Most athletes go to the Olympics, compete, fly home. Breezy Johnson went to Cortina d'Ampezzo and came back with a gold medal in three pieces, a fiancé she wasn't entirely expecting, and a viral exchange with the most famous pop star alive about sourdough bread and skiing technique.
Johnson is 30, from Jackson, Wyoming, and she races downhill, which if you have never watched it up close is the sporting equivalent of throwing yourself off a cliff on two planks at 85 miles an hour while wearing spandex and hoping for the best. She won the women's downhill on 8 February with a time of 1:36.10. Beat Germany's Emma Aicher by four hundredths of a second. Four hundredths. Blink and you've missed the margin twice over. It was her first Olympic medal. First for Team USA at these Games, too.
She was bouncing around on the podium, the ribbon snapped, and her gold hit the deck in three bits. She held the wreckage up for the press pack with a grin and told them, 'I don't know that the Italians are known for their engineering.' She got a replacement. She is keeping both. She wants to knit a pouch for the broken one because she hand-knits a new hat or headband before every single race as a superstition.
💬| Olympic gold medalist, Breezy Johnson offers ski lessons to Taylor Swift."Sourdough engagement gift please?... Would love to teach you to ski."pic.twitter.com/rrsNtsKSlc
The thing about Johnson winning gold at Cortina is that Cortina nearly ended her career.
Same course. January 2022. Training run. She crashed, ruptured her anterior cruciate ligament, and missed the Beijing Olympics entirely. At the time she posted on Instagram that she'd be back 'to the hill that stole this Olympic dream from me for another shot at that gold medal.' The sort of thing athletes say and you nod politely and think, well, we'll see.
Four years later she did it. On the same slope. Which is either poetic or slightly mad, depending on your tolerance for sports narratives that feel a bit too neat.
And Lindsey Vonn was there. The 41-year-old skiing legend, wearing bib 13, trying for a second Olympic downhill gold 16 years after her first. She crashed seconds into her run. Got airlifted off the mountain. The crowd at the Tofane Alpine Skiing Centre went quiet. A course hold dragged on for 30 minutes while medical staff worked. Johnson was already in the leader's chair. She sat there, watching her friend and teammate get stretchered off the slope that had wrecked her own knee four years earlier, not knowing if her time would hold or if the whole day would fall apart. She cried. On and off, for over an hour.
'If you're going through hell, you keep walking because you don't want to just sit around in hell,' she toldNPRafterwards. 'And sometimes when you keep going, maybe you'll make it back to the top.'
Four days after winning gold, Johnson crashed out of the women's super-G on 12 February. Not the ending she wanted. But when she skied down to the finish area, her boyfriend Connor Watkins was waiting on one knee.
Source: International Business Times UK
