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By Madison Chapman
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I was halfway through my morning coffee, glutes pleasantly achy after a long day skiing, when my husband walked into the kitchen downcast. “Bad news,” Quinn said. I paused, mid-sip, and grimaced. “Lindsey Vonn crashed in the downhill Olympic race.”
Coffee sloshed as I yanked out my phone to find a video. My hand flew to my mouth as she clipped a gate and tumbled down the mountain. On Monday, we learned the diagnosis: a complex tibia fracture. She just had her third surgery.
I’m far from a world-record Olympic athlete like Vonn. But she and I have one thing in common. We both tore our left ACL on the slopes and skied gingerly down while injured. Our shared experience has made me certain: Winner or not, Vonn is the ideal Olympic champion. Her grit and resilience helped me shed my own fear of risk and learn to see myself as a champion over adversity after my cancer treatment and subsequent knee injury. She may not have clinched gold, but Lindsay Vonn reminded us all how to live.
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I had my Vonn-style ACL tear on a bluebird ski day. Confident, I’d dominated every run. As the sun began to sink low in Big Bear, California—the resort where Shaun White cut his teeth—I cocked my head toward the lift. “One more run,” I told Quinn. “Wait for me at the bottom.”
For me, skiing was more than a sport. It was a path to physical freedom, a way to feel at home in my body after cancer. Blood still toxic, I skied the day after beginning chemotherapy for Stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 25, eager to show I could be ill and live a normal life. I was in remission now, but the sport had since become a joyful benchmark for what my weakened body could still do.
I jumped off the lift, gaining momentum as I shredded down each turn on the route. When a small mogul appeared, I took my chance. Then a loud pop, and soon my body was sliding across packed ice. Each ski detached and scraped helter-skelter downhill. A snowboarder jeered as he flew past. “Garage sale!” he shouted, as I dragged myself toward my scattered gear.
“Solid as a rock,” my orthopedist announced a month after my ACL surgery. He shook my knee with gusto to test the new ligament. “You should be able to ski in a year or so,” he added. “It’ll be sooner,” I responded. Here was a straightforward injury, one that—unlike cancer—could be fixed with a scalpel and physical therapy. I’d perfected how to be a good patient and dove into knee rehabilitation, resolved to return to my active post-cancer life.
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True to my word, I could bike, run, and even backpacked the 240-mile Camino Primitivo in Spain within the year. Yet the first season I was cleared to ski, I hung back. “Just to be careful,” I told my family as they loaded the car full of gear.
The truth was more complicated. Despite all my bravado about being an ace patient, I was sick of how brutal life in recovery—from cancer, from surgery, from the anxiety and depression that dogged me after both—could be. I’d recovered fast, but it had still taken too much time. All that downtime had given me plenty of space to replay my fall, and for fear to take root. The mountain had burned me, I thought. If I avoided it, I could control my newfound health and continue to enjoy the physical freedom cancer and injury stole from me.
Yet a new fear—of being left out—also took hold. I eventually returned to skiing, but with a whole new approach focused on caution, not fun. Last December Quinn and I returned to Big Bear, where I ruined my leg. He now stopped for me at the base not so I could chase one more run, but because I was a glacier. “How long did you wait?” I asked each time I caught up with him. He soon began to pause mid-mountain instead, consoling me like a child as I stalled, paralyzed, in the middle of the slope. Meanwhile, snowboarders and actual toddlers, skiing in pizza-formation, zoomed past.
To add pressure, Quinn and I had plans to ski in Park City, Utah, in March. My sister had recently moved to Salt Lake City and within the year became a ski demon. The Rocky Mountains were no joke. If I could barely ski in Southern California, I was unlikely to get far there—and I desperately wanted to keep up with her. To prove to everyone, and to myself, that surgery and cancer hadn’t changed me from an adventurer to a sideliner for good.
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When Lindsey Vonn became the oldest woman to win a World Cup ski title in December, I’d just had my worst day on the mountain. Light rain and ice overwhelmed me, and I quit after four runs. Amazed, I began to sift through her content online. Here was a kindred spirit, someone who also knew how to be unwell—who had my same injury!—but had, unlike me, come out the other side a champion.
So when Vonn tore her ACL just before her Olympic return, I began checking on her daily. “She’ll still compete,” I reported to Quinn one day. “She’s doing side lunges to prepare,” I shared the next. Vonn might have had a phalanx of coaches and trainers I’d never have. But somewhere, I knew I had her backbone. I’d had it in chemotherapy, after all. Between post-cancer anxiety and my own burst ACL, I’d just lost where it was.
I wanted it back.
Fresh snow from the east coast superstorm beckoned Quinn and me to a small resort near Washington, D.C., recently. Our goal was clear: get me ready for Park City. Vonn echoed in my head my entire first run. I caught up with my husband at the bottom, reining in a shocking amount of speed as I frosted him with powder. “How long did you wait?” I asked. “Just under a minute,” he responded. By the end of the morning, we finished at the same time. I scattered my gear again that day after slicing through a chunk of snow and falling. But this time when I clipped back in, I took the harder route down—and crushed my first ever black diamond.
The next day, Vonn wiped out and her career ended.
Lindsay Vonn crashed because she went all in, not, she said, because she’d torn her ACL. As she wrote on social media: “We jump. And sometimes we fall.” According to Vonn, the beauty of life is that we try.
I should know. Her courage and positivity helped me see there is little joy, or self-fulfillment, in a life without some risk. A life lived in a cocoon—from injury, from cancer—isn’t really a life. She may not have left Italy holding the gold, but her comeback was already a legendary feat of perseverance for people like me. Vonn achieved exactly what an Olympian should—she reminded us why we try, and how to live.
Now, I can only wish her a path back to herself, too, and the chance to experience freedom through her grief, and beyond her recovery.
After all, it’s the gift she gave to me.
Madison Chapman is a writer and proud cancer survivor from California, currently based in Washington, D.C. Her work appears in The New York Times, HuffPost, The Washington Post, TIME*, and elsewhere.*
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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