VANCOUVER — The NBC peacock can breathe a little easier this morning.
U.S. Olympic skiing star Lindsey Vonn, aided by pain killers and numbing cream, took a test run down a ski slope yesterday for the first time since injuring her shin Feb. 2 and came away encouraged. The free run was in preparation for yesterday’s Olympic downhill training session, which was cancelled due to thick fog and low visibility, a development Vonn and her handlers welcomed.
“I was happy to be back on snow today,” said Vonn. “My shin was still very painful, but I feel like the injury is finally progressing a bit. I am always disappointed when a training run is canceled, but in this situation I definitely welcome the extra day to heal.”
Thomas Vonn, Lindsey’s husband and coach, called the cancellation “fantastic.”
“It’s not like all her competitors are getting multiple runs down the course,” he said. “Nobody got to ski it, really, today. So it’s another day of healing, and hopefully tomorrow [today], she feels even better.”
Thomas Vonn said his wife still plans on racing in all five women’s Alpine events despite the badly bruised right shin. The first event is the super-combined on Sunday.
“She’s never taken any races off the table,” he said. “It’s going to be a day to day: If she can do it, she’s going to do it.
“But she’s not pulling out of anything at this point, and it’s looking better than it was yesterday.”
Lindsey Vonn enters the Vancouver Olympics as America’s biggest star. NBC has been pushing her for weeks in commercials, and she did a double-dip of posing for the cover of Sports Illustrated and the inside of the magazine’s swimsuit issue.
As the nation looks for another Michael Phelps, Vonn became the most likely candidate as a contender in several races. Then Wednesday she announced she had been injured, and there was doubt she would even race, a potentially devastating development for Vonn’s sponsors and NBC.
Yesterday gave everyone from Vonn to Dick Ebersol reason to hope. After aggressively treating the shin, just wearing ski boots was a positive sign for Vonn. Last week, she called it “excruciatingly painful” to wear boots.
“She had a smile today,” Thomas Vonn said. “It’s very encouraging. Like, it seems like it’s kind of turning a corner, based off today.”
Vonn has done a wide variety of things to rehab the shin since banging her boot against the leg in a headfirst crash during training in Austria. She has even wrapped the leg in an Austrian cheese to ease the swelling.
“The pain level has gone down from a sharp, debilitating pain to something that I feel I may be able to grit my teeth through,” she said.
brian.costello@nypost.com
