A STREET NAMED DESIRE

You don’t win an Olympic gold medal 14 months after undergoing reconstructive knee surgery and not have down days.

Even peppy Picabo Street came to understand that.

She hit her low point in September, six months before she came here and kick-started the whited-out Nagano Games by winning gold in the super-giant slalom--not even her best event.

Last fall, Street had gone to Chile to train with the U.S. ski team, pretending her knee was fine and that she could pick up where she’d left off--as the world’s top female downhill skier.

Street’s repaired left knee, in fact, was so distressed that a decision was made to take her off skis, put her back in rehabilitation and vastly lower her expectations.

The job of talking Street down from the starting gate fell to George Capaul, one of the U.S. coaches.

“I was sitting on the side of the course watching all my teammates train and I’m crying because I can’t train,” Street said a few hours after winning her gold medal. “And I’m listening to a coach who thinks I’m asking too much of myself, No. 1, to start the World Cup season on time, No. 2, to be anywhere in contention in the World Cup season and, thirdly, expecting a miracle to come to Nagano to win a medal.

“I don’t think he was trying to detour me from the challenge, he was just trying to put in perspective how large of a challenge I had just stepped into.”

Coaches sent Street home from Chile to visit Richard Steadman, the Colorado surgeon who had operated on her knee in December 1996.

As late as November, there were doubts Street would be ready for the World Cup season, let alone a contender for an Olympic medal.

Plans for Street to race in a Thanksgiving super-G at Mammoth were scrapped. Street did not make her World Cup debut until Dec. 17 at a super-G in Val d’Isere, France.

That Picabo finished 11th, however, pretty much showed where her mind was.

All during her comeback, a phrase had stuck in her head.

“Adversity makes heroes,” she said. “I think that was a quote I focused a lot on and figured was very appropriate for me.”

Suddenly, Street is the favorite to win Saturday’s Olympic downhill.

If she finishes in the top three, she will become the first U.S. Alpine skier to have won three Olympic medals.

“The last 14 months, it’s been like a whirlwind,” Street said. “It sounds like a long time when you think of all the things that have happened in that time, but it seems very short. It’s difficult for me right now to reflect upon it. I still have too much work here in Nagano. When I get home, actually when I get to Maui, and I’m laying on the beach, I think that’s when I’m going to be spending time reflecting more.”

During her rehabilitation, Street said she contemplated her place in the world and life’s funny way of evening things out.

Street used her silver-medal performance at Lillehammer as a springboard to international success and fame. She signed endorsement deals and, in 1995 and ‘96, won the World Cup downhill titles, winning six consecutive races in one stretch and the 1996 downhill world championship.

Then came the payback--the training-run crash at Vail, Colo., in December 1996, when she tore anterior cruciate and medial collateral knee ligaments; the hours of grueling rehabilitation; the crying scene in Chile, the harrowing crash during a super-G at Are, Sweden, less than two weeks ago.

“There were a couple of moments during my comeback when I questioned, but never a moment where I thought, ‘Uh, I’m not going to make it,’ ” Street said. “I never gave up like that. That was the most important thing, not giving up like that, not succumbing to some of those circumstances, some of those emotions us females sometimes tend to have trouble sometimes dealing with.”

Street said surviving the crash in Sweden right before the Olympics proved to her that she was fully recovered from her knee injury.

She arrived in Japan in good spirits.

She seems to have a certain kinship with the place. It was here that she won her first international medal--a silver in combined at the 1993 world championships in Marioka.

It was also at Marioka that Marc Girardelli, the five-time World Cup overall champion from Luxembourg, tagged Street with the nickname “Tiger.”

It was the reason Street wore a tiger helmet during Wednesday’s gold-medal run.

Well, one of the reasons.

“It’s also the year of the tiger, and the Bengal tiger is an endangered species,” Street said. “And the Japanese people do a lot to try and protect that species, and I wanted to have something to connect me to them as genuinely as possible.”

Unlike others who have complained about Nagano, and its irritating weather patterns, Street has always gone with Japan’s flow.

“One of the things I like most about Japan is that it’s very far removed from anyone’s comfort zone,” she said. “I think the only people truly comfortable over here are the Japanese, you know what I mean? It’s far away. The language is unfathomable. The people are so nice, and so happy, and so organized, it’s really calming, almost, to come here. I like the energy here. The hot-bath ritual is perfect, especially for my neck.

“I think what I like is that it’s neutral territory for everybody. It’s kind of like, nobody has an advantage here. We’re all removed. Let’s see who can pull it off.”

Actually, Picabo and Japan appear to have become a formidable tandem.

Street watched the snowfall blanket Hakuba from her hotel window, postponing for a day the women’s super-G.

It didn’t bother her a bit.

“I knew it was only a matter of time before the spirits would bless us with this kind of weather,” she said.

Street says she knows she isn’t doing all this on her own.

“There’s a big program going on for me and I’m just kind of along for the ride, if you will,” she said. “I’m happy I’m blessed with ability I have and with the know-how to make it all happen.”