SAALBACH-HINTERGLEMM, Austria (AP) — Lindsey Vonn acknowledged that “I didn’t help myself” by firing back on social media after learning that she wasn’t paired with Mikaela Shiffin for Tuesday’s team combined race at the skiing world championships.
The 40-year-old Vonn had campaigned to race with Shiffrin in a skiing “dream team” for the new event, which will also make its Olympic debut next year.
When Vonn saw Shiffrin announce on Instagram that she was racing with recently-crowned downhill world champion Breezy Johnson, Vonn reacted with displeasure on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“Why am I not surprised?” Vonn wrote Monday on X with a shrug emoji, before deleting her post and adding another.
“Maybe I didn’t help myself or the team by having my Twitter fingers out,” Vonn said Tuesday. “But at the same time, I’m a human being and I was disappointed in the communication. And I let my feelings be known. I’m a human. I have feelings. So shoot me.”
The new combined event entails one racer competing in a downhill run and another in a slalom, with the times of the two added together to determine the final results.
Johnson and Shiffrin won gold on Tuesday while Vonn and AJ Hurt, her partner, finished 16th after Vonn had a dismal downhill run that left her team 21st after the morning leg.
Vonn was the only one of the eight U.S. skiers competing who did not take part in the podium celebration for Johnson and Shiffrin. She ran to catch a plane for a ski school event in Switzerland later Tuesday.
But Vonn did congratulate Johnson and Shiffrin on X, saying “What a team!!!”
Lauren Macuga, another American, led the downhill portion, while Johnson was fourth.
In downhill, Vonn placed one position above Andorra’s Cande Moreno in a field of 26 starters — 2.51 seconds behind Macuga
“I was in my tuck pretty much the whole way down and just not accelerating anywhere,” said Vonn, who returned this season after nearly six years of retirement. “So I have clearly work to do. I think it’s my boots that I have to play with to figure out what’s better … but it’s hard to really change your entire setup while you’re racing in the world championships.”
The combined pairings were selected by the U.S. team’s coaching staff based on “season-best results” in downhill and slalom.
“I didn’t have a problem with the selection process,” Vonn said. “It was 100% the right decision. Breezy and Mikaela should be the pair.
“They’re the fastest two skiers … my only problem was that it wasn’t communicated to me. I found out about it on Instagram. And I just think it’s a little unprofessional. It’s just a simple phone call or text message. I think that’s not a really difficult thing to ask for.”
Vonn said she reached out and that Shiffrin agreed it would be great to race together. But then Vonn was told that Shiffrin wasn’t entering the combined. Vonn only learned of Shiffrin’s final decision to race it via Instagram.
“It would have been a cool thing if those two greats would have raced together, but at the moment others are stronger in their performance,” U.S. speed coach Alex Hoedlmoser said. “We had to make sure to bring the fastest pairings together, and it was very obvious that Breezy was the fastest in the downhill and therefore would race with Mikaela.”
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Associated Press writer Eric Willemsen in Vienna contributed to this report.
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AP skiing: https://apnews.com/hub/alpine-skiing
