Vonn fine day

From Whistler, Canada — 

Tears of joy, not pain, for Vonn

Welcome to the Vonn-couver Olympics.

She owns them now, bought them Wednesday with nearly two miles of hard mountain, painted them in red, white, blond and bad.

Lindsey Vonn, the American skiing superstar with the injured shin, irritated teammates, iridescent bikinis, and a gondola full of pressure, wore all of it down Whistler as if it were wings.

Too pretty? Too commercial? Too sore? Too bad.

In less than two minutes, Vonn forever changed the face of U.S. women’s skiing -- and perhaps women’s athletics -- when she became the first American woman skier to win the Olympic downhill.

Then sat in the cold and cried.

“There was a lot of expectations and a lot of pressure coming into these Games,” she said later. “I stood up to that and fought back.”

Vonn didn’t just win it. She delivered it. She dominated it. She stuck it under her spandex arms -- stars on right, stripes on left -- and flew off into history with it, blowing away the time of leader and teammate Julia Mancuso by the first turn, soaring through the course in 1:44.19, her flapping blond pony tail finishing soon thereafter.

In an event where winners often triumph by a few hundredths of a second, she beat Mancuso by .66, which is pretty much like the NFL preseason favorite surviving a tumultuous season by winning the Super Bowl by four touchdowns.

She finished with a stunned scream, falling flat on her back at the finish line while joyfully moving her arms and legs.

America’s snow angel.

“There was so much pressure there, it had all been building up, you could just tell,” said her sister, Karin Kildow. “To have it all come down to one race, one day, one-hundredths of seconds . . . and to have her win it like that. . . . It was unbelievable.”

After picking herself out of the white stuff, Vonn leaped a fence and jumped into the arms of Karin and other family members, everyone hugging and crying and still not quite believing.

“I questioned myself for a long time whether I would even be racing and if I would be able to win any medal,” said Vonn. “To come back and stand here today after everything I’ve been through is amazing.”

Equally as amazing is how she stood, treating each post-race interview along the finish line as if it were a gift, even greeting a two dozen frozen American reporters with an appreciatively large, “Hi!”

After the interviews, she delayed doping control and the news conference to sign autographs for many of the hundreds of American flag-bedecked fans shouting to her from behind a fence.

“I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders,” she said.

In doing so, a new poster has been tacked on the wall of America’s teenagers, Vonn moving toward becoming this country’s first beloved female sports star since soccer heroes Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain a decade ago.

It also vaults her into a female version of category dominated by the likes of Kobe Bryant and Derek Jeter, a sport’s best performer putting on its best show at its bigger moment.

“To go out and deliver under these conditions is unbelievable,” said Dexter Paine, the chairman of the United States Ski and Snowboard Assn. who was high-fiving in the stands like a nutty fan. “This is like LeBron or Kobe, under pressure, doing it when the chips are down.”

Indeed, up until the moment Vonn entered the starting gate, all bets were off.

She came to Vancouver as the centerpiece to the Olympic team, the greatest story yet to happen, a World Cup champion who awaited only Olympic validation.

But before her first news conference, magazine photos appeared of Vonn posing in scraps of a bikini, drawing criticism from columns such as this one. Then during the news conference she acknowledged seriously injuring her shin, yet not agreeing to X-rays while choosing to rub it with cheese. Then after the news conference, her teammates groused at all of her attention.

The woman who couldn’t lose had suddenly placed herself in a no-win position.

“It’s been an interesting couple of weeks,” she said.

But when racing was delayed three days because of weather, it gave her shin more time to heal. Then, the day before the race, she finally relaxed by supervising the shaving of her initials into her younger brother Reed’s black hair.

She was given her final push moments before her run, when she realized her rival Mancuso was leading. Down at the bottom of the hill, English skier Chemmy Alcott was already calling the race over. Vonn knew nobody was giving her anything, so she did what every great American athlete does.

“This is everything I’ve worked my whole life for, and I knew that in the starting gate,” Vonn said. “I knew that I had to take it.”

Take it, she did. Took the Olympics by ski, took America by heart, took it all on a mountain of chills, simply Vonn-derful.

bill.plaschke@latimes.com

twitter.com/billplaschke