Lindsey Vonn sure is purty, but who does she think she is? Getting everyone all hot and bothered over our Yankee Doodle Dandy and then having the audacity to break her shin before winning any gold medals! What a tease.
Vonn announced yesterday that she severely bruised her shin on a training run last week and may end up missing some or all of her Olympic events. This is an incredibly bad PR move, because a lot of people have spent a lot of money using saucy Lindsey Vonn photos to promote their stuff and now she's letting America down. She and her sexy, sexy shin should be ashamed of themselves.
I know Filip Bondy agrees. The New York Daily News columnist takes Vonn to task today for having the gall to accept endorsement money, pose for dirty pictures, and then turn around and lower everyone's inflated expectations just three days before the Opening Ceremonies.
You wish the best for this fine athlete, of course, for the sake of all the work she's put into this sport and because a lot of fans and teammates will feel cheated if Vonn isn't at her best these next two weeks. Her Games might turn out just fine, with a dramatic victory in the end as a reward ... And if this all turns into a bust, then Vonn will have to understand that she brought some of this on herself.
You don't pose the pose, if you can't ski the slope.
Yep, a human being actually wrote that sentence. Lindsey Vonn should not have accepted endorsement money or media opportunities—which is how Olympic athletes pay their heating bills, by the way—unless she could guarantee that she would not get hurt a week before the Olympics. Or guarantee that she would not lose a highly competitive international event after Americans just assumed she was going to. What was she thinking?!
Vonn fully understands what is at stake, and has more than embraced the opportunity. She's come very close to exploiting it, appearing mostly naked and helping to sell a magazine issue that reinforces the notion that women who weigh more than 105 pounds are destined for the scrap heap.
She also helped sell the New York Daily News, which put Vonn's bikini photos on their Olympic preview cover yesterday. I think her betrayal has hurt them most of all.
But why does everyone care that she's so damn hot to begin with? Bill Plaschke sure doesn't!
The athlete on the stage is talking about dealing with the pressure of a debilitating shin injury and suffocating Olympic hopes.
The babe on the website is posing seductively in a white fur wrap too small for her chest and hot pants too tight for her bottom.
Only in American women's sports would these two divergent creatures be the same person. Only at the Olympics would such a mix of messages be celebrated.
Meet Lindsey Vonn, the U.S. Olympic team's star skier.
Or is it cover girl?
Yes, why doesn't she fucking pick one already? Lindsey, please stop using your hotness (only in America, kids!) to distract Bill Plaschke from women's downhill skiing—which he would totally write more columns about if you weren't tarting it up in Sports Illustrated. Why can't she be more like Plaschke's hero and Vonn's teammate, defending giant slalom gold medalist Julia Mancuso?
Not only that, but during the news conference, even though Mancuso was sitting on Vonn's left, it was as if she didn't even exist, all the cameras and initial questions being focused on the woman with the flowing blond hair and sparkling smile.
[...]
A woman who could potentially be the Winter Olympics' most decorated athlete will also be its most Googled, by folks who care nothing about her athleticism and everything about her breasts.
Whoopee.
This is completely off topic, but if you Google "Julia Mancuso" you can find this picture of her breasts being fondled by another female athlete in a hot tub. Google didn't find me any LA Times columns about her skiing.
Lindsey Vonn's downhill spiral just before start of Winter Olympics is not much fun [New York Daily News, via Pat's Papers]
With Lindsey Vonn, is it the shin or the skin? [LA Times]
[Photo via SI]