But nothing is inevitable in alpine skiing except the brute force of gravity. Vonn’s great gift had always been to make that force her own, using the downward pull in combination with her strength and mass to plummet down sheets of ice at speeds higher than seventy miles per hour. She didn’t fight the natural sensation of falling, which was key to keeping herself upright. Still, sometimes, she fell. At the Turin Olympics, in 2006, she bruised her hip and back so badly in a crash during a training session that she was helicoptered off the mountain. Two days later, she went straight from her hospital bed back to the slopes. The next season, she tore her A.C.L. She won gold at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics with a shin so severely bruised that she could barely walk. She tried, and failed, to race with a concussion; after tearing her A.C.L. again, in 2014, she couldn’t race at all. She broke her ankle in the summer of 2015, and sustained three fractures in her knee in February, 2016. Then came the broken arm.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter