Sawt Falasteen - Vonn and Shiffrin glad to race Olympics on familiar terrain

The former Olympic and world champion stunned the sports world when she returned to the US ski team last year aged 40, five years after retirement.

Vonn's retirement followed a serious knee injury but after she underwent a titanium reconstruction of her knee, she opted to return.

And she told AFP that the prospect of competing for gold at the course in the Italian Dolomites was her primary motivator.

"It was probably the biggest reason why I came back -- because it was in Cortina. I don't know if I would have come back if the Olympics hadn't been in Cortina," she said.

"It's always been historically a great place for me. It's where I got my first podium, where I broke the Women's World Cup win record, and I think it would be a really fitting place to end my career again. It's definitely been the carrot that's been dangling in front of me," she said.

Vonn picked up the first podium of her return at Sun Valley in March, finishing second behind Switzerland's Lara Gut-Behrami in a World Cup Super-G race.

It was a sweet reward for her efforts after she had faced some criticism for taking the risks on the snow after such a long absence.

"The comeback season was incredible. A lot of amazing experiences. Sun Valley was definitely the best way to end it," said Vonn, who was speaking at an NBC event previewing the Winter Games.

"It gives me a lot of confidence going into next season. But it was definitely up and down, some low points, and some really amazing experiences.

"So I think I learned a lot. I know what I have to do next year. I think, hopefully, people understand now my capabilities, and I think the conversation will be hopefully a little different next year than it was this year," she added.

Vonn won her Olympic gold medal in downhill in Vancouver in 2010, a year after clinching World Championship gold at Val d'Isere.

- Beautiful place -

Her team-mate Mikaela Shiffrin, who endured a nightmare Olympics in Beijing in 2022, said she was also glad that a well known European venue had been chosen for the next Games.

"It's a beautiful place and it's a place that we're more familiar with on the Alpine side. And that feels really good to go to a place where we have some knowledge," she told AFP.

"We can talk about the Olympic planning and we can imagine what it's maybe going to look like because we've been there, we've seen it. And so that's going to be, I think, a really nice thing to go to a place that feels, for me in a way, it feels like home. Because I spent so much of my life in Europe now that it's like, OK, here we are. We know," she said.

Shiffrin, who has the most World Cup wins of any skier in history, won gold in slalom in Sochi in 2014 as an 18-year-old and then triumphed in giant slalom in Pyeongchang four years later.

But in Beijing she failed to finish in either of her favoured events and left without a medal.

"I think what I realized from the Olympics is there's always something new around the corner. And when I thought I experienced everything after South Korea, then Beijing came and changed everything I knew about the Olympics," she said.

"It just gave me experience of how hard and upsetting this kind of event can be when everything does go kind of wrong," she said.

"I think that the best approach is like, do the best we can, and I'll be prepared and I'll practice and be ready to go. And then what happens, happens, but life goes on," she said.

R.AbuNasser--SF-PST