"In November, 2016, during a training run on Copper Mountain, in Colorado, just before the start of the downhill-racing season, Lindsey Vonn crashed and shattered her humerus, the biggest bone in her right arm. Surgeons pieced it back together with a metal plate and nineteen screws, but nerve damage remained. Even after she began to regain the use of her arm, Vonn couldn't grip a toothbrush."
"Her rehabilitation included not only her usual gantlet of athletic torture-Vonn spent six to eight hours a day in the gym, and was reported to be doing pullups sooner than expected-but also exercises to help her hold a pencil. Every day, she practiced writing her ABCs. She returned to racing, two months after the crash, but her hand was mostly useless, and she struggled to hold onto her ski pole."
Lindsey Vonn suffered a crash in November 2016 that shattered the humerus in her right arm. Surgeons repaired the bone with a metal plate and nineteen screws, but nerve damage left her hand largely useless. Her rehabilitation combined intensive daily gym work with fine-motor exercises such as practicing the ABCs and holding a pencil. She returned to racing two months later despite difficulty gripping a ski pole, which was later duct-taped to her glove. Vonn was eleven wins shy of Ingemar Stenmark's World Cup record and pursued the benchmark aggressively, winning her second race back by taking an assertive fall-line route.
Read at The New Yorker
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