Former Olympic gold medalist and world champion Lindsey Vonn will return to skiing, she announced Thursday.

She said in an interview with the New York Times that her return was not planned and that she only reconsidered after successful knee replacement surgery seven months ago ended the pain that led to her retirement.

“I try not to get too far ahead of myself because I have quite a few hoops to jump through,” she said. “Obviously I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t hoping to race. I have ambitions. I like to go fast. How fast can I go? Don’t know.”

Vonn, 40, last competed professionally at the FIS Alpine Skiing World Championships in Sweden in February 2019, where she won bronze in the women’s downhill, becoming the oldest woman to win a medal at a world championship.

That same month, prior to the match, Vonn announced her retirement, citing injuries.

“The unfortunate reality is that my mind and body are not on the same page. After many sleepless nights, I have finally accepted that I cannot continue skiing,” Vonn wrote in an announcement on February 1, 2019.

She then added, “Over the last few years I’ve had more injuries and surgeries than I care to admit. I have always pushed the boundaries of ski racing and that has allowed me to have great successes, but also dramatic crashes.”

However, when Vonn returned to skiing this year 10 weeks after her surgery, “I had a smile so wide it came through the back of my helmet,” she told the Times.

Vonn has also won three Olympic medals, the most recent coming in 2018, the last Olympics she competed in. She won her only Olympic gold in 2010 in the women’s downhill competition.

At the time of her retirement, Vonn was the winningest woman in skiing, with 82 World Cup victories. (A record that has now been broken by fellow countryman Mikaela Shiffrin.)

Vonn was a dominant figure in the sport until injuries slowed her down.

She won three consecutive World Cups between 2008 and 2010, and another in 2012. In her career, she won races in all five disciplines of alpine skiing. Her 43 victories in downhill are the most of any skier, male or female, as are her 28 victories in super-G.

However, injuries took their toll on Vonn in the years leading up to her retirement.

At the 2013 World Championships, Vonn tore the ACL and MCL in her right knee and suffered a fracture in her right leg after crashing during the super-G. Later that year, she re-injured her ACL while training and ultimately did not participate in the 2014 Winter Olympics.

In August 2015, Vonn broke her ankle. The following February she suffered fractures in her knee, ending her World Cup season while in first place with eight races remaining.

In November 2016, Vonn broke her right arm. Two years later she tore a cruciate ligament and suffered three more fractures in her left knee.

In April of this year, Vonn announced that she had undergone knee replacement surgery.

Rumors of Vonn’s return have been circulating since October, after she was spotted training in Austria.

“I saw Lindsey Vonn training sliding turns on the Rettenbach Glacier in a very ambitious way,” Austrian head speed coach Sepp Brunner told Swiss newspaper Blick.

“When I first heard the rumor about Lindsey’s comeback three days ago, I couldn’t imagine that you could ski very fast with an artificial knee joint,” Felix Neureuther, a former German world champion, told Blick. “But looking at it from a distance, I say, if anyone can do the seemingly impossible, it’s the one and only Lindsey Vonn.”