Vonn crashes out, Malinin stumbles as Olympic dreams unravel in Milan | Telander

CHICAGO - Everybody’s gonna lose.

That’s how it goes, folks. You know the old saying: Nobody gets out alive.

But there are ways of losing that transcend the inevitable, that are instructional, that make us look into our souls and ponder, that make us say our prayers.

I give you Lindsey Vonn and Ilia Malinin, two superstar United States athletes who recently failed in the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics in unique and spectacular fashion. Their losses were so breathtaking that they already are legendary.

Vonn, 41, the much-decorated downhill skier who had retired in 2019, then returned to competition in 2025, crashed just 13 seconds into her downhill run, exploding like a puppet thrown off a cliff. The detonation was horrifying and maybe even predictable, knowing what a ferocious competitor Vonn is and knowing she was skiing—incredibly, ludicrously?—on a torn anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee. That injury had occurred just nine days earlier while training in Switzerland.

CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, ITALY - FEBRUARY 08: (EDITOR’S NOTE: This Handout image/clip was provided by a third-party organization and may not adhere to Getty Images’ editorial policy.) Lindsey Vonn of Team United States crashes during the Women's Downhill o

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A helicopter airlifted her off the Olympic slope to the hospital where her shattered right tibia plateau would need a series of surgeries to fix. Getting airlifted off slopes is normal for Vonn. Or was. She had been helicoptered off that Swiss mountain on January 31, for example.

We’ll assume she is done with hardcore skiing forever. We’ll assume she’ll be able to walk without a limp. But here’s what we know about Vonn, about all transcendent champions: their greatest virtue often becomes their greatest enemy: They never give up.

When she retired at age 35, Vonn said her knees hurt too much to go on. Then she got a partial knee replacement and back she came. After the pre-Olympic crash and torn ACL (not her first, by the way), there was no way she could ski barely a week later. But Vonn never gives up. And there she was, lined up and ready to win or almost die trying.

The dilemma for us observers is, of course, when is such diligence and suppression of pain heroic or just stupid? The fact is, we won’t know until the event itself has occurred.

Vonn has 84 World Cup victories and previous Olympic golds. But this quest of hers was insane. She said from her hospital bed, "My ACL and past injuries had nothing to do with the crash whatsoever."

That’s her defense, but it’s untrue. Not only was she wearing a large and limiting brace, she also knew, at least subconsciously, that at 41, with an old, wounded body, she had to cut every gate to the micrometer, blast down the steepest fall line, dig with the sharpest ski edge, do everything to beat the master of all races, the quietly undefeated rival known as Father Time.

If she’d won gold, or even made it safely to the bottom, we would be singing her praises. But this is reality, not a reality show. We’ll still sing her praises, but we’ll also remember Vonn as a champion who went too far, who couldn’t quit when she should have, who had to fly too close to the sun to find out she was done.

Malinin’s failure also involved a fall—two actually—in his free skate performance. I don’t know about you, but I’m not a huge fan of a sport in which the contestants wear sparkles and cavort to music. But I certainly recognize skill, athleticism, grace and strength, and Malinin, the so-called "Quad God," can zip around the ice, leap and pirouette in amazing fashion, landing on a single metal blade, which in itself is astounding; most humans’ ankles would snap like twigs.

Indeed, Malinin is so good at his craft that not only does he wear a T-shirt that says "Quad God" on the front, referencing his quadruple airborne spins, but the other contestants seemed to have all but ceded the gold to him before the Olympic competition began. After all, he was the two-time reigning world champion with an unbeaten streak dating to 2023.

This thing was his. Gold, fame, all of it. All he had to do was the usual. Quad this and quad that. Nothing special. Be himself. But he’d never skated in an Olympics before. He’d never had time to think about the possibility of failure on such a big stage, or the possibility of success, of the simple enormity of it all.

He fell twice, and those of us who couldn’t tell a lutz from a klutz, a salchow from a Chow Chow, watched in stunned disbelief as a master collapsed into futility. Malinin finished eighth, and seemed as baffled as anyone about why the disaster occurred. He "really just needed to go out there and do what I always do," he said. "That did not happen, and I don’t know why."

The only explanation was that he was overwhelmed by the situation. The dreaded "C" word. He choked.

Ilia Malinin (USA) competes during the Men's Single Free Skating Figure Skating competition on Day 7 of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic games at Milano Ice Skating Arena on February 13, 2026 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Ulrik Pedersen/NurPhoto v

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Malinin was a good sport about it afterward, and he was gracious to the winner, Mikhail Shaidorov. But skilled as he is at age 21, there is no guarantee he’ll ever be back to the Olympics. This is a hard way to lose. At your peak, as the best, and the most baffled.

There have been many legendary losers in sports. Buffalo Bills kicker Scott Norwood, Cubs infielder Bill Buckner, Chris Webber calling a timeout when Michigan had none. They were all human. And humans fail. And there are always the ones who stay on too long—don’t forget Muhammad Ali getting pummeled by Trevor Berbick or Michael Jordan’s return to basketball with the Wizards.

Still, those who never try will never risk anything. Maybe Vonn put it best from her hospital bed: "We take risks in life," she wrote on social media. "And sometimes we fall. Sometimes our hearts are broken…. But that is also the beauty of life; we can try."

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