Lindsey Vonn won’t compete in Sochi

While Canada waits and debates the Team Canada roster, there’s Olympic news from south of the border.

Olympian Lindsey Vonn has announced that she won’t compete in Sochi.

I am devastated to announce that I will not be competing in Sochi. My FB page has the whole story. http://t.co/7KHSXa0xYJ

— lindsey vonn (@lindseyvonn) January 7, 2014

Here’s how the downhill skier announced the news on her Facebook page: 

“I am devastated to announce that I will not be able to compete in Sochi. I did everything I possibly could to somehow get strong enough to overcome having no ACL but the reality has sunk in that my knee is just too unstable to compete at this level. I’m having surgery soon so that I can be ready for the World Championships at home in Vail next February. On a positive note, this means there will be an additional spot so that one of my teammates can go for gold. Thank you all so much for all of the love and support. I will be cheering for all of the Olympians and especially team USA!’

Digesting the news, Tim Layden of Sports Illustrated imagines what might have been for America’s most successful female Alpine skier: 

“It would have been a remarkable and inspiring story if Lindsay Vonn had won her second consecutive gold medal in the Olympic downhill barely a year after a crash in which she suffered catastrophic damage to her right knee. She required surgery last March to reconstruct the anterior cruciate and medial collateral ligaments, and just the passage of time to heal a tibial plateau fracture in that same leg. It would have been the kind of performance that fits all sorts of Olympic storytelling paradigms: Obstacle overcome, star power proven, genuine greatness validated. It would have been the moment of the Games, or of any Games.”