Lindsey Vonn made a surprising appearance at this year’s Met Gala – marking her first red carpet event since suffering a devastating crash at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics.
The Alpine skiing legend, 41, took on the famous Met steps sans crutches in a floor-length body-hugging gown.
The dress appeared to feature a one-shoulder neckline as her left half was covered in white fabric with a smoky black and silver designs drawn from top to bottom. Her feet were covered with a white tulle mermaid skirt.
The Olympian’s right side was covered with a sheer fabric that led all the way down to her wrist.
Her outfit leaned heavily into this year’s “Fashion is Art” dress code and “Costume Art” exhibition theme, which both examined “the centrality of the dressed body.”
Vogue explained back in February that the Met’s 2026 dress code encouraged “attendees to consider the many ways that designers use the body as their blank canvas.”
Curator Andrew Bolton, meanwhile, noted that “what connects every curatorial department and what connects every single gallery in the museum is fashion, or the dressed body.”
“Rather than prioritizing fashion’s visuality, which often comes at the expense of the corporeal, ‘Costume Art’ privileges its materiality and the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear,” he added in a release.
This marked Vonn’s third time attending fashion’s biggest night.
The Olympian previously walked the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s iconic grand staircase in 2010. She then returned in 2013 with Tiger Woods, whom she was dating at the time.
Vonn wore a sleeveless, floor-length white gown featuring sheer panels for her Met Gala red carpet appearance 13 years ago, while Woods sported a classic black tuxedo with a white dress shirt and a thin black necktie.
The three-time Olympic medalist posed with her surgery bandages from her crash on full display for the cover of Vanity Fair earlier this year.
“I was number one in the world, and potentially on my way to an Olympic medal,” Vonn told the outlet for its May 2026 cover story. “Now I’m in a wheelchair.”
“It took everything I had for it to not drive me insane,” she added.
Vonn was 13 seconds into her downhill run on Feb. 8 when her arm caught a gate, and she was sent hurtling down the course.
The skiing icon shattered her tibia, fibula and ankle during the scary incident and was airlifted off the mountain by helicopter.
Despite undergoing five surgeries, Vonn still nearly lost her left leg due to the severity of her injuries.
“I don’t want people to hang on this crash and be remembered for that,” Vonn told Vanity Fair amid her long recovery. “What I did before the Olympics has never been done before.”
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