Many doctors had already warned Lindsey Vonn of the consequences of hurrying her rehab for a torn ACL. Still, she participated in the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics just a week after the Crans-Montana crash on January 30. Just 13 seconds into her first race, she collapsed again. While her ACL wasn’t to blame for it, Vonn has now undergone three surgeries. With uncertainty looming, the same former NFL doctor who warned her earlier has weighed in again.

“It [the erector set] goes across her knee joint that means she has significant damage to her knee, whether it’s a condylar fracture, tibial-plateau fracture, whether it’s knee dislocation, instability of some sort,” the NFL’s San Diego Chargers’ former sports doctor, David J. Chao, said after analyzing Vonn’s left leg visuals that showed external fixators extending from her tibia to her femur.

“She’s probably going to have, and I say this in the kindest of ways, a dozen surgeries. In terms of washouts for debridements. She’s going to at least have one more surgery to definitively take off the erector set and fix the problem, but it’s likely multiple still,” he said on X, while sending out prayers to her.

Dr. Chao further claimed that, beyond the ACL tear, there is likely some substantial soft tissue damage as well. Thus, in his view, the injury is ‘significant,’ and three surgeries may not be the end of it.

This critical analysis comes just two days after Lindsey Vonn had a successful third surgery. However, she also confirmed that while it is slow, she is recovering. After all, a tibia fracture is a complex injury.

According to the Yale School of Medicine website, it often means the bone is shattered or broken in multiple places, something that can require several surgeries to repair fully. What is even more depressing is the fact that a recovery timeline for such a brutal injury is anything between 8 and 11 months.

Thankfully, Vonn seems to be aware of the long road ahead.

In her first update after the crash, she’d confirmed, “Unfortunately, I sustained a complex tibia fracture that is currently stable but will require multiple surgeries to fix properly.”

In fact, the alpine skiing queen has gone as far as clarifying that she had no regrets at all, despite going into the race with an ACL injury.

Lindsey Vonn has no regrets about her Olympics crash

Vonn stepped into the 2026 Winter Olympics with a courage that not many have demonstrated in the realm of sport. Just nine days before the Winter Olympics kicked off, Vonn crashed in Crans Montana, resulting in a 100 percent torn ACL. Many doctors believed she should have stepped back to recover. However, Vonn decided to go.

On the day of her first Olympic race of 2026, she had a brutal crash that resulted in her being airlifted to the hospital. Yet, Vonn had no regrets.

“Yesterday, my Olympic dream did not finish the way I dreamt it would,” the American legend shared after the upsetting incident. “It wasn’t a storybook ending or a fairy tale; it was just life.

“While yesterday did not end the way I had hoped, and despite the intense physical pain it caused, I have no regrets.”

She wanted to give it a try, and that’s exactly what she did. Similar to 2024, when Vonn made a comeback, years after being forced to bid farewell to the sport in 2019 because of her injuries. Even though she knows that the process of recovery is going to be a long haul, she’s looking at it with great optimism.