There’ll hardly be an eerier sight in sport any time soon than Lindsey Vonn being airlifted off that mountain on Sunday, the Alps the majestic backdrop as her airborne stretcher dangled far beneath the helicopter that had come to take her to hospital.
“I don’t want to reiterate how bad this is,” said Chemmy Alcott when Hazel Irvine handed over to her at the venue, before she reiterated how bad this was. “Normally, you are taken inside the helicopter, but the fact that Lindsey is flying underneath on a massive rope is a really bad sign. Something very, very bad has happened.”
It had. But our commentator Graham Bell had reassured the BBC’s viewers before the downhill event in Cortina that it was perfectly possible to race with a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament because he had done it back in the 1980s. How did he fare? “I crashed.”
That wasn’t hugely heartening, then, but Bell maintained his stance as Vonn set off on her run. “She is racing without the ACL! It is possible, I can tell you!” One second later: “Oh No!”
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It was horrific. At the best of times, most of us marvel at the courage – madness? – of these people hurtling down mountains on a pair of skinny planks. But to do so just 10 days after being airlifted off another mountain with a shattered knee? They’re a different breed.
The crowd’s silence allowed Vonn’s cries of pain echo around the mountain, the length of time the medical team attended to her adding to the distress of it all.
“Everyone had come here for a celebration and what we’re seeing right now is a tragedy,” said Chemmy, whose careless enough use of the latter word, which implied the grimmest of outcomes, was forgivable enough under the circumstances. She was as emotional as the ashen-faced members of the crowd.
In 13 seconds, then, we went from one of the gutsiest Olympic comebacks of all time, by a 41-year-old woman who had said six years ago that her body was “broken beyond repair”, to one that turned brutal.
“I just never believed it would end in a clump at the side of the piste,” said Chemmy, who found time to salute gold medal winner, and Vonn team-mate, Breezy Johnson. (“She skied like the wind.”)
Need it be said, there were those who pilloried Vonn’s decision to give it a go, the same folk who, largely, wouldn’t know a piste from a piss-up, aren’t draped in 11 Olympic and World Championship medals and haven’t successfully come back from more ACL injuries, and too many broken bones to count, than they’ve tapped daily spite on their keyboards.
No matter. As we know, with the possible exception of curling, the Winter Olympics generally feature sports on the death-defying side. Take that snowboarding Big Air thingie. As we learned when it made its Olympic debut in 2018, it’s exhilarating, thrilling and, well, utterly terrifying.
And even after all these years, the lingo remains a mystery. “Right foot forward, that’s goofy to you and me, popped a little ollie, clap of the hands, frontside 18,” said the Beeb’s Tim Warwood of Dane Menzies’s run. What now?
Oliver Martin had “the indie grab on that”, Francis Jobin produced “a backside double rodeo”, Valentino Guseli had “Iron Maiden blaring in his head somewhere” and after Taiga Hasegawa’s first run? “What will VAR [video assistant referee] show there?” asked Ed Leigh. “VAR will show the ball crossing the line,” said Tim. Swahili, like.
Kira Kimura proved to be the golden boy. As we anticipated, his “backside 1980 melon grab” gave him the lead after the first run, before he sealed his victory with an, “Oh my God, a switch backside 1980 spin!”
“I’ve often referred to him as the human tumble dryer, his spin cycle is absolutely outrageous,” Ed swooned. Tim begged to differ. “He’s more of a washing machine on rinse mode.” By then, our comprehension levels were on delicates.
