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Uphill Battle for a Downhill Skier
Posted: Tuesday November 24, 1998 10:37 AM
Picabo
Street, the Olympic
downhiller, is scared. "I'm just not sure I can be fearless
anymore," she
says.
If you know Picabo, your jaw just hit your cereal bowl.
It'd be like a tiger walking up to you, stepping out of its
skin and saying, "That's it. I quit. I don't even
like to hunt."
Athletes talk about their mothers and their sex lives and
their day-to-day speed-dial conversations with God, but
they don't talk about fear, because talking about fear is
the first step toward going full time into the whole-life
insurance business.
Street never used to be within a toll call of fear. While
growing up in Triumph, Idaho, a town with only eight kids,
seven of them boys, there was no run Picabo didn't want to
be first down. She used to get so geeked to ski she'd jump
off the chair lift
from about 20 feet up. In the summer she'd wage
BB gun wars with the boys in an old abandoned hotel. When
she'd get hit, she'd just get madder and attack. "I
always said I had to keep her brother fed," says her
mother, Dee, "and Picabo
alive."
After nine World Cup downhill wins, a silver medal in that
event at the Lillehammer Olympics and a gold in the Super G
at the Nagano Games, Picabo seemed immortal. But then came
last March and a downhill race in Switzerland and a bump
she misread and a
fence that came out of nowhere at 60 mph. "I was lying
there, and I could feel this bone trying to protrude out of
my quad," she
remembers. "I was sure I'd smashed my kneecap. But then I
found my kneecap, and I realized the bone trying to come
out was
my
femur."
Street's left leg had fractured like porcelain, and her
right knee was fettuccine. Worse, it took 45 minutes to get
her down the mountain and another half hour for the
painkillers to kick in.
"I could've died up there," she says. "I was
losing blood. The pain was so intense. It was like somebody
was inside my leg with a blowtorch. But I think I lay there
all that time for a reason: I think I needed to be kicked
in the teeth, woken up to how
bad it can
get."
The leg and the knee are still healing—she's on
crutches eight months later—but America's greatest
woman skier already knows there's a hole in her courage
where there hadn't been
one.
Join the club.
A young Mike Tyson would cry before fights. Mark Wilford, who
has climbed the north face of the Eiger without ropes, says
there are times when he's so scared that "I have to
sit on a ledge for two hours and battle the demons before I
can
go on." After jockey Julie Krone was thrown from her
mount and trampled like a rag doll in 1993 and '95, it took
her years to get her nerve back.
"Before the accident, I would see the hole and go for
it," Krone said, "but after the accident, I'd see
it and think, Should I go in there? What if I get pinched?
So I'd go wide. It hurt my business. Handicappers started
to pick up on it." She got an
ulcer. She became depressed. But she finally beat her fear by
silently repeating passages from self-help books in the
starting
gate.
Maybe Street will beat hers, and maybe she won't. "I
know what can happen now," says Street, who tore up
her left knee in a grisly spill on a practice
run in December 1996. "That's what I'm afraid of. I'm
afraid when I get ready to try it again, my
conscience isn't going to allow me to go flat
out."
Street wants desperately to ski in the 2002
Olympics in Salt Lake City, but she's not sure she'll ever
compete in the downhill again. At 27 something finally
caught up to her—maturity. "Hey, I am where I
am," she says. "I've done what I've done. I've
got nothing to prove. It's called growing up, I guess. But I
haven't thrown in the towel. I'm going to try it and
see."
Uh-oh. The dumbest thing Street can do now is take fear to
the start house. Roland Collombin of Switzerland was one of
the best downhillers in the world in 1974—until he
came to a bump at Val d'Isère, flew off it wildly
and wrecked his back. One year
later the back had healed but his mind hadn't. Just his luck,
his first downhill was at Val d'Isère, and he came
flying down to that same bump.
"It was as if he was frozen with fear," says U.S.
racer Steve Mahre. "He didn't make a move. He just
shot off the jump, not absorbing any of it." Collombin
sailed over the steep landing to the flats below, where he
fell on his back, fracturing two
vertebrae.
Hey, Picabo, just a friendly reminder: Sometimes the
bravest race is the one you don't ski.
Issue date: November 23, 1998
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