Lindsey Vonn has returned to skiing two months after breaking her right arm, days in which she spent documenting every step of her excruciating recovery.
According to the nearly 5 1/2 minute video she posted on her Facebook page, Vonn struggled with nerve damage so severe she couldn’t even move her fingers soon after surgery to fix a broken right arm she suffered while training in November.
Vonn plans to compete in the downhill this weekend in Altenmarkt-Zauchensee, Austria. It will be her first World Cup race since fracturing her left knee in a super-G crash in Andorra last February.The 32-year-old Vonn was planning to make her comeback during the speed races in Lake Louise, Alberta, in late November and early December until she broke her upper arm on Nov. 10 at Copper Mountain, Colorado. On Facebook, she called her return from the nerve damage the “hardest recovery of my career.”
In her video, the 2010 Olympic downhill champion shows steady progress after more than 300 hours of therapy. She learns how to straighten her fingers again, lifts glasses of water, works on signing her name, rotates a shampoo bottle, catches a tennis ball off the wall and finally uses a ski pole to push out of a start gate.
The video doesn’t show the band-supported pull-ups she did and filmed for Instagram two weeks after the incident.
Vonn wrote on Facebook: “Today I am still struggling to do simple things like put on my ski glove and do my hair, but I’m at a point where I am comfortable with my hand in most situations.”
Vonn is the winningest female World Cup racer with 76 victories.
With AP