This is the end of Lindsey Vonn’s career, skier’s father declares after crash

Dubai: No father would want to see her child suffer, especially when the latter has done it all and doesn’t have anything to prove to the world.

Lindsey Vonn’s father is no different.

After watching his daughter’s horror crash at the Winter Olympics on Sunday, Alan Kildow decided that he had seen enough and declared that the American skiing superstar will no longer race if he has any influence over her decision and that she will not return to the Winter Olympics after breaking her left leg in the downhill over the weekend.

Following Vonn’s complex tibia fracture that required multiple surgeries, Kildow told AP: “She’s 41 years old and this is the end of her career. There will be no more ski races for Lindsey Vonn, as long as I have anything to say about it.”

Kildow and the rest of Vonn’s family — a brother and two sisters — have been with Vonn while she is being treated at a hospital in Treviso following her fall and helicopter evacuation from the course in Cortina on Sunday.

Kildow declined to comment on the injuries, but he did address how Vonn was doing emotionally.

“She’s a very strong individual,” Kildow said. “She knows physical pain and she understands the circumstances that she finds herself in. And she’s able to handle it. Better than I expected. She’s a very, very strong person. And so I think she’s handling it real well.”

Kildow — a former ski racer himself who taught his daughter to race — said he slept in his daughter’s hospital room overnight.

“She has somebody with her — or multiple people with her — at all times,” Kildow said. “We’ll have people here as long as she’s here.”

Vonn will also not return to the Olympics to cheer on teammates or for anything else, Kildow said.

“No, she’s not that in kind of situation,” he said. “She will be going home at an appropriate point in time.”

Meanwhile, in her first statement since the crash on Sunday in Cortina d’Ampezzo that brutally ended her Olympics dream, Vonn said: “While yesterday did not end the way I had hoped, and despite the intense physical pain it caused, I have no regrets.”

The 41-year-old insisted that the ruptured anterior cruciate ligament she had sustained in a crash in a World Cup race before the Milan-Cortina Games “had nothing to do with my crash whatsoever”.

“I was simply 5 inches too tight on my line when my right arm hooked inside of the gate, twisting me and resulted in my crash,” she added on her social media, from the hospital in the Italian city of Treviso where she is being treated.

“I sustained a complex tibia fracture that is currently stable but will require multiple surgeries to fix properly,” she said.

She continued: “My Olympic dream did not finish the way I dreamt it would. It wasn’t a story book ending or a fairy tale, it was just life. I dared to dream and had worked so hard to achieve it.

“Because in Downhill ski racing the difference between a strategic line and a catastrophic injury can be as small as 5 inches.”

Vonn gave no indication whether she intends to bring an end to a career that has made her one of the most recognisable faces in world sport.

She has already had two surgeries to stabilise the fracture of her left leg, according to reports in Italy.