One-Way Street

By all rights, downhill racer Picabo Street should not be ready to challenge for a gold medal in Nagano only 14 months after sustaining a major knee injury.

Then again, Street and patience have never been willing dance partners.

As a tempestuous daughter-of-hippies growing up in Sun Valley, Idaho, the only punishment that ever worked on Picabo was when her father made her stand still in a corner with her freckled nose pressed against the wall.

“That was the worst for me,” Street says. “Bend over? Touch your toes, I’m going to smack your [butt]? Go for it! But make me stand in the corner, by myself, in the dark? Well, that was all it took. Just a little threat of that and, ooh, I’ll be good.”

Released from her corner and unleashed on the world, flower-child Street blossomed into the world’s top female speed skier, following her burst-upon-the-slopes, silver-medal performance at the 1994 downhill titles and a world championship gold medal.

Street’s megawatt personality and tomboy tongue made her transcendent, garnering her fortune in a media-starved sport that cranks out a “Suzy Chapstick” every epoch or so.

Picabo was different, of course, the way Picasso was different, fame glomming to that million-dollar name--Picabo is an Indian word meaning “shining waters”--like no other. She was as close as American skiing had to Alberto Tomba, the swashbuckling Italian slalom king.

Children flocked to Picabo, and she to them, making her post-Lillehammer “Sesame Street” appearances a match made in PBS heaven.

Picabo would become a cottage industry. She signed endorsement deals with Nike, Mountain Dew, United Airlines, Rolex and, yes, Chapstick.

She began each day as if shot out of a cannon.

“She has energy that blows people away,” Brad Hunt, her agent, says.

At public appearances, Picabo insists on personal interface.

“I’ve never seen autograph lines move so slow,” Hunt says.

And then came Dec. 4, 1996, when, in the same split second it took to become famous, Street tore up her left knee in a high-speed crash during a downhill training run at Vail, Colo.

Street provides the unique play-by-play.

“I was cruising, having a sweet run,” she recalls, “everything was flowing nice, so comfortable, I was really kind of in my zone. I find out later I’m eight-tenths ahead at the last split, so I was carrying a lot more speed than everybody. And I just made a rookie move, I didn’t think about it smart enough.

“I forever wanted to make a nice turn on the top of Pepi’s face, we always had to chuck our skis sideways a little, to make this rat-rat-rat thing.

“I thought, ‘Right on, I’ll just lay a fattie,’ and I just made a really nice arc, but the problem was I didn’t scrub any speed, and I hit the lip and just launched.”

Street knew in the air she was going to blow out her knee and had to decide, in a split-second, which one she wanted to lose to surgery. She chose the left, the same knee she injured in 1989.

“Let’s go back to the left one,” she thought, “so he [Dr. Richard Steadman] can tighten it up, because it’s gotten kind of loose.”

More on Picabo’s crash plan. . . .

“The [right] ski popped off like I planned,” she says, “and I dropped my right hip into the snow. Soon as my hips hit, my elbows went smack on the ground, and I completely relaxed. The knee dropped all the way. My [butt] dropped all the way to the ground. My MCL [medial collateral knee ligament] and ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] went, my posterior capsule went, the bottom of my femur fractured.

“As I’m spinning after it went I said out loud, ‘Oh, man, there it went!’ If someone would have had a microphone up there, one of those fuzzy microphones, they would have picked it up for sure. Because I said it loud.”

Street slammed into a retaining fence. Impatient, as usual, she then used her good leg to free her left from its binding.

“I knew my muscle was gone,” she says, “then, I sat up, pushed my shin forward and the knee just mushed forward.”

The woman who could barely survive without movement was struck with the horror of impending inactivity. It was almost as unbearable a thought as having her mouth taped shut.

“There was a fight going on within me, and my body,” she says, “this competitive racehorse that was stuck in the corner with her nose on the wall, having to stand still.”

It took a month as a couch potato to put her injury and career in perspective.

It was amazing, really, how far she’d come from the precocious brat who twice was booted off the U.S. ski team for insubordination; how much she had grown since those infamous, foul-mouthed tantrums she used to throw in finish areas.

An older, wiser Picabo Street did not think her injury unfair.

“I think one thing I notice . . . that Mother Nature and God and the higher powers take care of, is making sure everything is always in balance,” she says. “Like, if there’s something so good that happens to you, there has to be something crappy happen to you too, so you can be more balanced. I think the knee injury was balance for the five tremendous years I’ve had on snow. This one year was the balancing act so I can go for another five tremendous years on snow.”

It didn’t take Street long to snap out of her funk and map out her comeback.

Two and a half months after her injury, on a trip to Japan, Street demanded to ski down the Olympic downhill course in Hakuba. That being a physical impossibility, she enlisted the help of Andreas Rickenbach, the U.S. women’s downhill coach.

“I literally hopped on his back and we slid down the course,” Street says. “Basically, I wanted the visuals, of being on the course, in between the gates, standing where I’m going to be skiing, looking around at the scenery that surrounds it all.”

Still, the prospects of her returning to top Olympic form seemed remote. Full recovery time for her injury is usually two years.

That’s how long it took Olympic champion Tommy Moe, who suffered a similar injury in 1995.

“Injuries are tough, no matter who you are,” Moe says. “Picabo will find that out. She knows.”

Last November, at the U.S. Alpine training camp in Beaver Creek, Colo., women’s Coach Herwig Demschar was also skeptical about Street’s medal chances.

“This is a big problem,” Demschar said. “On one side is her mind, on the other side is the realistic situation.”

With Hilary Lindh having retired after winning the world downhill title last year, and the prospects bleak for the U.S. producing a medal, Demschar admitted there was pressure to rush Street back.

“Sure there is,” Demschar said. “You have sponsors. The U.S. ski team wants to come home with a medal. But if she makes a medal, it will be a serious deal.”

Well?

Street returned to the World Cup circuit in mid-December with a flourish, posting a 10th-place downhill finish at Val d’Isere, France. She followed with another 10th in January at Altenmarkt, Austria.

But that was nothing compared to last week, in Cortina D’Ampezzo, Italy, when Street finished fourth in a World Cup downhill, two places ahead of Germany’s Katja Seizinger, the defending Olympic downhill champion.

“It is unbelievable” Street said of her finish.

Remarkably, it appears Street will head to Nagano with a head of steam.

“People have no concept how great Picabo has done,” Alan Ashly, United States Ski and Snowboard Assn. vice president of athletics, says.

Street’s year of rehabilitation and reflection rekindled a fire.

“It’s scary how much it’s still burning inside of me,” she says. “I didn’t know how much I had left in me for the sport, I honestly didn’t, I think I started being blind to it, not noticing, not feeling it, not having perspective to be able to find it. That’s another thing this injury was. It snatched it away and it was like ‘Noooo, that’s not what I wanted. No fair!’ ”

If she quit today, Street would rank among the all-time American skiing greats.

She has won an Olympic medal, two World Cup titles, three world championship medals, nine World Cup downhills, including six in a row in one stretch.

Yet. . . .

“I have not won a gold medal in the Olympics,” she interjects, “and that is my ultimate dream in ski racing. That was the dream I had since I was 10 years old. It still sits in my gut.”

Street has made more money than she ever imagined, enabling her to buy a 3,400-square-foot home in Portland, Ore., for her and her parents, Dee and Stubby. Picabo made her dad retire from his job as a stone mason. “He’s a racehorse like I am,” she says, “and he’ll just work himself into the ground.”

Dee became her accountant, her father her business liaison.

Street, 26, still lives with her parents.

“I can’t imagine coming home to a cold dark house without them there,” she says. “Not to say I’m some clingy, young kid still. I just love my family.”

When Street races overseas, Stubby, a self-described 1960s hippie who claims to have dropped LSD with Timothy Leary, rises in the middle of the night to meditate at the time Picabo should be on the course.

Life is good.

Yet. . . .

To be considered the greatest American female skier ever, Street insists she has to become more than a downhill and super-giant slalom specialist. She has to become a four-event skier.

“Yeah, I’m known as the best downhiller, da, da, da,” Street says, “but to me, Tamara McKinney is the best skier the Americans ever had.”

McKinney never won an Olympic medal but won the prestigious World Cup overall crown in 1983.

“That challenge [the overall title] is intriguing to me,” Street says.

Hunt, her agent, says Street’s star should burn well into the next century. Next year, the world championships will be held in Vail, Colo. And, of course, there’s the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002.

“Picabo is going to be the name in skiing in the U.S.,” Hunt predicts. “The Olympic Games in Salt Lake City? She’s going to be the star of those Games.”

Street, of course, has other plans. She wants to be the star of these Games. As an American downhiller, she’ll be alone on the mountaintop.

It won’t be the same without Lindh, her longtime teammate and rival. While Lindh won Olympic silver at the 1992 Albertville Games and a world downhill title, her career was largely overshadowed by Street’s dominance in ’95 and ’96.

In 1995, the year Street won her first World Cup downhill title, Lindh finished second.

“Hilary was like right there, all the time, always in my shadow, and that was very hard for me,” Street says. “I had a very, very guilty conscience. I just didn’t feel it fair. She was having the most tremendous year of her career, as well as me, yet for some reason I was always getting the spotlight.”

Lindh and Street were total opposites off the course, their relationship often icy. But Street says she always respected Lindh.

“I felt like we were out there hammering it together,” Street says. “It was like, let’s go make a show together. I miss her. I never thought that I would. I miss her energy, I miss her strong, solid demeanor and her leadership.”

Street will have to go it alone in Nagano.

Believe it or not, she might be ready.

“I know I’m not going to be the same Picabo,” she says. “I’m going to be better.”