At 40 years old, Lindsey Vonn stepped onto a World Cup podium for the first time in seven years. She finished second in the super-G at Sun Valley on 23 March 2025, becoming the oldest woman ever to reach the top three in a World Cup alpine race.
A run that cut through the wind
The downhill had been cancelled the day before when high winds made the course unsafe. Overnight, volunteer crews shovelled and scraped the track back into racing shape for the super-G finale. The race also settled the tightest crystal globe duel of the season — only five points separated series leader Federica Brignone from Olympic champion Lara Gut-Behrami.
Gut-Behrami attacked first and set a time that put her 1.33 seconds clear of Brignone. Vonn pushed out of the gate with bib 17, met by a wall of noise from the Idaho crowd. She carved the bottom half of the course better than anyone except the winner, building speed where others had lost it.
She crossed the line 1.29 seconds behind Gut-Behrami and pushed Brignone into third. Her arms went up and the familiar wide smile came fast. It was her 138th podium, on her 408th World Cup start, on what may have been her last race on American snow.
A record that refused to be finished
The podium arrived in a season full of doubt. She had heard for months that she was too old, too slow, that the comeback was a mistake. “I think I proved everyone wrong,” she told reporters afterwards. “This is the level that I know I can ski.”
Eight years earlier she had taken downhill bronze at the 2019 World Championships on badly damaged knees, a farewell race everyone called the end. A decade before Sun Valley she had passed Annemarie Moser-Pröll’s 35-year-old record for women’s World Cup victories. She had been the first American woman to win Olympic downhill gold.
The St. Moritz downhill win would follow later that year. But Sun Valley was the hinge — the afternoon a 40-year-old racer looked at a discipline globe fight between the sport’s best and took her place inside it.
