Going for the Gold: Lindsey Vonn

The "Going for the Gold" series kicks off our One-Year-Countdown to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. We will feature a different 2010 U.S. Olympic or Paralympic hopeful each week with a vodcast on Friday of every month.

Alpine skier Lindsey Vonn is known for being the only American woman having captured the last two World Cup overall titles.

Now she wants to be known as the American woman who won an Olympic gold medal.

It's been an elusive goal for Vonn, who is preparing for a possible third trip to the Olympic Winter Games this February in Vancouver. She is considered the favorite, having won two world gold medals in the super-G and downhill events at the FIS World Ski Championships in Val d'Isere, France, in February. With 22 World Cup titles in four disciplines, Vonn has become the most successful female American skier in World Cup history.

She made her Olympic Winter Games debut in 2002 in Salt Lake City, where her best finish was sixth place in combined. Vonn returned to the Winter Games four years later in Torino, but she was involved in a crash during some warm-up runs that required a life flight and a hospital stay.

Despite the severity of the crash, she was back on the mountain to race two days later, finishing eighth in the downhill. She also raced to a seventh-place finish in the super-G and was 14th in the slalom. She didn't win an Olympic medal, but she was honored with the U.S. Olympic Spirit Award.

Three years later, she became a double gold medalist at the world championships. Although Vonn made it through the 2009 world championships collision free and dominated the event, she didn't leave unharmed. She was gripping a broken champagne bottle during a victory celebration and sliced a tendon in her right thumb. Many people would require three months without motion for the injury to mend. Not Vonn. A few days later, she returned to race the slalom with a specially constructed splint.

The last American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in the super-G was Picabo Street in 1998. Barbara Cochran was the last U.S. woman to win an Olympic gold medal in the slalom in 1972, and no American woman has claimed an Olympic gold medal in the downhill event. Julia Mancuso won a gold medal in the giant slalom in the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games.

Vonn hopes to rewrite history in Vancouver. She will begin her Olympic campaign with her first World Cup event of the season in Soelden, Austria, on Oct. 24.

One of Vonn's mottos is: "If you work hard, it will pay off in the end," and she definitely practices what she preaches. She works out in the gym six to eight hours a day and brings everything she has to her skiing. In the wake of her problems, she comes back fighting harder than before.

Vonn began skiing at 3, raced for the first time when she was 7, and competed internationally by 9. Her parents spent most of their money on her skiing, and sometimes it was hard to make ends meet. But her family -- which consisted of Lindsey, her parents, younger triplets (two brothers and a sister) and another younger sister -- took Lindsey's training so seriously that they moved from St. Paul, Minn., to Vail, Colo., so that she could get better instruction.

When she was 14, Vonn competed in the Trofeo Topolino in Italy, which was for young skiers between ages 11 and 14. She became the only female American to win the event. The following year she was participating in top-level competition.

Lindsey, whose maiden name was Kildow, married Thomas Vonn in 2007. As a former Olympic ski racer himself, Thomas helps Lindsey with life on and off the slopes. He comes to all her races, and Lindsey says her skiing has improved immensely because of the role he plays in her life. The couple celebrated its two-year anniversary in September.

Off the slopes, Vonn enjoys watching the TV show "Law and Order," golf, road biking, reading and tennis. She's been described as a Roger "Federer freak." She attended the BNP Paribas Open Tennis Tournament earlier this year to cheer him on, and she also got to meet her idol while she was there.

Ever since childhood, Vonn wanted a World Cup globe and an Olympic medal. She got her globe -- two, actually -- but the 25-year-old is still vying for her Olympic medal. No one doubts that she'll ski her heart out until she accomplishes that dream. And knowing Vonn, she won't settle for anything less than a gold next year in Vancouver.