Lindsey Vonn said on Twitter Thursday in South Korea that she will need to race with new skis during the combined event at the Olympics after burning hers out the day before in the downhill.
Vonn shared the following photo on Twitter and said that her skis got burnt out in the downhill race on Wednesday:
Turns out my skis got burnt out in the race yesterday. My technician thinks it happened on the 2nd gate Have to race on another pair today. Hopefully they’ll survive and stay fast the whole way down. #thatisskiracing pic.twitter.com/r8hKINANHN
— lindsey vonn (@lindseyvonn) February 22, 2018
Some may view this as an excuse for not winning gold in the downhill, but it’s pretty impressive that Vonn still won a medal in the event despite an equipment failure.
It sounds like she was going so fast on the slopes that there was enough friction to melt part of the base of her skis. That sort of damage could be enough to have slowed her down to finish behind Sofia Goggia or Ragnhild Mowinckel. Vonn ended up 0.47 seconds behind Goggia and 0.37 seconds behind Mowinckel.
