Becky Sullivan

Still, she says, she has no regrets about competing.

Becky Sullivan in PR News, Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy.

Just 13 seconds into the race, she clipped a gate with her right arm, and she crashed very, very hard, had to be airlifted off the slope.

AP and Reuters, in fact, are reporting that she was taken to a hospital in Treviso, which is an Italian city about two hours south of here, where she underwent a procedure to stabilize a fracture in her left leg.

U.S.

ski team says she's in stable condition, but just a really devastating end to this chapter of Vaughn's story.

Lindsey Vonn's crash looked bad.

Just 13 seconds after she came out of the start house, Vonn killed herself.

clipped one of the orange gates with the inside of her right arm, swinging her around in midair and crashing hard into the snow.

She could be heard wailing on the TV broadcast as a medical team tended to her.

The Associated Press reported she was taken to a hospital in Treviso, a city two hours to the south.

There, the AP said, she underwent an operation to stabilize a fracture in her left leg.

Vaughn had torn her left ACL just over a week ago but decided to race anyway.

It wasn't clear how much of a factor that was in the crash.

Her teammate, Breezy Johnson, won the gold medal, becoming the second American woman to do so at the downhill event, the first, of course, being Vaughn herself back in 2010.

Becky Sullivan in PR News, Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy.

Any downhill race requires taking risks and pushing your limit, and Breezy Johnson's run looked just like that.

She hit a top speed of 80 miles per hour and finished in one minute, 36.1 seconds, which was just

four hundredths of a second ahead of silver medalist Emma Eicher of Germany.

Italy's Sofia Goggia won bronze.