Lindsey Vonn revealed to her fans on Instagram that she recently underwent another knee surgery to help her recover from numerous skiing injuries.
The Olympian uploaded a video that showed her sitting in a hospital bed before being wheeled through the halls, presumably to the operating room.
Later in the clip, Vonn, 37, bent her injured right knee a few times following the procedure and filmed herself riding an exercise bike.
“Surgery yesterday went well…. Been having a hard time with the pain in my knee,” she wrote in the caption. “You may have noticed I haven’t been posting many workout videos lately… that’s why.”
Vonn then thanked her doctor for removing bone spurs and scar tissue from her knee.
She added, “Hopefully now I can straighten my leg fully!”
The retired skiing legend also shared that this procedure is the last step before she has knee replacement surgery, possibly in the next two years.
“Ahhh the price we pay to do what we love. Still worth it though,” she wrote, remaining optimistic.
At the end of the post, she thanked her fans for their well wishes and said “See you on the mat and the slopes soon!”
Throughout her career, Vonn has suffered multiple injuries and dramatic crashes. In 2019, she was injured during a super-G race and announced her retirement from ski racing shortly after.
“It’s been an emotional 2 weeks making the hardest decision of my life, but I have accepted that I cannot continue ski racing,” she wrote in February 2019 on Instagram.
In January 2022, Vonn appeared on TODAY and opened up about her memoir “Rise — My Story,” which details the difficulties of leaving the sport behind.
Speaking about her mental health, she said, “skiing was the one thing that could make me happy, my escape…retiring was so hard for me because I no longer had that crutch to lean on.”
Following her retirement, Vonn became a NBC Olympics correspondent. When fellow skier Mikaela Shiffrin had a devastating run during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics last month, Vonn reached out to her on Twitter.
“Gutted for @MikaelaShiffrin but this does not take away from her storied career and what she can and will accomplish going forward,” Vonn tweeted. “Keep your head high.”
Vonn also spoke about Shiffrin’s performance on TODAY at the time and said, “If I were her, I wouldn’t make any rash decisions. I think she just needs to take a minute and really think and take a deep breath and be around her mother and her boyfriend, her teammates, and just feel the support of everyone and not think the worst.”
As the most decorated female skier of all time, Vonn won four World Cup overall championships as well as the gold medal for downhill skiing at the 2010 Winter Olympics.
She also retired with a whopping 82 World Cup victories.