Lindsey Vonn photographed by Warwick Saint in Whistler Blackcomb, British Colombia for Sports Illustrated’s 2010 Swimsuit issueJust in case serious sports fans are too involved with the Sports Illustrated 2010 Swimsuit issue to read the morning news, America’s superstar skier Lindsey Vonn is arriving in Vancouver injured.

While the blogosphere — especially offended women — claim ‘foul’ over Vonn’s recent ‘sexualization’ on the front cover of SI, the real concerns should be about Vonn’s ability to bring home any gold medals, let alone five.

Lindsey Vonn made her announcement on the Today Show, explaining that she has a deep muscle bruise in her shin, an injury she sustained during a slalom training run in Austria. Vonn hasn’t been on skies since.

“When I tried my boot on, I was just standing in the hotel room barely flexing forward and it was excruciatingly painful, and I’ve got to try to ski downhill at 75, 80 miles an hour with a lot of forces pushed up against my shin,” Vonn said in the interview aired today. “I don’t honestly know if I’ll be able to do it.”

Vonn is scheduled to compete in her first race on Feb 14.

Circling back now to the charges that Lindsey Vonn has been exploited by Sports Illustrated, it seems best to ask how? We’re fine with the SI cover and fully approve that Vonn is posed exactly like the 1992 cover of her male Olympic counterpart. Whatever do women want!!!

Years ago we marched to get women on the cover. We would have celebrated that she was posed exactly like a man, because we were fighting to get women taken seriously as athletes. Suggesting that photographing a woman posing as she must to win — and as her male counterparts are posed, based on folks who pulled out past issues of SI — is reason to celebrate, not cry ‘exploitation’.

Superb athlete Lindsey Vonn is a disciplined, highly trained woman. All medical evidence indicates that her exercise routine elevates hormones that positively impact her brain functioning. It’s also true that her exercise program and self discipline enhance her libido and awareness of her ‘sensual’ self.

In numerous medical studies, women who exercise have a more positive self image and what might be called ‘muscle lust’, a term coined by ‘Elle’ a few years ago. The term implies a woman who exercises and loves the feel of her own body, when she touches her muscles and toned self.

Women are in two camps on this topic. There are women who think that Vonn’s behavior is scandalous and that she’s being victimized.

No man drugged Lindsey Vonn and put her on the cover of SI, and it insults her to suggest otherwise. I also want to point out that the camera crew here is not all men. Women, too, work on the SI swimsuit issue.

Lindsey Vonn being photographed by Randall Grant in Whistler Blacomb, British Columbia, Canada.Trust me, Lindsey Vonn doesn’t sport the role of ‘victim’. She’s a superstar with self-discipline that most women only hope for. If she wants to show her physicality in SI, that’s Lindsey Vonn’s business.

We belive the ‘tsk tsk’ from women that female sexuality is a private matter, better housed under a full suit of clothes is just as debilitating to female psyches and confidence as men enjoying Vonn’s photos.

For the record, many women enjoy them, too. Many women aspire to achieve the self-dicipline and focused goals of Lindsey Vonn. Many women know how much better they feel and function, when they’ve trained their body with self-discipline.

After that, how a woman displays her body is her business — within reason, of course. As American women become more obese than ever — we just wrote a horrifying story on teen girl obesity, drinking and cigarettes in Britain — let’s focus on these problems and not a star athlete who celebrates her body as she sees fit.

I can lay out 15 surveys that document the lifestyle habits of these young women are far more self-destructive than Lindsey Vonn choosing to work with Sports Illustrated. She’s not a victim. Anne