Vonn plans to race wearing brace on right pinkie

[February 26, 2010]  WHISTLER, British Columbia (AP) -- It will take more than a broken pinkie to stop Lindsey Vonn's pursuit of Olympic glory.

The two-time World Cup overall champion from Vail, Colo., will put a plastic brace on her injured finger, wear a mitten over it instead of a ski glove -- even tape the ski pole to her hand if she has to -- and climb into the starting gate as scheduled for Friday's slalom.

Did you expect anything less?

It's the last women's Alpine event of the Vancouver Games, and Vonn is trying to become the first American woman to medal in three of them in the same Olympics.

Vonn cracked the base of her right little finger and tweaked her shin and back when she crashed during the first run of Wednesday's giant slalom. She tested the finger in a series of practice runs Thursday and was satisfied that she can race.

"Training was OK," Vonn wrote on her Facebook page. "I still feel pretty beat up after my crash in GS yesterday. I was able to modify one of my gloves and make a brace for my right hand. It seemed to work without too much pain, so I will try and race tomorrow."

Her husband, Thomas Vonn, said in an interview with The Associated Press that she's "a ball of hurt right now," but the pain is "manageable."

"After taking a fall like that, you're always going to wake up sore," he said. "You never know how your body is going to adapt the next day. You could wake up fine or 'Whoa, I can't move.' She was just sore."

Lindsey Vonn took three low-intensity runs through a slalom course Thursday, each one for a different purpose. The first pass was simply to see if she could ski at all, given her sore back, finger and shin.

She could.

The second and third runs were to see how well the finger held up banging into the gates -- a common occurrence in the slalom -- and if the protective padding around her hand would be sufficient.

No problems there, either.

"The goal was to find a solution so the pain was moderated enough to do it," Thomas Vonn said. "Fortunately, we have a history with hand injuries."

Last February, Lindsey Vonn sliced her thumb open on a champagne bottle during a photo op gone bad, forcing her to race the rest of the season with her pole taped to her glove.

"It's more similar than we could've imagined," Thomas Vonn said of the injured pinkie.

The 25-year-old Vonn is no stranger to injury, especially at these Olympics. She entered the games with a badly bruised right shin, the result of a crash during slalom training in Austria on Feb. 2. She even tried wrapping her leg in topfen, an Austrian curd cheese said to reduce swelling.

Still, the injury remained so painful that she struggled to slip on a ski boot in her hotel, let alone ski down a slope, and worried at one point if she would be able to compete in one event, let alone all five.

Using painkillers and a numbing cream, Vonn was able to get the shin ready for competition, winning a gold in downhill and a bronze in super-G.

She crashed out of two other events. She hooked a tip on a gate in the slalom portion of the super-combined and then, spun out of control in the giant slalom, slid across the snow and slammed into the netting. Somewhere along the way -- she's really not sure where -- she injured her finger.

Even fully healthy, Vonn would hardly be the faorite in the slalom.

That tag belongs to her close friend, Germany's Maria Riesch, the World Cup slalom leader this season.

And, even with a sore left calf, Sweden's Anja Paerson remains a top contender as well. She is the defending Olympic champion and is attempting to become the most decorated woman in Alpine history. With a bronze in the super-combined last week, Paerson tied Croatia's Janica Kostelic with six career medals.

"Wouldn't it be awesome if I won it again?" said Paerson, herself still feeling the effects of a bad landing in the downhill last week. "No one believes it, so I'm going to prove everybody wrong."

For Vonn, the last race at these Olympics is quite similar to her first -- managing pain in order to compete.

"She'll be ready," Thomas Vonn said. "You lay it all out there in the Olympics."

[Associated Press; By PAT GRAHAM]

AP Sports Writer Graham Dunbar contributed to this story.

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