#20 - Lindsay Vonn, Rise

So she has a memoir called rise that came out in 2022.

That's the book that I chose for us to talk about this week.

It was an incredible choice, specifically because for anyone that has listened to the podcast, you and I had a bit of a debate in our Olympic episode about her choosing to ski on a torn ACL and then.

having a devastating crash that she is still going through a pretty extreme recovery.

And so I guess there's a couple of things that came out of reading this book that I think are interesting.

Obviously, it really reaffirmed my position on why she chose to ski at the Olympics, but also why she chose to ski in terms of her entire career and who she is as an athlete.

A lot of things make sense that we already talked about.

So we'll get into that a little bit more detail.

But I do obviously want to introduce Lindsay Vaughn for anyone who doesn't know who she is.

As you mentioned, Lindsey Vonn is an American former alpine ski racer, widely regarded as one of the greatest in the sports history.

And so she was born in 1984 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and began skiing at a young age before making her World Cup debut as a teenager in the year 2000.

And so over a long and decorated career, Vaughn won four FIS Alpine Ski World Cup overall titles and amassed 84 World Cup victories across multiple disciplines.

She ended up being one short of the world record.

for World Cup victories, held by a European male ski racer.

And she tried like hell at the end.

Couldn't quite get there, but 84 World Cup victories is pretty incredible.

Also claiming three Olympic medals, including the downhill gold at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games.

the first for an American woman in that event.

She also earned eight world championship medals and set records for wins in downhill super G before she retired in 2019.

She writes this book in 2022.

After retiring in 2019, we know now she returned for the 2026 Olympics.

And so yeah, so that was after a five year hiatus, she made a remarkable comeback in her 40s became the oldest downhill race winner on the World Cup tour, competed at the most recent Olympics.

And so again, her contributions to the sport are pretty incredible and then also has a lot of contributions to female sports specifically.

So there's a good amount of some gender discussion throughout this book and in terms of maybe from her perspective, some unintentional contributions of hers to female sport.

Obviously a very different sport experience than what either you and I have experienced ourselves.