The Olympic career of Lindsey Vonn has ended in a sickening, split-second crash high on the side of the Tofane downhill run in Cortina d’Ampezzo. The American, one of the most successful skiers in history, had come out of a five-year retirement to compete in her fifth Games, and was hoping to become the oldest athlete, male or female, ever to win a medal in the downhill.

Vonn was just 12 seconds into the race when her legs gave way beneath her as she rode a bump. She twisted, fell, and tumbled and, after the first stunned screams and shouts, the crowd all around the mountain fell entirely silent in shock and worry.

Her teammate Breezy Johnson was in the leader’s seat when Vonn went down. She covered her eyes because she couldn’t watch. Johnson, 30, was forced out of the last Olympic Games in Beijing after she had a bad crash here on this very same slope. She went on to win the gold in 1min 36.10sec, just four hundredths of a second ahead of Germany’s Emma Aicher in second. The home favourite Sofia Goggia, who lit the Olympic cauldron during the opening ceremony, was third. But the abiding memory of this race will always be the sight of Vonn on a stretcher, being evacuated from the mountain by air ambulance.

The crowd broke into applause as it flew away into the bright blue sky, Vonn’s coach told Johnson that Vonn had been cheering for her from the helicopter as it passed. But the atmosphere had changed on the mountain, and everyone’s joy at watching what had been the most eagerly anticipated race of the Games became something more solemn, darkened by the sudden reminder of just how dangerous this sport is. When racing finally resumed, there was another bad accident when Cande Moreno, a 25-year-old from Andorra, collapsed on a turn, and the air ambulance had to be called out for a second time.

“It’s tragic, but it’s ski racing I’m afraid,” said Johan Eliasch, chair of the international skiing federation. Vonn knows that better than anyone. Her body, she said herself, was “broken” when she first decided to retire from the sport in 2019. She has had six fractures in the left leg, and another in the right, has broken her right arm, her left arm, and just about every finger. She came out of retirement after a knee replacement surgery last year persuaded her she was fit enough to compete again. And she was, until she crashed again while racing in Switzerland last week, and ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee.

Like every great skier, Vonn’s success turns on her ability to brush right up against the limits of control, and stay there, out on the edge of her capabilities. “It is a critical section, because it’s in the beginning, and you really need a lot of speed coming out of it,” said the Norwegian skier Kajsa Vickhoff Lie, who finished seventh, “It’s super flat after it, so the goal is to be as close to that gate as possible. She really nailed the turn, but she was too close to it, so she was hooked into it. But that’s how it is with the Olympics – you really want to be at the limit, and she was a little bit over the limit.”

“My heart aches for her,” Johnson said, “but that’s the madness of this sport, it can hurt you so badly, and you keep coming back for more.”

There will be talk about the wisdom of Vonn’s decision to compete here, even though she successfully completed her two training runs on this course before the final. Anyone who asks that, Eliasch said, “doesn’t know Lindsey”. She is a woman who once tried to check herself out of hospital in her hospital gown so she could compete in the downhill after a bad crash at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. “Whenever I was injured, my internal drive shifted. I decided I could overcome anything, and I could do whatever I set my mind to,” she once wrote, “in those moments, it became about not giving up, fighting through it, and not letting anyone else tell me what to do.”

“In the end she risked too much,” the double Olympic champion Tina Maze said, commentating on Eurosport/TNT, “that’s the kind of crash that can happen, of course if you are not healthy the consequences are even worse, but Lindsey wanted to do this no matter what.” Eliasch said that anyone asking the question “doesn’t know Lindsey”.

No doubt the delay unsettled the racers who came after her. Goggia, was the only one of that group of 30 who was able to get within half a second of Johnson’s time. “After Vonn’s fall, I knew the situation wasn’t looking good for me,” Goggia said. “It was very hot, I had been at the start already since almost 11:30 waiting, and my helmet was boiling.”

But the overwhelming mood was one of sympathy for one of the great champions of the sport.

“She deserved a better ending than that,” said her teammate Isabella Wright, who came 21st, but of course Vonn would say herself that “deserve” doesn’t come into it. Vonn has done things no one else ever has in her sport, she was the first US woman to win an Olympic gold in the downhill, has won the Crystal Globe awarded each year to the world’s leading skier more often than anyone, and was, already, the oldest woman in history to win an Olympic medal in the event, after she won bronze when she was 33 in Pyeongchang in 2018. She is, now, the first woman ever to race the Olympic downhill in her 40s too.

However hard she’s hurting now, the most painful thing of all will be that she didn’t just become the first to finish it, too.