Right before Lindsey Vonn’s final season, the iconic American Alpine skier was brought back to where it all began.
Her first coach, Erich Sailer, died in mid-August at age 99. The Austrian had produced many champions in his illustrious career — from Kristina Koznick to Julia Mancuso to Paula Moltzan to, of course, Vonn. He used to ski behind them on slalom runs on the modest 310-foot vertical slope at Buck Hill, directing them in his soft accent, “Left ski … right ski.” The reward for the relentless reps was often sprinkled donuts in the humble basement-like clubhouse.
“It was our sacred place,” said Koznick, Vonn’s former Olympic teammate.
For Vonn, Sailer wasn’t just a mentor, he was family. He was at the hospital when she was born, with Vonn’s father, Alan Kildow, one of his early protégés. So Vonn didn’t think twice about disrupting her rigorous training schedule in Park City, Utah, to make a one-day detour to the Twin Cities to offer a tribute on Sept. 21.
Vonn, wearing a black dress, her blonde hair tucked up, stepped on stage and was brought to tears a few times during her heartfelt eulogy at Hyland Hills Ski Chalet.
“He may have been pissed if I got second (place) — I was really pissed,” Vonn said, drawing laughs from the hundreds there on a sunny September Sunday. “But I knew he always believed in me. When people ask me what was the best advice you were ever given in your life, I always say Erich taught me to believe in myself. He taught me to be who I am.
“Everyone tried to change me, except Erich. He always taught me to just be me.”
That reminder of Sailer’s unwavering support comes during a year in which Vonn has heard plenty of doubters after her improbable comeback last winter from a five-year retirement, at age 40, to try for one last run of glory at February’s Olympic Games in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. Vonn, now 41, has very little left to prove, already boasting a record 20 World Cup crystal globes — given to the best performers each season in each Alpine discipline — along with an Olympic gold and two bronze medals, eight world championship medals and 82 overall World Cup wins.
Erich Sailer coached Lindsey Vonn in her youth. “Everyone tried to change me, except Erich,” Vonn said. “He always taught me to just be me.” (Courtesy of Lindsey Vonn)
Some wondered why Vonn would even try. Was she unfulfilled in retirement? Did she need this? The truth is, Vonn is doing this because this sport was her first true love. And because she can. Injuries forced Vonn to retire while she felt she still had runs left in her. Then, a knee replacement in 2024 changed everything.
“I know what good skiing feels like, and I know what it’s like to win,” Vonn told The Athletic recently. “While I haven’t done that in a long time, have been retired for a long time, you don’t lose that feeling. I knew there would be some bumps in the road, but I would be competitive again.”
“I wouldn’t have set out on this path if I didn’t think I could be here.”
Vonn’s final season begins this weekend at a World Cup stop in St. Moritz, Switzerland. (UPDATE: She won the downhill Friday.) She hopes it will conclude at the Olympics in Cortina, on a slope where she’s won more than anyone, after which she says she’ll retire for good. Those who have competed with or against Vonn since her childhood days can see her swan song ending in a medal.
“She totally can, I think she’s in the right place,” said Sarah Schleper, Vonn’s Olympic teammate in 2002, 2006 and 2010. “She just looks ready.”
“I think everything is possible,” said childhood friend and rival Mancuso, a four-time Olympic medalist for the U.S.
Kildow said this will be “like no Olympics ever before,” with his daughter’s comeback sparking significant media attention and focus. “There’s a lot of pressure, and she put herself in it,” he said with a chuckle.
“She’s pretty undaunted in what can be done,” said Tony Olin, Vonn’s early coach at Buck Hill and a Sailer disciple. “… Erich was very good about teaching what’s possible.”
The rope tow at Buck Hill, whisking skiers up to the top, was re-named “Kildow’s Climb” back in 2019, in honor of Vonn, whose maiden name is Kildow.
The thousands of runs Vonn must have made in her early days, especially from age 7 to 11, served as the foundation for her Hall of Fame career.
“Those were still some of the best times of my life,” Vonn said.
Her father, an accomplished skier and son of a ski jumper, said there was “nothing remarkable” about Vonn when she started skiing. She was a little awkward. Her technique wasn’t textbook. Vonn’s sister, Karin, was more of a natural, but she didn’t have Lindsey’s passion for it.
One day, when Vonn was 7, Alan Kildow approached Olin and asked, “What is it going to take to coach my daughter?”
“We’ll have to get creative,” Olin said.
So Vonn came out with her mother, Lindy, three times a week to Buck Hill at 7 a.m. for a couple of hours each time. It was just Olin and Lindsey, sometimes under the lights. Olin would take small pieces of foam pipe insulation and stick them in the ground. There were three in each turn, and Olin told her to plant her skis inside of them without hitting them. It made for such a narrow window. Kildow asked how it was going.
“I have to tell you,” Olin replied, “I have never seen anything like this, the way she touches the snow. It’s incredible.”
Sailer, who ran the school, was hands-on at times as well, skiing behind her, but he built her confidence in her more unorthodox style. She said she was always leaning in, very “tippy,” having a hard time controlling her lateral movement.
“Everyone said when I got to the U.S. ski team, I had to change,” Vonn said. “… Erich always said I’m fast the way I am. He just kept saying, ‘Don’t change. Stick with who you are.’ My dad and him used to butt heads on that, but he was right.”
The passion and drive for Vonn was undeniable. Kildow recalled a Mount Hood training run when Vonn was around 8 or 9. It was the summer, but it was 32 degrees and snowing, with a lot of fog. She was soaked. She was freezing. “She kept going up and down, up and down,” Kildow said. “Everyone else went in. I was like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on with this kid?’”
It became a microcosm of her whole career. The competing, the fight, the winning was addictive.
She started skiing competitively at 10, and she would race up in age group. In one slalom event that first year, she was competing against boys and girls up to age 14. She beat them all.
“I’m like, ‘I think we’ve got something here,’” Kildow said.
A bit of swagger has been a fixture in Vonn’s career. She calls it a “goldfish mentality,” the ability to forget, especially with all her crashes. She doesn’t dwell on things.
Her former teammates laughed as they told the story of a training trip to Australia when they were 16 or 17 years old. There were horses behind the hotel they were staying at. Schleper and Mancuso joined her as they walked close to the fence to see them. Mancuso, an admitted troublemaker, egged Vonn on to ride one.
“I think I can get on one,” Vonn told them. “Do you guys dare me to get on?”
“So she gets on this horse, bareback, the horse starts bucking like crazy, like throws her off,” Schleper said. “I don’t know what you call it, like a herd of horses, they start stampeding past her like we think she’s going to get trampled by these horses. Nothing happened in terms of injury. But, later, we found out they were actually wild horses.”
Lindsey Vonn won Olympic gold in the downhill, the first U.S. woman to do so, in Vancouver in 2010. She’s aiming for one more shot at Olympic glory in Italy. (Clive Mason / Getty Images)
Schleper said that on another trip — also as teenagers, this time in Colorado — Vonn was driving her along the Vail Pass, a high-elevation section of I-70, and bet her she could do the whole thing without touching the brakes. A 20-mile stretch, a lot of it downhill, with curves.
“And she did it,” Schleper said.
Vonn always dreamed big. The U.S. ski team used to hand out goal sheets for athletes to fill out. “Hers were always so precise,” Schleper said. “She’s like, ‘I’m going to win this event this year, then I’m going to win four World Cups this year.’”
And those goal sheets included Olympic medals, just like they would for this February.
“She’s going to do something really big and cool this year,” Schleper said. “I just feel it.”
The last time Vonn spoke with Sailer was in a visit to his Edina, Minn., home in June.
Vonn wanted to catch up, plus shoot some footage for an upcoming documentary she’s working on with childhood friend and business partner Claire Abbe Biesemeyer. It was just Vonn, Biesemeyer, Sailer, and Sailer’s wife, Ursula, and daughter Martina. They reminisced.
Sailer asked Vonn about her training. Her equipment. Life away from the slopes. They had a FaceTime when Vonn first announced her comeback, and his genuine reaction to her decision was very similar in their final conversation. She tried her best to mimic his unique accent.
“He’s like, ‘Unbelievable, unbelievable, Lindsey,’” Vonn recalled. “He was so happy, and he couldn’t believe what I was doing, but in a way that was so supportive.”
Abbe Biesemeyer was part of the production of “Vonn: The Final Season,” an HBO documentary back in 2019, when Vonn was attempting to break the record, then held by Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark, for most World Cup wins. But Vonn crashed in Copper Mountain in Colorado in November 2018, tearing the lateral collateral ligament and sustaining three fractures in her left knee. She would retire after the 2019 world championships, four wins shy of Stenmark’s 86, the mounting injuries too much to push through. (American Mikaela Shiffrin has since passed both Vonn and Stenmark, now with 104 career World Cup wins.)
“She was done. Like, ‘I can’t go any longer,’” Abbe Biesemeyer said. “There were moments where I think people almost didn’t believe her.”
Lindsey Vonn finished in second place in the season-ending super-G race in Sun Valley, Idaho, in March, fueling the belief that she can win an Olympic medal in Cortina. (Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)
Vonn stayed busy during retirement. She co-directed a documentary on her idol, Picabo Street. She wrote a memoir. She focused on her foundation, which awards scholarships for girls who show athletic and academic promise. But something was indeed missing.
“She wasn’t really ready to hang it up when she did,” Abbe Biesemeyer said. “She was still wanting to compete.”
A comeback wasn’t a guarantee. The knee replacement surgery went so well, though, that Vonn told friends she hadn’t felt so pain-free since she was in her early 20s.
Vonn got to take advantage of a new wild-card rule established by the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, which allows former champions to return to the World Cup circuit after retirement without needing to accumulate ranking points in lower-level competitions. She’s had some struggles, but a second-place finish in the World Cup finals in Sun Valley, Idaho, in March gave her a big boost ahead of her final season.
She’s entering with no fear — of falling or failure.
“It’s that goldfish mentality — you can’t dwell on the past,” Vonn said. “… It’s part of ski racing. I’m not perfect. I (crashed and fell) so many times in my career since I was a kid. It was part of learning and growing, knowing how hard to push.
“I’m not a technically perfect skier. But I’m someone who is dynamic and willing to push myself to the limit. … There are definitely athletes where guys come back from injuries, and their body is not able to do what they’re used to doing. I was lucky. My body responded to surgeries. When I got to the starting gate, I didn’t think about what happened. I thought about what could happen.”
What could happen in Cortina is historic. Made-for-TV movie stuff. If she makes a podium, she’ll set a new mark for the oldest Olympic medalist in Alpine skiing.
“She kind of feels like she already won; she got that second place in Sun Valley,” Abbe Biesemeyer said.
As Vonn made the rounds following her eulogy of Sailer on that September day, she talked with dozens of people she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager. Vonn did plenty of reflecting — about the countless hours on that old rope tow, all the friends and coaches there that shaped her as a person and athlete. She posed for a group picture, standing in the middle of at least 100-plus skiers, from all eras of Sailer’s run. Vonn may have left Minnesota at 11 to start training in Colorado, but in some ways, the place never left her.
“In so many ways, I’m the same girl from Minnesota — I always have been,” Vonn said. “I just dreamed really big. I’m the same 12-year-old girl I was back then. I just ski a little faster.”
When asked what she’d think about first if she makes the medal stand, Vonn choked up and said her late mother, Lindy, who died of ALS in 2022. She always taught Lindsey about resilience. Sailer would likely not be that far behind in Vonn’s mind at that moment, either.
When Sailer died, Vonn made a promise: “I will try to make my last turns in ski racing fast for you. I will try to make them mean something more for you.”
“I bet if (Vonn) wins,” Schleper said, “something she’ll say is, ‘This is for Erich.’”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of the ski area that hosted Erich Sailer’s memorial service. It is Hyland Hills, not Highland Hills.
