By Alan Baldwin
CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy, Feb 8 (Reuters) – World champion Breezy Johnson won the women’s downhill to secure the U.S. team’s first medal of the Milano Cortina Olympics on Sunday, but her pride was mingled with pain after teammate Lindsey Vonn crashed heavily and was flown to hospital.
Germany’s Emma Aicher secured silver with a time 0.04 slower than Johnson’s one minute 36.10 seconds, while Italy’s home favourite and 2018 champion Sofia Goggia had to settle for bronze.
Johnson’s title, won on Cortina d’Ampezzo’s spectacular Olimpia delle Tofane piste gleaming in the sunshine, came exactly a year after she bagged the world championship gold at Saalbach, Austria.
The Wyoming native is the United States’ first women’s downhill champion since Vonn in 2010, and only their second ever.
Johnson was banned for 14 months from October 2023, a sanction announced only in May 2024, after three anti-doping whereabouts failures.
She has also had a career punctuated by injury, and she missed the 2022 Beijing Games after a crash in downhill training in Cortina.
“I had a good feeling about today,” she said. “I sort of still can’t believe it yet.
“The run, I knew I had to push. I knew I had to go harder than I did in training. I had to be super-clean and I felt like I did that.”
FASTEST IN WEATHER-HIT TRAINING
The American, fastest in a weather-interrupted final training on Saturday when Vonn was third, had started sixth and soared to the top of the leaderboard with a time more than a second quicker than previous leader Ariane Raedler of Austria.
Other than Aicher, the 10th starter, the big guns that followed all failed to come close to a skier who has yet to win a World Cup race and had a nervous wait to be sure of gold.
The race was then halted when Vonn, 13th out of the start hut and a serious medal contender, lost control and crashed as fans and teammates gasped in horror.
Johnson appeared close to tears, wiping her eyes and looking away.
Vonn, leader of the downhill World Cup, appeared to clip the fourth gate with her shoulder and barrelled off the course at high speed before coming to rest in a crumpled heap.
The 2010 downhill champion could be heard screaming on television coverage.
Her run lasted barely 13 seconds but, with the 41-year-old already the headline act as she sought to overcome a serious knee injury and become the oldest Olympic Alpine medallist, all the attention was fixed on the stricken American.
“It’s a tough road and it’s a tough sport,” said Johnson.
“I think that’s the madness of it, that it can hurt you so badly but you keep coming back for more.
“My heart aches for her. It’s such a brutal sport sometimes.”
Goggia, 15th starter, heard Vonn’s scream and had to wait at the top of the mountain for her rival to be tended to before the race could re-start.
Jacqueline Wiles was fourth equal for the United States together with Austria’s Cornelia Huetter who said she made a big mistake before the final part of the run.
Italy’s Federica Brignone, the 2022 giant slalom silver medallist making an Olympic comeback after suffering multiple leg fractures and a torn anterior cruciate ligament last April, was 10th.
There were further interruptions to the race when Austria’s Nina Ortlieb and Andorra’s last starter Cande Moreno crashed, the latter taken away on a stretcher.
(Additional reporting by Julien Pretot and Sara Rossi, editing by Hugh Lawson and Christian Radnedge)
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