Risk, reward and Lindsey Vonn

Linsdey Vonn is a hero. Let’s be clear about that at the outset. She is one of the greatest alpine ski racers of all time, dominating speed events, especially downhill and super-G, for more than a decade.  Lindsey Vonn is also a great advocate for women in sport, consistently pushing for gender equality in pay, media coverage, and opportunity and speaking openly about the disparities between men’s and women’s sports.

Alongside this, her career has also been defined by her amazing resilience. Lindsey Vonn has consistently battled repeated, serious injuries, particularly to her knees. However, she has repeatedly fought her way back to the top. Which brings us to the 2026 Winter Olympics.

Risk versus reward

In one final bid for Olympic glory, Vonn came out of retirement, aiming to become the oldest Alpine skier to win a medal. Just days before the games, she tore her ACL. Not letting this deter her, Lindsey assessed the risks and decided to compete. Sadly, her run ended in a violent crash, resulting in a complex fracture of her left tibia.

This got us thinking about risk and reward. Clearly Lindsey Vonn knew that, with a history of potentially career-threatening injuries, competition skiing with a torn ACL was a massive risk. However, it was one she was willing to take in order to achieve one final, glorious end to her glittering career.

Whilst we’re certainly not comparing our work to downhill skiing, there are some similarities. Risk and reward sits at the heart of every project we deliver, whether we’re launching a new product, migrating a platform, or betting on an unproven technology.

Understanding the risks

Lindsey Vonn didn’t crash because she lacked skill, as we know she’s a giant in her sport. She crashed because she was pushing the absolute limits of what was possible, at speed, on a course designed to punish hesitation as much as recklessness.

Olympic downhill skiing is a sport where reward only comes to those who accept risk, but who also manage it. Play it safe and you don’t end up on the podium. Push too hard and sadly you may not finish at all.

Digital projects work the same way. Teams rarely fail because they don’t know what they’re doing. They fail because they misjudge how fast they can go, how sharp the turns are, or how forgiving the terrain will be. A bold websitge refresh, an aggressive timeline, or a leap onto a new platform can deliver massive competitive advantage. But it can also send the project tumbling if the risks aren’t understood.

Managing the risks

Risk management used to be an area of business sidelined to the ‘outer office’, alongside health and safety. Collectively, businesses seemed to realise that there were real benefits to managing health and safety proactively and now, some years later, risk management is having its day and businesses understand the benefits in it.

Vonn’s crash highlights a truth: risk isn’t eliminated by preparation, but it is managed by it. She trained relentlessly, studied the course, and trusted her instincts. In digital work, this translates to prototyping, stress-testing assumptions, and being honest about unknowns. You can’t remove uncertainty, but you can decide where it’s acceptable and where guardrails are non-negotiable.

So when converting this into risk management, you look at something and say “if x happens, then the impact is y. The mitigation is z and the probability is b”. Lindsey Vonn’s would have been something like:

“If I crash at high speed, the impact will most probably damage my already vulnerable leg preventing me from racing again. I will mitigate against this by using medical staff to strap my leg carefully and have doctors on hand to manage any issue. If I race, the likelihood of this risk coming true is 40 per cent”.

The question many people may ask is, with this risk hanging over her, why on earth did she race. Well the answer is simple, another risk:

“If I do not race in the downhill, I will never again have the chance to win an Olympic medal and cement myself as the greatest skier of my generation. I will mitigate this by racing. If i do not race, the likelihood of this risk coming true is 100 per cent”.

So she had two risks to balance. One had a 40 per cent probability and the other a 100 per cent probability. She took a judgement and went with the lower probability and raced.

The three rules of risk

Digital initiatives have to do the same. There are risks to doing something and risks to not doing something. The key is to establish a powerful and independent risk management approach to inform decisions. These can then release you to make decisions that are brave and innovative, but in a way that if they go wrong, they are not catastrophic.

Progress, on snow or in software, belongs to those who are:

• brave enough to push
• disciplined enough to prepare; and
• wise enough to respect the consequences of going all in

Lindsey’s accident is terrible. In the unlikely event she is a keen reader of blogs from British digital companies, then we would like to say how sorry we are for her pain and loss, but also to thank her for what an inspiration she is. Not just for her role as an ambassador for women and sport, but for being the living embodiment of the bravery to take measured but incredibly bold risks.

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Photo by Hendrik Morkel on Unsplash