By Alan Baldwin
CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy, Feb 8 (Reuters) – World champion Breezy Johnson won the women’s Alpine skiing downhill at the Milano Cortina Olympics on Sunday in a race interrupted and overshadowed by U.S. teammate Lindsey Vonn crashing heavily and being taken to hospital.
Germany’s Emma Aicher secured the silver medal with a time 0.04 of a second slower than Johnson’s winning one minute and 36.10 seconds, while Italy’s home favourite and 2018 champion Sofia Goggia had to settle for bronze.
Johnson’s Olympic title, won on Cortina d’Ampezzo’s spectacular Olimpia delle Tofane piste gleaming in the sunshine, came exactly a year after she bagged the world championship gold at Saalbach, Austria.
It was the U.S. team’s first medal of the 2026 Games, and Johnson is their first women’s downhill champion since Vonn in 2010, and only their second ever.
Wyoming-born Johnson was banned for 14 months in May 2024 after three anti-doping whereabouts failures. She has also had a career punctuated by injury, and she missed the 2022 Beijing Games after a crash in downhill training in Cortina.
“I had a good feeling about today,” she said. “I sort of still can’t believe it yet.
“The run, I knew I had to push. I knew I had to go harder than I did in training. I had to be super-clean and I felt like I did that.”
The American, fastest in a weather-interrupted final training on Saturday when Vonn was third, had started sixth and soared to the top of the leaderboard with a time more than a second quicker than previous leader Ariane Raedler of Austria.
Other than Aicher, the 10th starter, the big guns that followed all failed to come close to a skier who has yet to win a World Cup race and had a nervous wait to be sure of gold.
The race was then halted when Vonn, 13th out of the start hut and a serious medal contender, lost control and crashed as fans and teammates gasped in horror. Johnson appeared close to tears, wiping her eyes and looking down.
Vonn, leader of the downhill World Cup, appeared to clip the fourth gate with her shoulder and barrelled off the course at high speed before coming to rest in a crumpled heap.
The 2010 downhill champion could be heard screaming on television coverage.
Her run lasted barely 13 seconds but, with the 41-year-old great already the headline act as she sought to overcome a serious knee injury and become the oldest Olympic Alpine medallist, all the attention was fixed on the stricken American.
“I hope it’s not as bad as it looked and I know how…sometimes because you love this course so much, when you crash on it and it hurts you like that it hurts that much worse,” said Johnson.
“My heart just goes out to her.”
Jacqueline Wiles was fourth equal for the United States with Austria’s Cornelia Huetter, who said she made a big mistake before the final part of the run.
Italy’s Federica Brignone, the 2022 giant slalom silver medallist making an Olympic comeback after suffering multiple leg fractures and a torn anterior cruciate ligament last April, was 10th.
There were further interruptions to the race when Austria’s Nina Ortlieb and Andorra’s last starter Cande Moreno crashed, the latter taken away on a stretcher.
(Additional reporting by Julien Pretot and Sara Rossi, editing by Hugh Lawson and Christian Radnedge)
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