Her Career’s Not Going Downhill : Olympic Silver Medalist Picabo Street Already Has the Name, but Now She’s on Course for the Fame

At 80 m.p.h. on skis, fear is the last thing on Picabo Street’s mind.

Even after seeing death in the downhill, she said, “I don’t really feel fear. That’s not something that I ever encounter. And if I do, it means that something’s going on, and I have to open my eyes and be more aware than normal. But usually, it’s not something that enters my brain, not when I’m skiing anyway.”

Ulrike Maier’s fatal accident a year ago in a World Cup race at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, “was just a freak, weird thing,” says Street, who added, “It was her destiny to die that day, because the timing was so precise on it.

“But it didn’t make me think twice (about racing). It just made me evaluate the risks in what I do. . . . Still, everything I do is totally fun. I can’t go fast enough or catch enough air, so I’m definitely not afraid.”

Home in Idaho for an unplanned midwinter vacation, Street was not trying to sound insensitive, merely realistic, as she prepared to resume her domestic spat with Hilary Lindh over which American deserves to be called queen of the downhill.

Entering the second half of the season, which begins today at Are, Sweden, Street, the 1994 Olympic silver medalist, and Lindh, the ’92 Olympic silver medalist from Juneau, Alaska, have each won two of the five World Cup women’s downhills, but are “extremely different.”

That’s Street’s description.

“(Lindh) is kind of an introverted and cold-hearted person, and everything that she does is for herself, which is fine with me,” she said. “Some people have to be that way.”

Nobody ever called Street an introvert, which is OK with her agent, Chris Hanna of Tahoe City, Calif., who was also here to pass along the latest requests for her appearance, endorsement or other cash-generating assignments before his client returned to Europe.

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To reach Picabo Street, you drive 15 miles south of Sun Valley on Idaho 75 to the town of Hailey, turn left on Bullion Street, continue east for a block, and there it is, in front of Atkinson’s Market, a sign reading, “Picabo Street.”

But on this day, to find the ski racer of that name, you had to stop a couple of blocks short, at Java on Main Street, an espresso emporium with the motto, “Wake Up and Live.”

Wide awake, Street appeared, wearing freckles and a black beret.

She was supposed to be in Spain, according to the International Ski Federation (FIS) schedule, but there was no snow at Sierra Nevada, so the biennial World Alpine Ski Championships were postponed--for a year.

Was she disappointed?

“I was in Spain, actually,” she said. “We spent 3 1/2 days on the beach at Marbella, waiting for the decision to be made, so that was nice and relaxing. It doesn’t really bother me that much. Of course, I would have liked to have had the World Championships this year. I’m skiing well, and I’m in another zone.

“But I have to feel more for the people who wanted to retire. . . . They have to decide if they’re going to ski another year or hang it up on what they’ve done, and that kind of overshadows my feelings and what I want.”

So instead, Street was hanging out in Hailey, where she shares a rented house with her parents, Stubby and Dee, and their somewhat countercultural lifestyle. Hailey is 12 miles southwest of Triumph, where Picabo was born, and about 20 miles north of her namesake town.

“I was named after the game, ‘peek-a-boo’--my mom called me that since I was little,” she said, “and they just decided to spell it like the town. It’s a (Native American) word meaning ‘Shining Waters.’ ”

It’s also an unforgettable, not to mention marketable, name.

Said Hanna: “I ran into (former U.S. ski team star) Cindy Nelson recently, and she said, ‘I wish to heck my name had been Peek-a-Boo.’ ”

Street laughed and said, “Yeah, I get recognized quite a bit in ski areas, especially in Europe, and little kids know who I am. But I’ve tried to maintain myself as a person and just be me, just keep skiing.

“I’m shooting for more consistency this year, and in more than just downhill, which is happening--especially in super-G. And I’m training some technical events and trying to branch off into giant slalom and slalom too, so I can rack up points and stay up there in the (World Cup) overall standings. I’m fifth right now and ahead of Hilary, but about 30 points behind her in the downhill standings.”

Will she catch Lindh in downhill too?

“Yep,” she said.

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At 25, Lindh is two years older than Street and has about five years’ more experience as an international racer. She has tried to shrug off her rival’s scene-stealing antics but occasionally gets irritated, as when she told a Sports Illustrated reporter earlier this season:

“I hate being characterized as the strong, silent type. That’s such BS. . . . I’m not silent in personal situations. But I’ve always disliked people who are overbearing, people who have to make an impression by being loud. I’m not loud or boisterous, and I think that’s a good thing. I want to be worthy of respect because I excel at what I do. Classy--that’s how I want to be defined. A class act.”

Street said she and Lindh “kind of keep everything on a very surface level” in their relationship, but acknowledges, “Hilary is very dedicated and determined in one direction, whatever she’s doing, and everything goes for that and that’s all she cares about, which is fine. That’s just how she is.

“I’m not that way. I feel a responsibility to bring attention to my sport and to be a positive role model for the kids, and I see more in it than just competing and doing well, and having that experience and that’s that.”

Despite the coolness between them, Street said that if she can’t win a race, “I’d definitely want Hilary or another American to win.”

The U.S. women’s team has a new coach this season, Herwig Demschar, who, Street said, hasn’t tinkered much with his athletes’ skiing mechanics, but has “just created a good training program . . . a good atmosphere and a good feeling when we’re together as a team. That’s where I think we’re benefiting the most--from his communication and his friendliness. He’s my friend before he’s my coach, and that’s something that works with the American team. That’s how we operate.”

Demschar was coach of the Austrian women’s team but was released last season after Maier’s death.

That incident, Street said, “just confirmed the fact that I never have wanted to ski out of control.”

She added, “I’ve always thought I could ski in complete control and win, and that’s a level that I’ve reached. You can see that when you watch me ski now. My winning runs are my most solid runs, where I’m in total control and I never look like I’m going to lose it or I’m hanging it out too far. Ulli’s accident reconfirmed my idea of wanting to ski that way.

“You can lose control every once in a while, for sure, but there are usually warning signs you’ll feel if you’re pushing it to the point where something could happen and you wouldn’t have enough recovery time to get out of it without crashing.”

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At Garmisch on Jan. 29, 1994, Street was leading the downhill when Maier, a 26-year-old mother of a 6-year-old daughter, was killed.

“It was going to be my first World Cup win,” Street said. “But I ended up seventh because the weather changed so much (to the benefit of later starters), which was fine with me. I didn’t care at the end of the day.

“It was a safe course. The problem was, it was just a freak accident. (Maier) was skiing a little too high of a line, and the visibility wasn’t as good in that little dark, narrow pocket. I don’t think she could see how close to the wall she actually was, and when she finally hooked the tip that spun her around, she hooked the mountain. It spun her so quickly that she had no time. . . . She just went stiff and then hit the pole with the back of her neck, and it broke her neck immediately. She was brain-dead immediately.

” . . . Her edges had been catching the whole way down. I watched her run before she crashed . . . and the warning signs were there for her--that her skis were kind of funny--but when she finally caught, she caught three edges in a row and the third one caught the side of the mountain. . . . If she’d just caught the snow again, she’d have made it past there. So the timing was too precise. It was weird.

“We raced there again just recently. It was a super-G, but we had to ski right through the same part, and I had a hard time the first couple of runs (in training). I couldn’t really do much besides slide my skis and feel my stomach flip over. . . . I felt really uncomfortable and out of place, and she was on my mind quite a bit.”

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While professing to be fearless when she’s skiing, Street will say that she sometimes has butterflies before a race.

“But they’re anxiety and expectation butterflies,” she said. “It’s not like, oh, I’m worried about this turn or that schuss on the course, nothing like that. I always just try to go out there and have fun.”

She plans to continue having fun at least through the 1998 Winter Olympics at Nagano, Japan.

“After that, we’ll see,” she said. “It depends on how big of a bang we have there.”