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The FIS Alpine Ski World Championships will be held in Are, Sweden, over the next two weeks, with forging legends, names to be made and scores to settle.
Slalom specialists Mikaela Shiffrin and Marcel Hirscher, on the other hand, are trying to enhance their brilliant career and defend world titles won in St. Moritz, Switzerland, two years ago.
Here are the top five points of discussion for the World Ski Championships.
See you soon, Lindsey
Vonn, 34, had a stellar career and 82 World Cup victories, putting him in second place behind Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark.
Despite a catalog of injuries, she was determined to try to beat Stenmark's record this season, but Vonn finally succumbed to her distressed body.
"My body is broken and it does not leave me the last season of my dreams," she wrote on Facebook on Friday. "My body is screaming at me to stop and it's time for me to listen."
The American won the World Super-G and Downhill titles in 2009, and his bronze medal in the Pyeongchang Olympic Downhill in 2018 was a resounding success. Due to a knee injury, a world farewell title is not impossible.
But Vonn will continue to say goodbye to the sport as the most successful female ski racer of all time.
Svindal is one of the most dominant male skiers of his generation with 36 World Cup victories and five world titles.
He won three medals, including the super-G, at the Vancouver 2010 Games and became the oldest ski gold medalist with a victory in the descent of the blue ribbon at the age of 35 years. last.
A serious knee injury brought on by a fall at Kitzbühel in 2016, preventing him from training much in recent seasons, reserving his efforts for the day of the race.
He won a super-G in Val Gardena, Italy, in December, but Svindal – one of Norway's "Attacking Vikings" – agrees that the end is near.
Shiffrin Brilliant
His dominance this season has resonated well beyond skiing and has made comparisons with top athletes.
The 23-year-old has won 11 of her last 14 World Cup races and 13 overall this season. She climbs to third place on the list of the best female ski racers with 56 wins, just six less than Austrian Annemarie Moser-Proell (62) and strong on the heels of Vonn.
Shiffrin won his first World Cup event at Are in December 2012, at the age of 17. She returns to the Swedish site in search of a fourth consecutive world title in slalom.
An out-of-the-ordinary Shiffrin missed a slalom medal at the Olympics in South Korea, but she won gold in giant slalom and will also be the big favorite of this discipline in Are.
Vlhova, France's Tessa Worley and Italian Federica Brignone will be among the main competitors.
Magic Marcel
Twenty-nine-year-old, six-time world champion in various disciplines, he has been simply magnificent in ski technical events over the years and is poised to win an unprecedented title for the eighth World Cup. He has counted 68 World Cup victories and finals and could be the one to beat Stenmark.
Like Shiffrin, his slalom Olympic ambitions collapsed in Pyeongchang, but he fought back with the first gold medal ever won at the Games in the giant slalom and added a combined victory.
Hirscher and his wife Laura had a baby boy last summer, but his fire does not seem to have been toned down and he has won 10 victories this season to keep the competition at bay.
Norway's Henrik Kristoffersen, Hirscher's longtime rival, has been tight in the lock this season, but rising French star Clement Noel and Switzerland's Daniel Yule have started slalom hunting.
Frenchman Alexis Pinturault and Austrian Marco Schwarz could be the dangers of giant slalom.
Speed Kings
Swiss Beat Feuz is the reigning world champion and arguably the most likely to deprive Svindal of a fairytale mailing to Are.
The 31-year-old has won downhill bronze and silver in super-G at Pyeongchang and has made five podium finishes this season, including a downhill win at Beaver Creek. He was also third at Are in the Downhill World Cup final last March.
Other names to watch are the Italian Dominik Paris, who won a third victory in Kitzbühel in January on the legendary Hahnekamm course, fellow countryman Christof Innerhofer and teammate Kjetil Jansrud.
In the void of Vonn
While Vonn will give everything and Shiffrin will only participate in the super-G speed disciplines, the most likely opponents of the women's downhill will be defending champion Ilkha Stuhec of Slovenia and the overall champion the World Cup, Nicole Schmidhofer, from Austria.
However, the Czech phenomenon Ester Ledecka might not imitate her Olympic success when she shocked the world by winning the gold downhill followed by the parallel giant slalom snowboarding.
The 23-year-old has struggled a bit on the skis this season with a top eighth place finish in a downhill in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy.
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