2/5/18 — Vonn Dominates the Kandahar, Sunday River Selfie

Well ok the photo is a bit overdone, but since there is usually zero connection between the Super Bowl and this column, I figured this might be my only opportunity to talk football. Sunday River, naturally, making the most of this with some priceless publicity and offered the selfie kid a free pass…back to part one of the headline…couple weeks back I was fearful that Lindsey Vonn’s days of winning races were behind her; you’ll have to give me a pass on that because she was coming off her umpteenth horrific injury and is in her mid 30s and looked dreadful at Lake Louise. Well I’m eating my words and they taste pretty damn good after watching Lindz kick ass in the Kandahar at Garmisch-Partenkirchen this weekend. Two downhill wins, albeit one on a shorter course. Although that makes it arguably even more amazing. Hey, she still needs a few more wins to top Ingemar Stenmark for career victory count, and it definitely is not a done deal. Far from it. Ask any other World Cup racer past or present how hard it is to win just one, let alone four or five or whatever it is she needs to pass Stenmark. The odds are still stacked heavily against her, believe it or not. Regardless of the win count, Vonn stands alone at the top of the all-time list. That’s an undeniable fact — Stenmark was victorious only on the technical side — whereas Vonn has won in both tech, speed disciplines.

Since the broadcast media likely won’t drill down to these specifics during the Olympic coverage, here’s the list of all-time, all-around top skiers who won at least one race in every available discipline…

1. Lindsey Vonn 81
2. Annemarie Moser-Pröll 62
3. Marc Girardelli 46
4. Anja Pärson 42
5. Pirmin Zurbriggen 40
6. Bode Miller 33
7. Janica Kostelić 30
8. Tina Maze 26
9. Pernilla Wiberg 24
10. Kjetil André Aamodt 21

…incidentally, Mikaela Shiffrin needs only a Super G win to launch into fifth place on this list, while Marcel Hirscher needs a downhill and a combined win to move immediately into third.