right to be there, knowing I had a real chance to win, that was already a victory,” Vonn said. “That crash didn’t take that from me. Nothing could.”