Lindsey Vonn couldn’t wiggle her fingers or move her wrist. Understandably, she wanted to be reassured everything would be OK.

A crash during training had left her screaming, then passing out from the pain, on the side of a Colorado mountain, 15 months ahead of the Pyeongchang Olympics. Just one of a series of serious injuries that has interrupted the American’s illustrious ski career, this required delicate surgery to insert a plate and more than a dozen screws into her broken right arm while trying to avoid nerve damage.

“She looked up at me: ‘Buddy, you’re going to fix this, right? You’ve got this?’” her longtime sports physical therapist, Lindsay Winninger, recalled in a recent telephone interview with The Associated Press. “I confidently said, ‘Yes.’ But at that point in time, I didn’t know if I (could). That was hard from Day One. … We were putting in almost eight hours a day on that arm, to try and revive the nerve a little bit and get things done as fast as possible. That was a big one.”

There have been several big ones for Vonn along the way, no real surprise given that she spends day after day hurtling herself down icy slopes at speeds that can top 75 mph.

“The thing is, everyone asks me if I’m afraid after so many crashes. Do I take my foot off the gas pedal? … You try to manage risk as much as you want,” she said. “But at the end of the day, it’s a dangerous sport.”

Concussions. Broken fingers. Torn ligaments. A fractured ankle.

The lengthy list includes the ripped-up right knee that held her out of the 2014 Sochi Games and prevented her from defending her downhill gold medal from four years earlier, when she also collected a bronze in the super-G.

“Eight years has been a very long time. Obviously, I was very … disappointed and devastated and frustrated that I missed Sochi,” the 33-year-old Vonn said. “I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. I’m ready.”

So it’s only natural that as she looked ahead to the 2018 Winter Games, which open in South Korea on Feb. 9, Vonn voiced one primary concern — and it was not related to making sure her racing would be at its best.

In sum: To get a chance to add to her medal collection, she’ll need to be in the starting hut.

“I don’t really think about peaking, so much as staying healthy. As long as I’m healthy and confident, then I’ll be in a great position when I get to Pyeongchang,” Vonn said.

“Getting to February healthy,” she said, “is the only thing I should focus on.”

As much as she’s already done — and won — in a sport she has dominated for stretches, including four World Cup overall titles and seven world championships medals, Vonn still has plenty of unfinished business on her agenda.