Vonn recovers from nerve damage in broken right arm to race

Published Jan. 11, 2017 6:24 p.m. ET

Lindsey Vonn struggled with nerve damage so severe she couldn't even move her fingers soon after surgery to fix her broken right arm.

On her Facebook page, the four-time overall World Cup champion revealed in a more than 5-minute video her journey back to the slopes after breaking her right arm during a fall while training in November.

Vonn plans to compete in the downhill this weekend in Altenmarkt-Zauchensee, Austria. It will be her first World Cup race since fracturing her left knee in a super-G crash in Andorra last February.

The 32-year-old Vonn was planning to make her comeback during the speed races in Lake Louise, Alberta, in late November and early December until she broke her upper arm on Nov. 10 at Copper Mountain, Colorado. On Facebook, she called her return from the nerve damage the ''hardest recovery of my career.''

In her video, the 2010 Olympic downhill champion shows steady progress after more than 300 hours of therapy. She learns how to straighten her fingers again, lifts glasses of water, works on signing her name, rotates a shampoo bottle, catches a tennis ball off the wall and finally uses a ski pole to push out of a start gate.

Vonn wrote on Facebook: ''Today I am still struggling to do simple things like put on my ski glove and do my hair, but I'm at a point where I am comfortable with my hand in most situations.''

Vonn is the winningest female World Cup racer with 76 victories.