AP Photo Captures Moment Lindsey Vonn Loses Control Before Crashing Hard at Winter Olympics
An AP photographer captured the exact moment Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn clipped a gate while competing in the downhill event, causing her to fall badly.
Vonn, one of the most successful skiers of all time, came out of retirement to compete in her fifth Winter Olympics. But it ended with her being airlifted to hospital where she has since had surgery on a broken leg.
“The big story this year in Lindsey Vonn’s comeback kid story,” says AP photographer Jacquelyn Martin. “She’d just had the injury to her ACL and people were really excited to see her race and what’s going to happen.”
Martin explains she was taken to a great vantage spot on the Tofane downhill run in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites, Italy.
In a video by the Associated Press, Martin walks the viewer through what happened from her perspective blow-by-blow.
“Lindsey Vonn comes through, she’s coming into the turn. As she approaches the gate, she clips the gate with her arm or her shoulder. As soon as she does that, we know this is bad. She clips it and it totally throws her off; she’s unable to recover. A couple of pictures later, you see her body at an almost full diagnol; it’s bad,” says Martin.
“She’s not able to come back from that, being put off balance when the impact from the gate happened. And at that moment, I realized she’s not going to be able to come back from this — and it is a bad crash. I gasped out loud. It was really scary. And really sad to see the end of this current Olympic journey.”
Vonn was hoping to become the oldest athlete, either male or female, to win a medal in alpine downhill.
The crash that Martin witnessed took place just 12 seconds into her run. The Guardian reports that the mountain reportedly fell silent out of concern until rescuers airlifted her away and they broke into applause. But the mood changed again when there was yet another bad accident and the air ambulance summoned once more. The two severe crashes underline how dangerous the sport is.
