Olympic gold medalist Lindsey Vonn to come out of retirement ahead of 2026 Games

Former Olympic gold medalist and world champion Lindsey Vonn is returning to skiing, she announced Thursday.

She said in an interview with the New York Times that her return was not planned and that she only reconsidered after successful knee replacement surgery seven months ago stopped the pain that had prompted her retirement.

“I’m trying not to get too far ahead of myself because I have quite a few hoops to jump through,” she said. “Obviously, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t hope to be racing. I have aspirations. I love to go fast. How fast can I go? I don’t know."

Vonn, 40, last competed professionally in February 2019 at the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in Sweden, where she won a bronze in the women’s downhill — becoming the oldest woman to win a medal at a world championship.

In that same month, ahead of the competition, Vonn announced her retirement, citing injuries.

“The unfortunate reality is my mind and body are not on the same page. After many sleepless nights, I have finally accepted that I cannot continue ski racing,” Vonn wrote in an announcement on Feb. 1, 2019.

She then added: “Over the past few years I have had more injuries and surgeries than I care to admit. I have always pushed the limits of ski racing and it has allowed me to have amazing success but also dramatic crashes.”

However, when Vonn returned to skiing ten weeks after her surgery this year, "I had a smile so wide it was coming through the back of my helmet," she told the Times.

Vonn has also won three Olympic medals, the most recent of which came in 2018, the last Olympics she participated in. She won her only Olympic gold in 2010 in the women’s downhill competition.

At the time of her retirement, Vonn was the winningest woman in skiing, with 82 World Cup victories. (A record that has since been broken by fellow American Mikaela Shiffrin.)

Vonn was a dominant figure in the sport until injuries slowed her down.

She won three straight World Cups from 2008-10, then another in 2012. In her career, she won races in all five disciplines of alpine skiing. Her 43 wins in downhill are the most by any skier, man or woman, as are her 28 wins in super-G.

Injuries took a toll on Vonn in the years leading up to her retirement, however.

At the 2013 World Championships, Vonn tore the ACL and MCL in her right knee and sustained a fracture in her right leg after a crash during the super-G. Later that year, she re-injured her ACL while training, and ultimately did not participate in the 2014 Winter Olympics.

In August 2015, Vonn fractured her ankle. The following February, she sustained fractures in her knee, ending her World Cup season while she was in first place with eight races remaining.

In November of 2016, Vonn broke her right arm. Two years later, she tore a ligament and sustained three more fractures in her left knee.

In April of this year, Vonn announced she underwent knee replacement surgery.

Rumors of Vonn’s return have been floating since October after she was spotted training in Austria.

“I was able to watch Lindsey Vonn train gliding curves in a very ambitious manner on the Rettenbach glacier,” Austrian head speed coach Sepp Brunner told the Swiss newspaper Blick.

“When I first heard the rumor of Lindsey’s comeback three days ago, I couldn’t imagine that you could ski really fast with an artificial knee joint,” Felix Neureuther, a former German world champion, told Blick. ‘But looking at it from a distance, I say, if anyone can do the seemingly impossible, it is the one and only Lindsey Vonn.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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