Typically, when news breaks that a professional athlete has torn his or her ACL, the immediate assumption is that the athlete will miss the better part of a calendar year and the remainder of whatever campaign they are in the middle of.
Legendary Olympic athlete Lindsey Vonn is looking to bring home the gold after only days.
“No doctor could endorse a normal person to go skiing, let alone competitively so,” said orthopedic surgeon and knee specialist at Hackensack University Medical Center (N.J.), Dr. Yair David Kissin, per Yahoo Sports.
However, Vonn is in a remarkable position to defy the science, and isn’t confined to the same constraints that “normal people” are, according to Dr. Catherine Logan, an orthopedic surgeon at the Joint Preservation Center in Denver.
“From a purely physical or biomechanical standpoint, it’s possible if you’re an elite Alpine skier like Lindsey is to perform at that Olympic level,” Logan said. “Alpine skiing is very different from your traditional field, cutting, pivoting sports. The movement patterns are relatively predictable in comparison, so there’s less demand on the ACL when we’re trying to decelerate or change directions.
“There’s still an increased risk for secondary injury to the meniscus or her cartilage, but really her ability to generate force, maintain her edges and tolerate those speeds is not eliminated inherently just by having that ACL deficiency. So, despite all those things, she still has a great chance to perform well.”
Vonn presents a rather unique case. While torn ACLs usually result in some sort of loss of neuromuscular control in the surrounding muscle, Vonn’s years of elite training and preparation spent developing her quadricep and hip muscles may allow her retain some control of them and provide compensation for the loss of stabilization.
She’s also facing what is in all likelihood her last Olympics as a competitor, meaning she doesn’t have to worry about what the playing through the injury could mean for the rest of her career.
“This is going to be difficult, but she’s as tenacious as they come,” Dr. Samuel Ward, a professor of orthopedic surgery and co-director of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at UC-San Diego, said bluntly. “There’s a little bit of mind over matter here, too. The combination of those things either provides her enough stability where she can do it or it doesn’t, and I think she’s going to figure that out.
“The average human being would be like, ‘I hurt my knee and I’m afraid of it.’ In her situation, she has the capacity to push past that, whether or not the knee itself has the intrinsic stability to do what it needs to do during the race. I think nobody knows the answer to that until she races.”
“Her body is so conditioned that most likely she’s got the compensatory mechanisms very few people in existence ever have and she may be able to do it,” Kissin said. “If she doesn’t feel like it’s a good idea I hope she has the wherewithal to stop and not risk something that is inevitable.
“In her case, if she thinks she can do it and her doctors may not disagree with her completely — I wouldn’t want to be them but at the same time I envy them — because she’s a different level of ACL patient and it’s a great example that every case needs to be individualized.”
Although the science might be against her, there’s nobody better poised to defy the odds.
About Qwame Skinner
Qwame Skinner has loved both writing and sports his entire life. In addition to his sports coverage at Comeback Media, Qwame writes novels, and his debut; The First Casualty, an adult fantasy, is out now.