Lindsey Vonn says she is still recovering from knee surgery and won’t be competing in Saturday’s Olympic ski season opener in Austria, but will instead use an extra month to train and make sure her leg is strong enough to compete in her home races at the end of November in Beaver Creek, Colorado.

“While I physically feel great, I have decided to not race this weekend and instead will focus on returning in Beaver Creek. I am confident the extra month of training will ultimately put me in the best position to have a successful season,” she said.

Vonn injured her knee in a horrific crash during a super-G race in Austria this past February and had to be airlifted off the mountain. In a blog post before the competition, she wrote that weather conditions were sketchy at best.

“I’ve been trying to be patient and stay calm, but it’s pretty tough with the way the weather has been,” she wrote. “It snowed a lot Sunday night, there was no training possible Monday on the race hill, then it rained most of Monday afternoon and evening.

Vonn has enjoyed a very successful career in skiing and is one of only two female skiers to win four overall World Cup championships. She was also the first American woman to win a gold medal in downhill skiing at the 2010 Winter Olympics. She and beau Tiger Woods have managed to keep their relationship relatively low-key in the media, but she has said that he’s helped her tremendously just because he understands the pressure she’s under.

“He understands pressure and he understands, obviously, competing at an extremely high level,” she said. “It’s difficult for me going into big events like the Olympics because there’s so much more pressure and media attention, and he gets that every single day. So it’s nice to be able to talk to him about it and we can relate to each other’s lives so well. So I think that’s one of the reasons why we work.”

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