Lindsey Vonn Injury on Eve of Vancouver Shows Olympics' Cruelty to Favorites

The Olympics can be unusually cruel.

While the 2010 Winter Olympics that open tonight in Vancouver are sure to provide stories of inspiration and dreams fulfilled over the next two weeks, they are also guaranteed to leave athletes who have dominated their sports for the last four years heartbroken.

Such is the potentially cruel fate that besets American gold-medal favorite skier Lindsey Vonn even as the Olympic cauldron still sits unlit in Vancouver’s BC Place Stadium.

It was barely two weeks ago that Vonn triumphed in St. Moritz, Switzerland in her final race before the Olympics and found herself on the cover of Sports Illustrated, dubbed “America’s best woman skier ever.”

But after a training crash last week, Vonn finds herself questioning whether she will even be able to compete with a deep bone bruise on her right shin that makes it painful for her to put on her ski boots and kept her off of the slopes completely until Thursday, just three days before the first of her five scheduled events.

In a matter of months, perhaps even weeks, the injury should be healed. But in a sport that only has its biggest competition every fourth year, an ill-timed injury such as this one is in its own way career-threatening.

Vonn’s list of achievements justly qualify her as “American’s best woman skier ever”—she finished the 2008 and 2009 seasons as No. 1 in the world in the overall and downhill standings, 2009 at the top of the Super-G standings, has won more World Cup races than any American woman in history, and won silver in both the Super G and downhill at the 2007 World Championships before winning gold at both of those events in the 2009 World Championships in France.

However, should she be unable to compete in Vancouver, or should her injury force her to compete at less than full strength, she could well never win so much as a medal in the quadrennial event that defines greatness in her sport.

Vonn has been on the Olympic stage twice before, as a 17-year-old in 2002 at Salt Lake City and again in Torino, Italy in 2006, where she suffered a frightening crash during a training run but still managed to finish eighth with a badly bruised hip and back.

At 25 years old, Vonn is likely to continue skiing through the 2014 Olympics, but she will never be better positioned to win Olympic gold as she seemed to be several weeks ago as a defending world champion and a favorite in both the downhill and the Super-G.

Not only would Vonn need to persevere in a sport where dangerous crashes and injuries are the norm, but she would have to once again find herself in peak form and at the very top of her sport at the exact right time four years from now—a scenario that is possible but also far from a given.

That is what can make the Olympics so cruel. Athletes have but one chance every four years to succeed on their biggest stage and fulfill their dreams, and all it takes is a bad cold, a missed gate, a slip, or a bruised shin at the wrong time to quash them.

It is a difficult enough task for any athlete, but for one who has dominated his or her sport in the years leading up to the Olympics, it can be a particularly daunting fate.

For every Michael Phelps, there is a Mary Decker-Slaney. While Phelps fulfilled his lofty goal of winning a record-setting eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics by dominating his fellow swimmers much the way he had for the previous four years, Decker-Slaney, one of the greatest American distance runners in history, who was near the top of her sport for a decade, never found her way onto an Olympic podium.

One year she was injured, four years later the US boycotted the Olympics, four years after that she was tripped in the Olympic final, and four more years later she was past her prime.

None of the top athletes in Vancouver are likely to emulate Phelps’ historic success, but some, perhaps many, will face a cruel fate like that of Decker-Slaney.

Vonn must hope that her balky shin does not make her one of them.