Vonn reflects on money, retirement, injuries, identity, and life beyond skiing in a candid conversation with Boardroom’s Rich Kleiman and Ally Bank’s Jack Howard on Mental Wealth.
Lindsey Vonn has stood in an Olympic starting gate with the world watching, 90 seconds between her and history. She’s also sat in a hospital bed, unable to walk, writing out her rawest emotions on her phone because she couldn’t hold them in any longer. Somewhere between those two extremes is where she’s found her clearest thinking about money, identity, and what actually matters once the medals stop coming.
That’s the terrain she covers on the latest episode of Mental Wealth, where the Olympic champion joins Boardroom CEO Rich Kleiman and Jack Howard, Head of Money Wellness at Ally Bank, for a candid conversation about resilience, money, identity, and finding purpose beyond the sport that defined her career. Vonn opens up about the physical and emotional toll of her latest injury, the uncertainty surrounding retirement, and why she refuses to let skiing define who she is. She also shares the lessons her parents taught her about money, how she built a career beyond winning races, and why she prioritized long-term partnerships and financial stability over quick paydays.
The conversation begins back home. Vonn is the oldest of five kids, including a set of triplets, and long before there were Olympic medals or Rolex deals, there was a family stretching to make ends meet. “It wasn’t easy for my family growing up,” she says. When the Vonns left Minnesota for Colorado so she could chase ski racing, her father stayed behind to keep working as a lawyer while her mother held down a household of five kids in a cramped environment. “We had a small condo, and things were really tight,” she remembers. It wasn’t only the sacrifice, either. Her siblings didn’t share her dream, but they lived it anyway. “It wasn’t just that it cost money,” she says. “It was also it cost my siblings a lot emotionally to move their lives to Colorado for me.” When she made the 2002 Olympic team at 17, she felt vindicated: “When I made the team, it was like, OK, all the money we spent, all the sacrifices we gave up for this are worth it.”
That sense of debt shaped everything that came after, including how she thinks about money itself. Ask her about the connection between winning and getting paid, and she doesn’t hesitate. “I always put my performance first,” she says. “I prioritized the winning. I won, and then the money followed.” She’s heard from plenty of athletes chasing the same big break she eventually got, and her answer to them is blunt: “It’s like, you have to win first. You have to put in the work. And then those things will come.”
Her father planted that idea early, telling her that talent on the mountain wouldn’t be enough on its own. “You’re going to have to be more than an athlete,” he told her, a line that stuck. So she took media training seriously before it was fashionable, treated every interview like part of the job, and built something that outlasted any single season. “All those things add up,” she says. “Over time, I build relationships. I build respect, not just on the mountain, but how I show up as a professional.” The payoff wasn’t a headline-grabbing one-year deal; it was two decades and counting with partners like Red Bull, Under Armour, and Rolex. “I’m looking for a 20-year deal, 30 years, lifetime deal,” she says.
That same patience is what she’s leaning on now, as she works through the aftermath of her latest crash, still nursing a broken ankle she only recently learned hadn’t fully healed. “I’m more focused, I guess, on probably living than my rehab for once in my life,” she says. The hardest part wasn’t the missed medal. It was losing the team around her the instant she went down. “We dismembered, and I felt so sad because I was losing my team,” she says. “I felt worse about that than I did about not getting a medal.”
And yet she resists letting any of it — the crash, the medals, the fame — define her. “I’m not a skier,” she says. “I’m Lindsey, and I love to ski, but there’s two different aspects of me. My identity isn’t tied to ski racing.” It’s that separation that lets her picture a life beyond competition, one that already includes a trip to South Africa and more time simply living instead of training. “I need money to be able to do that,” she says. “I’m lucky that I’ve lived my life in a way that I’ve been responsible, made good investments, and I don’t have to work anymore.”
Even so, work remains part of who she is, just not for the reasons people assume. “I’m not working for money,” she says. “I’m working for me.”
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