WHISTLER, British Columbia — Downhillers greet the frequent weather-related delays and cancellations of their sport with a mixture of frustration and resignation, but Lindsey Vonn didn’t mind at all when Thursday’s downhill training run was canceled.
Vonn “inspected” the course, warmed up and was prepared to test her injured leg, but patchy fog and intermittent snow showers forced cancellation after two racers ran. Vonn never got in the starting gate.
The course inspection was her first time on snow since she suffered a severe bruise on her right shin Feb. 2 in slalom training.
“I was happy to be back on snow today,” Vonn said. “My shin was still very painful, but I feel like the injury is finally progressing a bit. I am always disappointed when a training run is canceled, but in this situation I definitely welcome the extra day to heal.”
If the weather stays bad and races have to be pushed back on the schedule, that wouldn’t be a bad thing for Vonn, either. Her first scheduled race is Sunday’s super-combined. Training runs are scheduled for today, with more gloomy weather forecasts putting them in doubt.
“I know it’s not the popular thing to say,” said her husband, Thomas Vonn, “but I’ve heard a lot about the ‘Whistler weather,’ and we’d welcome that right now. Not to rain on the parade, but a couple days could be very big for Lindsey, for sure.”
Fog on the course thickened and thinned teasingly for much of the morning, but eventually it became obvious the weather was not going to cooperate. Stacey Cook of Mammoth Mountain, Calif., was the second racer on course and crashed coming off a jump. She was airlifted from the course with unspecified injuries, and the training run was never resumed.
Cook was examined and released from a hospital after X-rays and a CT scan came back negative, according to a U.S. Olympic Committee spokesman. Having been cleared by the medical staff, Cook hasn’t been ruled out of today’s training run.
The men completed their downhill training run, which was run simultaneously on an adjacent slope. Michael Walchhofer of Austria, one of the race favorites, had the fastest run, and Bode Miller was the top American in eighth.
Topical analgesics were used to numb the site of Vonn’s injury, and that seemed to help. Her husband, a former U.S. Ski Team racer and unofficial assistant coach for his wife, accompanied her on inspection and the warm-up run that followed.
“I followed behind her, and I could see she was skiing OK,” Thomas Vonn said. “She could roll up (on edge) the way she wanted. And the warm-up course was pretty choppy, so it was a good test. That put a smile on my face right away. Then I saw her at the bottom, she was obviously in pain, but smiling through it, like, ‘OK, we can work with this.’ “
John Meyer: 303-954-1616 or jmeyer@denverpost.com
