See How Breezy Johnson Won Downhill Gold by 0.04 Seconds at the Olympics

In less time than it takes to blink, Breezy Johnson eked out the United States’ first gold medal of these Winter Games with a blistering run down the Cortina d’Ampezzo women’s downhill.

After a leg-burning, ski-chattering mile and a half, Johnson beat Emma Aicher of Germany by 0.04 seconds.

Goggia, the host country’s favorite, won bronze, 0.59 seconds behind Johnson. Jacqueline Wiles, Johnson’s U.S. teammate, missed out on a medal by just over a quarter of a second.

“I wasn’t quite sure it would be enough for the gold, but I thought when I got down it would be enough for a medal,” Johnson said after the race.

Back in 2018 at the Pyeongchang Games, Goggia became the first Italian woman to win an Olympic downhill. In Cortina, she started out among the fastest, finishing the first of the race’s five timing intervals in 21.45 seconds. By the end of the second interval, however, both Johnson and Aicher had pulled ahead, jockeying for gold. At the fourth interval, Johnson and Aicher were just 0.04 seconds apart, the same margin that would separate them at the finish.

Johnson won her first Olympic medal; she had placed seventh in the 2018 Games and missed the 2022 Beijing Games because of an injury.

Heading into the race, much of the attention was focused on Lindsey Vonn, 41, who had come out of a nearly six-year retirement in search of gold in the Dolomites. No race hill in the world had been better to Vonn than Cortina, where she had won a record 12 World Cup races, six in downhill and six in super-G.

The fans at the finish line were raucous with excitement as she left the start gate, only to fall into a somber hush when the big screen displayed her crash.

Skiing with a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee, Vonn clipped a gate only 13 seconds into the race and tumbled violently. The race was paused as Vonn was tended to on the slopes before she was airlifted off the mountain.

The helicopter soared over the fans, who gave her a standing ovation as she passed overhead.

Vonn’s Olympic results do not nearly compare to her World Cup career, which earned her the nickname the Queen of Speed.

Vonn had been scheduled to also compete in one or two other events, but those plans and any other future skiing are up in the air.

“My heart aches for her,” said Johnson, the second American woman to win an Olympic downhill, after Vonn in 2010. “It’s a tough sport. It’s the beauty and the madness of it. It can hurt you so badly and you keep coming back for more.”