Lindsey Vonn makes official training run but isn’t entirely happy

Reporting from Whistler, Canada — 

American Alpine star Lindsey Vonn finally made an official training run Monday, but her results were mixed.

Nursing a sore shin she thought might keep her from competing in the Olympics, Vonn won the first half of a split downhill training run at Whistler Creekside, but victory came at a cost.

“It’s tough,” she said. “I honestly was expecting it to be a little bit better than it was.”

Vonn, on her own, did some slalom training Sunday. Thomas Vonn said before Monday’s men’s downhill that his wife had suffered a “setback” but “it was to be expected.”

Vonn got her first look at the Whistler downhill Monday, in a split training-run session wrapped around the men’s race.

“The course here is pretty bumpy,” Vonn said. “I was pretty shocked. It was like jarring -- it was a fight to make it down. . . . I think this is the worst course for my shin. I just have to fight through it.”

Vonn is hoping poor weather might cancel Tuesday’s second training run in advance of the women’s downhill competition Wednesday. More snow and rain are expected, but not nearly the amount that wreaked havoc on the early Alpine schedule.

The men’s downhill was postponed two days, and the women’s first scheduled event, the combined, was moved from Sunday to Thursday. The men have a combined scheduled for Tuesday.

Vonn, the two-time defending World Cup overall champion and considered a multi-medal threat at these Games, bruised her shin Feb. 2 while training in Austria.

Vonn said at her pre-Olympic news conference last Wednesday that she feared she might not be able to race.

But she caught several breaks when poor weather prevented the women from even completing a training run for four days.

Vonn couldn’t believe she checked in Monday with the fastest time in an abbreviated downhill run.

“I almost went out of the course a couple of times,” she said. “It wasn’t bad skiing, it was just fighting-to-make-it-down skiing. . . . I know what I have to do. I know how to ski. It’s just fighting the pain.”

chris.dufresne@latimes.com