The numbers alone are impressive. You can use them to measure her against the sport's past standards.

But the time has come to start looking at her from a different perspective.

Comparing greatness from one sport to another can be a futile apples-and-oranges exercise. There are, after all, relatively few elite skiers, especially when counted against basketball or soccer players and the like.

But no athlete in any sport has been more consistently brilliant over the past several years than Vonn. World Cup overall titles reward consistency over an entire season. Her 52 World Cup race victories — third on the all-time women's list — testify to stunning consistency over the eight years since she won the first.

Since 2008, she has skied to an Olympic gold, two World Championship golds, four World Cup overall crystal globes, five straight World Cup season titles in downhill, three straight in combined. She should win a fourth straight Super-G title this week.

Yet hers is a sport in which everything conspires against consistency.

She wins on mushy snow and rock-hard ice, in weather conditions that can immeasurably help one skier and hinder the next. She wins from October through March across two continents and 12 time zones, in a far-from-the-mainstream sport that demands she live mainly out of a suitcase and far fromhome, in events that require fearlessness and technical mastery.

And she has won this year despite personal upheaval after the most productive offseason of her career.

Vonn, 27, knew she began this season physically stronger than ever. She also was sure the hundreds of hours spent riding a bicycle last summer had made her endurance better than ever.

But when the white circus decamped in North America in late November, the secure feeling Vonn gained from her preparation seemed threatened by emotional uncertainty when she and her husband, Thomas, confirmed they were divorcing after four years of marriage.

Beginning the next week, Vonn won four straight races in the speed events that are her specialty: two downhills, two Super-Gs.

"That was really important," Vonn said on a conference call Friday, soon after she had clinched the overall title by winning a giant slalom for the second time in her career. "I went out there and showed everyone I can ski under tough situations. That confidence has carried me all the way through to now."

She has gone on from there with the most assured skiing of a career that has made Vonn, who first raced on a molehill in her native Minnesota, easily the greatest Alpine skier of either gender in U.S. history.

"It has been an incredible season," Vonn said. "I have had a lot of personal struggles off the slopes but somehow managed to find the mental strength to overcome them."

The split with Thomas Vonn risked weighing on her in several areas. Beginning in 2005, he had assumed multiple roles in her ski life: coach, logistics coordinator, booster, sports psychologist, factotum.

Instead, both Vonn's results and her words leave one to think she feels liberated. At least three times during the conference call, she mentioned how enjoyable the season has been.

"I'm having more fun with my life," she said.

Her unprecedented success in giant slalom has been the big change in Vonn's skiing this season, which she began with her first win in the discipline. She attributes the difference to using men's longer, stiffer skis in giant slalom, a switch she previously had made in the speed events.

"The problems in my personal life have made me more focused," she said. "It is just wanting to prove to myself I can ski by myself."

Vonn hasn't exactly been alone. She has engaged more with teammates. She has relied more on advice from U.S. Ski Team coaches. Vonn's two sisters have been with her off-and-on through the winter. And she has begun to reestablish a relationship with her father, Alan Kildow, from whom she had become estranged primarily because he did not approve of her relationship with Thomas Vonn.

"Skiing is the only thing that is simple right now in my life," she said. "Skiing has been the constant."

The only constant in skiing is Lindsey Vonn. By any standard, she is simply the best.