Lindsey Vonn makes a statement

After yet another spectacular performance by Lindsey Vonn Friday in Lake Louise, Canada, one seriously has to wonder: why can't she ski against the guys? Vonn won the first of three World Cup races over the weekend in Lake Louise, a downhill, by an absurd 1.73 seconds.

American Stacey Cook took second -- her first World Cup podium, and the first 1-2 finish for U.S. women in a World Cup downhill since 2006. Germany's Maria Höfl-Riesch and Liechtenstein's Tina Weirather tied for third, one-hundredth of a second behind Cook.

Vonn had petitioned skiing's international governing authority, FIS, for permission to race here last week against the men. FIS turned her down, essentially saying  men race against men and that's that.

Since then, Max Gartner, the president of Alpine Canada, has said he's in talks with Red Bull, which sponsors Vonn, to put together a race, and to hold it at Lake Louise.

Such a race would be a marketing and publicity boon for a sport that needs it, especially here in the United States.

Alpine skiing is great stuff. Lindsey Vonn is a great champion. FIS should put her front and center, someway, somehow. What's so difficult about that?

Aksel Lund Svindal, the two-time overall men's World Cup champion from Norway, gets it, and told the Canadian Press: "I've trained with her. My experience is if you are on a hill that she likes and you don't ski good, she can beat you. It's realistic that she would be in the race."

Vonn said after flying down the course Friday, "Well, I kind of felt like I had to win today. I mean, like you say you want to race with the men -- you can't really not win the women's races. I knew that. I was trying to prove a point, mostly to myself but to everyone else who doesn't think I should race with the men. I don't know. I just do my best."

Lindsey Vonn's best, especially at Lake Louise, is so good one struggles to keep finding words to describe just how good.

The first victory of her career -- ever -- came in Lake Louise, in 2004.

Friday's victory marked her 54th. She now stands one behind Vreni Schneider on the all-time women's list.

It was her 12th in Lake Louise -- 10 in the downhill, two in super-G.

It was her fifth straight victory there and first of the still-young 2012-13 World Cup season.

Last year, she won the first of the two Lake Louise downhills in 1:53.19. Her winning margin in that race was an absurd 1.95 seconds.

She followed that up by winning the Saturday downhill by "only" 1.68 seconds, and then winning Sunday's super-G.

This year, her winning time Friday: 1:52.61. At the second speed check, she was flying along at 84 mph.

Making all this even more outlandish: Vonn was in a Vail, Colo., hospital just a little over two weeks ago with stomach pains. In a column she writes in the Denver Post, she said that after she was released it made her tired just walking down the hall of her condo: 'I felt like I was 100 years old, and I couldn't even think about skiing."

At the end of last Saturday's race in Aspen, she collapsed in exhaustion.

This, however, has always been the Lindsey Vonn way.

She has faced a succession of extraordinary challenges: a crash in the downhill in Torino in 2006, a gashed thumb at the world championships in Val d'Isere in 2009, a banged-up shin before the Olympics in Vancouver in 2010.

Invariably, she rises to the occasion.

After the race Friday, Vonn was asked -- naturally -- how she felt, and if you were the other women on the tour, maybe you would be giving some thought to the notion of whether she ought to race the guys at Lake Louise, because this is what she had to say: "It just gives me confidence."

A historic 50th for Lindsey Vonn

You wonder whether Lindsey Vonn is so good this season that the point has come whether she has simply imposed her will on everything and everyone around her. She did it again Saturday, winning the historic 50th World Cup victory of her career in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, even though temperatures in the Bavarian Alps were crazy cold and she had to survive a near-crash about halfway down.

Lindsey's winning time, in temperatures of -13 Fahrenheit, so cold that racers had to tape their faces to avoid frostbite, was 1:44.86. She trailed through the early intervals. Yet by the finish she was, again, first, and by almost half a second.

Nadja Kamer of Switzerland finished second, 41-hundredths of a second back. Tina Weirather of Liechtenstein crossed third, 79-hundredths back, for her third World Cup podium finish, all this season.

Last year's overall World Cup winner and a Garmisch local, Maria Höfl-Riesch, Lindsey's good friend and rival, finished fourth, in 1:45.85, 99-hundredths back.

At 27, Lindsey is the youngest woman to reach 50 World Cup victories. Only Annemarie Moser-Pröll of Austria, with 62, and Switzerland's Vreni Scheider, with 55, have more.

Of the three, Lindsey got to 50 the fastest, with just seven years between her first World Cup win and her 50th. It took Moser-Pröll eight years.

Men's racers with 50 or more victories: Ingemar Stenmark (86), Hermann Maier (54), Alberto Tomba (50).

"I mean, when I was a kid I dreamed of winning the Olympic gold medal and I wanted to ski like people like Alberto Tomba did," Lindsey said Saturday night from Garmisch on a conference call with a few American reporters. "But I never dreamed I would have reached the successes they reached in their careers.

"I still have a lot of years of racing in me. I have been at a loss for words all day. It definitely is something I never expected. It takes a lot of hard work to get to this many wins and it is a huge milestone in my career."

The Garmisch downhill, 1.8 miles long, is called the Kandahar. It's a course that, by now in her career, Lindsey knows well -- but, intriguingly, one she had never won.

Last year, they held the world championships on this course, and despite battling the effects of a concussion, Lindsey finished second.

All week, anticipation ran high that Lindsey would get that 50th victory. She had come oh-so-close to 50 last weekend in St. Moritz, Switzerland, winning first a super-combined (48), then a downhill (49) and then, last Sunday, coming in second, behind Höfl-Riesch in another super-combined by a mere three-hundredths of a second.

In Garmisch, there's an American military base essentially at the bottom of the run. During the week, Lindsey and others on the U.S. team had visited with some of the U.S. troops -- so she and the other American racers, as they always do there, had a built-in red, white and blue rooting crew.

Three other Americans finished Saturday in the top 15: Stacey Cook ninth, Laurenne Ross 10th, Julia Mancuso 13th. The U.S. women's team leads the downhill Nations Cup standing race -- over Austria -- by 433 points. Austria leads the overall standings with 3555 points, the Americans second with 2428.

At the second split, Lindsey trailed by 62-hundredths. Then came a bump about halfway down the course that saw Lindsey lose the inside edge of a ski and slide onto a hip and almost out of the race. Almost.

She recovered, found a line and made up time.

The U.S. head coach, Alex Hoedlmoser, who had been standing by the side of the course about 20 meters away from the spot where Lindsey almost went down, said afterward that watching her slip "stopped my heart a little bit."

But, he said, she "pulled it off like nobody else would."

She said, "I definitely gave the coaches a little bit of a scare there."

She also said, "I felt like I was down on my hip and then right back up again," the kind of mistake she has made before and assuredly will make again. "I do make mistakes quite a few times in downhill and super-G. I just have to keep my composure and ski the line I expect at maybe a more aggressive pace -- I have to keep my composure and keep going."

The victory Saturday was Lindsey's ninth -- already -- on the 2011-12 tour. She has won four downhills.

Of her 50 World Cup victories, 25 have been downhills.

Lindsey now has 1350 points for the season, a whopping 482-point lead over Tina Maze of Slovenia. Höfl-Riesch stands third with 746.

Lindsey leads the downhill points tally as well, by 230.

The next event: a super-G, on Sunday, still in Garmisch. Lindsey leads the super-G standings this season, too.

This season, of course, has come amid considerable turmoil in Lindsey's personal life. She split from her husband, Thomas. Lindsey's sister, Laura, was on hand in Garmisch as was her father, Alan Kildow, and stepmom. She said she was glad to be able to share the historic moment with family.

Make no mistake. The time that Lindsey gets on the mountain is, in many ways, sanctuary. When she's up there in that start gate, it just her and her very considerable will, alone.

The best two minutes of her day are coming right up. She couldn't be happier.

"I'm really enjoying skiing," she said in that conference call. "I feel like no matter what going on in my personal life I can put my skis on and go out and have fun.

"Skiing has been honestly the best thing for me in my life at this point. It's hard to describe. Things in the personal front aren't any better than they were a few months ago. I feel very clear-minded when I'm skiing. I enjoy it … it's just a different state of mind."

Lindsey Vonn +1.95 seconds = wow

Lindsey Vonn didn't just win her 43rd World Cup race Friday. She absolutely dominated.

She won the downhill in Lake Louise, Alberta, up in Canada, by 1.95 seconds. That's crazy.

Alpine skiing is typically decided by tenths or even hundredths of a second. Bode Miller won the Birds of Prey World Cup downhill in Beaver Creek, Colo., Friday by four-hundredths of a second. That made it a banner day for the U.S. Ski Team; the last time there was a double downhill American win was on Dec. 3, 2004, again by Bode and Lindsey. His win Friday was fantastic. Hers -- simply outrageous.

It has to be said: The other racers on the tour are, like, really good, too.

Lichtenstein's Tina Weirather, skiing from the back of the back -- bib number 40 -- was the only racer to come within two seconds of Vonn. Dominique Gisin of Switzerland, who had put up Thursday's fastest training run, was 2.06 seconds back for third place.

Vonn's winning time over the 3,068-meter course: 1:53.19.

Another American, Alice McKennis, competing in her first World Cup race since breaking her leg last year, finished eighth.

At every ski race, there's a live timing system set up so that you can follow along. It lets you see not only whether a particular racer is ahead or behind of the leader at certain intervals but also just how fast each racer is going.

Lindsey Vonn started 22nd Friday. That's an ideal start spot. On purpose, alpine racing officials group the best skiers from roughly the 16th to 22nd start slots.

That means Lindsey knew going down what her chief rivals had done.

She also knew this particular course like the back of her hand. She has seen more success here than anywhere else on tour -- before Friday, winning eight races and standing on the podium 14 times.

At the same time, it was windy out there. "I could feel the wind heavily when I was skiing," Lindsey would say later, adding, "I just tried to ski as aggressively as I could."

At the first interval Friday, she was already four-tenths of a second ahead. At the second, she was 1.07 seconds up. The first speed clock got her going 124.8 kilometers per hour, or 77.5 miles per hour. That's on ice, not snow;  ice is how the World Cup surfaces are set up.

At interval three, her lead was 1.22 seconds. At interval four, 1.35.

The second speed clock got her going 127.9 kph, or 79.5 mph.

Think about that for just a moment. At that point in the course, she already had been skiing for 80 seconds. She had about 30 seconds yet to go. This is the point where other racers start to give in; their legs start to burn and they start slowing down.

Not Lindsey Vonn. The clock proved it. She was going faster on the bottom of the hill than on top.

Think again about what she was doing. Think about driving your car on ice at 79.5 miles per hour, about what the sensation of that would be like. Now think about that would be like without being inside the heated comfort of the drivers' cockpit -- the split-second decision-making, the rush of the trees by your eyes, the slash of your skis through the ice, the whip of the cold wind on your face.

At interval five, her lead was up to 1.89 seconds. At the finish, it was 2.06, over Gissin. Weirather, 18 spots later, had yet to come.

The 1.95-second margin is by far the most Vonn has ever won by. She said she had won once by 1.2 seconds -- in Lake Louise, of all places.

 "I really couldn't believe it when I got to the finish today," Vonn said later at a news conference. "My goal today was to ski as aggressively as I could and try not to make any mistakes."

She said a moment later, a little laugh in her voice, "It was awesome."

It was, and all the more so because of what's going on in her personal life -- the recently announced split from her husband, Thomas. Her sister, Karin Kildow, came to Lake Louise to be there for her. Her U.S. teammates were being so supportive, she made a point of saying; so was Maria Hoefl-Riesch, her longtime friend; so were "the entire World Cup girls."

Even so, just to be out there on the Lake Louise course Friday was probably the very best thing for Lindsey Vonn.

"When I'm on my skis and I'm on the mountain," she said, "I feel calm and I feel comfortable. I love skiing. I love going fast. I love downhill. Today, even if I didn't win, just racing and being out on the mountain is what I need."

But, she was asked at that news conference --  to win by such a huge margin?

This is the secret to Lindsey Vonn's success -- and, for those expecting magic, it's so elemental. It's hard work and ferocious drive, all of which she made abundantly plain in one of the most incredible performances you would ever want to see in a nearly two-second victory at Lake Louise, Alberta:

"I try to work hard every day. I try to do my best every day. I always want to try to improve. Even if I win a race, I still want to improve. I think it's just that I am never satisfied. That keeps me motivated and keeps me wanting to do my best every day."