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U.S. Olympic legend Lindsey Vonn said Monday that she nearly lost her left leg and needed a blood transfusion after suffering a devastating crash at the Winter Games.
Vonn shared her latest update in a video posted to her Instagram. She described the past two weeks as “by far the most extreme and painful and challenging injury” she has ever faced and thanked the doctor who performed the operations on her leg.
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Lindsey Vonn of Team United States during the track inspection before the downhill training at the Milan Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games at the Tofane Alpine Skiing Center on February 6, 2026 in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. (Daniel Kopatsch/VOIGT/GettyImages)
“Basically, I had a complex tibia fracture,” she said. “I also broke my femoral head, my tibial plateau, like everything was broken. And the reason it was so complex was because I had compartment syndrome. And compartment syndrome is when you have so much trauma to an area of your body that there’s too much blood and it gets stuck and it crushes pretty much everything in the compartment, and all kinds of nerves, and all kinds of nerves.
“Dr. Tom Hackett saved my leg. He saved my leg from being amputated and did what’s called a fasciotomy where he cut open both sides of my leg, kind of filed it up so to speak, let it breathe and he saved me.”
LINDSEY VONN TAKES ‘BABY STEPS’ AFTER LATEST SURGERY THAT TOOK OVER 6 HOURS: ‘LOTS OF PLATES AND SCREWS’
Lindsey Vonn speeds down the track during the women’s official alpine training at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, on February 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Marco Trovati))
Vonn added that she lost a lot of blood during the surgeries and needed a blood transfusion.
“I feel very lucky and grateful to him, the six-hour operation he had on Wednesday to reconstruct it, which went amazingly well. I was in the hospital longer than I had hoped because I had very low hemoglobin from all the blood loss from all the operations. I was really struggling. The pain was a bit out of control. I had to have a blood transfusion and it helped a lot,” she said.
Vonn said she hoped to move from a wheelchair to crutches soon, but expected to be on crutches for at least two months.
“It’s going to be a long road but I’m getting there. At least I’m out of the hospital,” she added in the caption of her post on the social media platform.
Vonn suffered a crash during women’s downhill skiing. She had persevered through a torn ACL to even have a chance at winning a medal.
Lindsey Vonn of the United States is lifted away after a crash during a women’s downhill skiing event at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
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However, the injury forced her to be removed from the mountain via helicopter. She had several surgeries before being moved back to the United States
