Vonn’s event, the downhill, is Sunday. Like, tomorrow. So she has had essentially no time to heal.

And for context, the downhill is by far the fastest of the ski events. It’s literally called downhill. She is going to hurl herself down a mountain at 80 miles an hour, knowing her knee is messed up.

Vonn obviously has not had surgery to repair her ACL. She’s just going out there with two ends of a ruptured ligament flopping around in her knee, not connected to the parts of the knee where it’s supposed to connect. If at any point in her race Vonn needs to do whatever it is ACLs do, it just won’t happen.

Believe it or not, there is a somewhat healthy debate about whether ACLs are strictly “necessary” for skiing. (I got several replies on various social media sites like “I tore MY ACL and I ski all the time” which, good for you, but I think Lindsey is doing something different here.) A handful of skiers have competed on torn ACLs, and done OK: Canadian moguls skier Philippe Marquis finished seventh in 2018 with no ACL, and Kristina Koznick competed in the 2006 Olympics two weeks after tearing hers. (Funnily enough, that story leads with Koznick running into an equally injured Lindsey Vonn. Vonn has been injured a lot in her career.)

Vonn almost competed in the 2014 Olympics with a torn ACL, too, before deciding that her knee would be too unstable. (That was her second of three ACL tears. I think. She might have had a fourth at some point.)

But after several hours of googling, I have concluded that it’s not good to tear your ACL if you’re a skier. (Subscribe to Sports! for more medical analysis!) A LOT of skiers tear their ACLs, and in almost every instance it’s a season-ending injury. At the very least, it’s going to cause a lot of pain and force Vonn to compensate with other parts of her body.

Regardless, Vonn does not need to do this. She’s famous. Outside of the NHL players, she has to be one of the most financially secure athletes at the Olympics. And she has achieved all she needs to achieve: She retired in 2019 as one of the greatest skiers of all time, having won the most World Cup races ever at the time.

And yet, she felt the need to get back out there. Vonn got knee replacement surgery in retirement and decided to return in 2024, at 40 years old, after five years of no competition. She quickly proved herself to be one of the best in the world, again. She reached the podium in all five World Cup downhill events this season, and won the events in St. Moritz and Zauchensee. She looked like a podium lock at the Olympics, and a threat for gold.

And then, another injury. She admitted in a press conference that she thinks her chances of winning in the Olympics have changed now that she’s torn her ACL. But …

It feels like Vonn simply competing tells us everything we’ll ever need to know about her. She’s displaying a near-fanatical need to get out there and ski one last time. It’s the same drive which surely made her great for so long, in its most extreme sport. She’s gonna end her career on her skis rather than a stretcher, and whether she wins or not, I’m gonna remember that about her.

Before we get to the dicks, think about the goal of ski jumping. The athletes are trying to jump as far as possible. How do you do that? Think about flying squirrels. To glide farther, they maximize their surface area, turning their bodies into furry little parachutes to glide as far as possible.

For this reason, ski jumpers are required to wear extremely skin-tight suits — NO flying squirrel flaps. Before competition, the jumpers are scanned fully nude. Then they are scanned in their competition suits to ensure that their clothed and unclothed measurements match down to the centimeter. If a suit has excess fabric, it gives the jumper an unfair advantage. (The ideal ski jumping outfit would probably be JNCOs.)

This leads us to the first incident we’re discussing: The Great Norwegian Crotch Parachute Scandal. At last year’s World Championships, the head coach of the dominant Norwegian team was caught on video sneaking into the equipment facility and sewing additional fabric onto the crotches of the team’s uniforms.

It was one of the biggest scandals in Norwegian sports history. The coach and equipment manager were given bans that are still in effect. The jumpers who competed in manipulated suits, Marius Lindvik and Johann André Forfang, received relatively short bans, but have been performing well below expectations this season, and are not expected to medal despite winning golds at past Olympics. I recommend the episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out about the scandal.

Last week, another report suggested that ski jumpers were doing something else: Injecting hyaluronic acid into their penises to increase the circumference of their shafts before their nude measurements. The effect of the injections would be temporary, so the ski jumpers could get scanned with an artificially inflated surface area in their crotch, allowing them to wear slightly larger body suits, and therefore get away with legal crotch parachutes.

To be clear: there is no evidence this is actually happening. Notably, the story originated in the German newspaper Bild, which is a tabloid famous for sensationalism and publishing topless women on the cover of every issue for decades. The story didn’t actually cite any athletes who are supposedly doing the pump, and one of the jumpers asked about it noted they’d never heard of anybody doing it.

The international ski jumping federation seems pretty pissed that we’re talking about this. "This wild rumor started off a few weeks ago from pure hearsay," FIS spokesperson Bruno Sassi told The Associated Press. "There has never been any indication, let alone evidence, that any competitor has ever made use of a hyaluronic acid injection to attempt to gain a competitive advantage."

But it does touch on something real: Reuters noted that “scientists and ski jumpers at the ​Winter Olympics say if true, it would make perfect sense.”

And if athletes are increasing their penises with hyaluronic acid … it’s unclear what anybody could do about it, or how anybody could detect it. It is not a banned substance, and I don’t know if it’s possible to test for it.

And cross-country skier Mika Vermeulen said that during his jumping career he was taught how to tape his penis to manipulate measurements. (It does kinda track that you’d tape your penis to potentially increase the aerodynamic principle known as “drag.”)

So are ski jumpers actually injecting their penises with acid to win? We don’t know. But it definitely seems like something they’re incentivized to try. And ski jumping might be in for years of funny headlines unless they can figure out how to fix that.

I told you that preparations for Milano-Cortina were … less than ideal. Then, four minutes into the very first event of the Games, the power went out at the curling arena. Not great from an “omens” perspective!

Team USA’s mixed doubles curling team is wiping the floor with opponents. (Or scrubbing the ice with them, I guess.) Korey and Cory are 4-0 with wins over Canada, Norway, and Switzerland — literally the podium from the 2018 edition of the mixed doubles tournament.

After three of four qualifying performances, Team USA leads the team figure skating event … and the best men’s skater in the world, Ilia Malinin, hasn’t taken his turn yet to potentially extend that lead.

Several figure skaters had issues getting permission to use the copyrighted music they selected for their programs. Permissions haven’t been much of an issue in the past when competitors mostly skated to long-dead classical composers; they’re a bigger problem when someone wants to skate to the Minions soundtrack. That’s a real thing that’s happening, by the way: Spanish skater Tomas Guarino found out last week that his Minions-themed routine he’d been skating for months had been flagged, and that he’d have to change his music. For a moment, it looked like he was going to have to come up with an entirely new routine — I cannot imagine anything dumber than if he had to skate in a Minions outfit without the Minions music — but the crisis was resolved at the last minute.

BTW, you’re simply not prepared for how many Dune routines there are. So much Dune.

Finland’s women’s hockey team had to postpone its game against Canada due to a team-wide norovirus outbreak. That sound you hear is everybody involved in the 2021 or 2022 Olympics yelling OH NO IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN!!!!

Last but not least: Curling Baby.

THE FIRST MEDAL OF THE OLYMPICS! WOOOOOO!

(And it probably got decided before you woke up. Certainly before this email went out!)

Long story short, all the skiing events exist on a spectrum from “lots of turns” to “just going.” Downhill is the fastest of them all. (And yes, it’s the one that Lindsey Vonn does.)

Am I supposed to preview the events that have happened before the email goes out? I don’t know.

We could see an American gold medal right off the bat! Jessie Diggins has won the only skiathlon in World Cup competition this year and taken gold and silver in two other 20km events. She’s an American Olympic legend. And yes, I’m using this opportunity to post the video of her down-the-stretch win in the team sprint event at the 2018 Olympics:

But Ebba Anderson from Sweden has won back-to-back World Championships. She won last year’s in a photo finish, chasing down defending Olympic champ Therese Johaug at the line:

In case you’re wondering what the hell a “skiathlon” is, it combines the two primary forms of cross-country skiing. The first 10k are skied “classical” style (with straight skis kept parallel) and the final 10k are skied “freestyle” (using technique that looks more like speed skating.) The skiathlon rewards a well-rounded skier who is good at both.

The Dutch love speed skating, along with the color orange and functional bicycle infrastructure. They’ve won this event at three straight Olympics with three different skaters: Ireen Wust in 2014, Carlijn Achtereekte in 2018 (part of a legit podium sweep by the Dutch), and Irene Schouten in 2022 … and this event will probably be won by an entirely separate Dutch woman!

Time to learn about Nika Prevc, the Jumping Baby GOAT! (Yeah, I’m calling her that so I can include a video of a jumping baby goat.)

The Slovenian star has the second-most World Cup wins in women’s ski jumping history … even though she’s 20 years old. She closed last season winning 10 events in a row, and ran off six in a row earlier this year.

And the best part of it? We know Prevc’s dominance has absolutely nothing to do with illegal penis injections.

This is the event where you do exactly one extremely cool trick off of one really big jump. It’s basically Snowboard Diving.

I have harrowing proof that the air is, in fact, big. Canadian Mark McMorris fell during a training run and needed to be stretchered off the course.

The American to watch is 17-year-old Ollie Martin, who took bronze at the 2025 World Championships in this event. (WHEN HE WAS 16.) But he finished ninth in qualifying, so he might not medal here.