Setting Up Another Street Festival

Picabo Street has literally gone from Triumph (Idaho) to triumph and experienced more than a redheaded tomboy from a two-hitch town could ever have imagined.

She has bagged two Olympic medals--silver and gold--two World Cup downhill titles, a world championship and all that comes with the spoils: wealth, fame and a Nike contract.

Her collection also includes an array of surgical scars, including one she calls her “Bride of Frankenstein,” a 10-inch zipper that runs along her left thigh.

This gruesome flesh wound came via Crans Montana, Switzerland, the result of a Friday the 13th spill in a World Cup race only a month after Street stunned the world by winning gold in super-giant slalom at the 1998 Nagano Olympics.

The Crans crack-up should have ended all talk of skiing for the red, white and blue in 2002.

Street’s career should have been over the second she slammed into that fence, shattering her left femur and blowing out her right knee.

“I thought maybe it was done for her,” recalls Herwig Demschar, U.S. women’s team coach at the time and one of the first persons to reach her at the accident site.

The injuries cost Street two seasons on the World Cup circuit.

Yet, here she is, four years later, after plunging into physical rehab and out of depression, after watching another World Cup compatriot lose her life on a mountain, ready to risk it one last time at the Salt Lake Games.

The obvious question, of course, is, ‘Why?’

Gold medal?

Has that.

Legacy?

Secured.

Personal life?

Recently engaged to be married.

Finances?

Set.

Nike deal?

Just did it.

“I’m not coming back to prove myself as an athlete to myself or anyone else for that matter,” says Street, who is expected to retire from ski racing after the Salt Lake City Games. “That’s not why I have returned. I have returned because I don’t want to walk away from the sport on anyone’s terms but my own, and that includes the fence.”

This is not the same freckle-faced dervish who burst on the scene in 1994, sucking oxygen out of every room she entered en route to winning a silver medal in the downhill in Norway.

Street is 30 now, street smart. In her life as a downhill racer, she has dished and taken it, plowing through sets of coaches, teammates, boyfriends, joys and traumas.

She is now more pragmatic than precocious--with time comes wisdom. Her smile still lights a room but it is more of a long burn. Street has been heightened and hardened by reality, like a cop who has walked the beat a few years.

That she sometimes slips into talk of fatalism might be expected, given the treacherous backdrop to her life’s story. In 1994, Street was leading the pre-Olympic race at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, in which Austrian star Ule Maier was killed. Street watched from below on a video screen as Maier tumbled and struck her head on a timing box.

Last October, French star Regine Cavagnoud died after a freak accident in which she collided with a coach during a training run.

“There are times when I’m siting on a chair lift when I think about Ule and I think about Regine,” Street says. “To be honest, I’m not afraid of dying. I’m not afraid of death, obviously. To do what I do I couldn’t be.

“I’m afraid of the people I’ll leave behind. What they’d go through. Maybe that’s a warped reality, I don’t know. But that’s me. That’s where I live.

“I don’t care about me. I can go. If I were to hit the wall and go, immediately, ski racing, how much more perfect could it be for me? For me. Only me, however. Everybody else? Complete nightmare. Absolutely horrific. Just like Ule and Regine. They both died doing what they loved, but they left all of us behind to be sad and to wonder why. And I guarantee you, every single one of us said, ‘Am I next?’”

It is difficult to link this Street to the sailor-tongued girl who was ski-booted off the ski team in 1990 for insubordination, the girl who preferred suds to sit-ups.

Who could have envisioned she would develop the fortitude and discipline to become an Olympic champion and mount against-all-odd comebacks not once, but twice?

“She has matured a lot through the years,” says Demschar, the former Austrian coach who guided Street to her gold medal.

Her victory in super-G at Nagano was a minor miracle given she had shredded left knee ligaments in a spill at Vail, Colo., in December 1996. Yet, her motivation then was vivid and clear: to return in time for the 1998 Olympics and fulfill her dream of winning gold.

“Nagano was definitely a godsend, a gift from above; it all just fell in place and clicked for me,” Street says.

Ah, but the second comeback, what could possibly be in it for her now?

Her terrible tumble in Switzerland should have been a jumping-off point, as she writhed in almost unbearable pain begging for an injection that could numb her lower torso.

Street is spiritual more than religious and saw Crans as the evil karma that had come to counter-balance her Olympic fame.

As she lay there, knowing her left leg had been pulverized, she thought, “It’s not the way I foresaw my career going. I thought I’d be the tough guy that never hurt myself. I told myself if I had three knee surgeries I was quitting.”

Crans was worse than feared. Not only would she need to have a metal plate inserted to bracket her broken femur, it was discovered she had blown out her right knee--the pain in her left leg was so intense Street had hardly noticed.

Street had twice previously blown out her left knee; now her right knee was rubble.

The public generally sees athletes at their best, in victory’s afterglow or staged appearances. What it doesn’t often see is what goes on behind closed doors, when Olympic ski champions return home at age 26 in wheelchairs and need help getting to the restroom.

Picabo Street made such a retreat in the spring of 1998.

“I got depressed,” Street says. “I really did. I sat in my room with the blinds shut, literally, TV off, no radio, in bed, staring at the ceiling. I slept a lot. I would cry and make myself so sad to wear myself out so that I would sleep.”

Street says this “funk” lasted a month.

Notions of another comeback overwhelmed her.

“It’s going to take so much to make it back, and I don’t know if I can pull it off,” she thought.

Street remembers precisely when the veil began to lift. It was 2 p.m., on a Sunday in May 1998. On that day, at that hour, she dragged herself into the kitchen and wished her mom, Dee, a happy Mother’s Day.

“Sorry it took so long to get out here,” Street said.

As her physical recovery took time, so did her mental healing.

“I was in limbo, and I don’t like time in neutral,” Street says. “If I set limbo up for myself for the weekend, if it’s on the agenda, limbo’s fine. But when limbo is forced on me, and I have to sit there and endure, then I start to squirm and get upset.”

Street’s second comeback road was paved by father Ron, a former Marine-turned-1960s free spirit who, with Dee, reared Picabo and her brother, Baba, in the rural remoteness of Idaho.

Street was born at home, in April 1971, and it was Ron who blew life, his mouth on hers, when “Baby Girl” turned blue on arrival.

No one has been more engaged in Street’s career than her father, no one more possessive and proud, and it was Ron in 1998 who set down the new law.

In her book, “Nothing to Hide,” Street recounts how her father told her, “If you never ski again, I don’t care. If you ski again and win, I don’t care. I just want you to become a healthy, whole woman again. That’s all I care about.”

She broke down and cried.

So, the plan was set.

“The dream was to make it to the Salt Lake Games,” she says. “The goal was to make it back on the ski team, but the mission was to get healthy. I knew if I set the dream to make the Olympics, worst-case scenario I’d be healthy. And that’s what I promised my father.”

On Dec. 27, 1999, a year and nine months after her crash in Crans, Street was back on skis, making a leisurely run down the Sun Valley run, Payday, on which she won her first downhill race at age 12.

A year later, Street returned to the ski team and had to claw her way up the world rankings like some “B” team scrub.

She wondered at times if this was the way it was going to end, like quarterback Joe Namath limping up behind center late in his career.

Most of the pain had subsided, but not the fear. Not the memory of that bad karma in Crans. There were occasions last year when she examined a downhill course and said, “Oh my God, how am I going to get through this?”

Yet, she worked through it.

Her breakthrough came at a triple-A race last spring on the Olympic downhill course at Snowbasin, outside Odgen, Utah. It wasn’t a World Cup race, but most of the world’s top skiers had entered to get a sneak-preview run on the Olympic course.

Street won.

Demschar, who left the U.S. ski team after the ’98 Games to become Alpine director for the Salt Lake City Games, knew then that Street had a shot to make it all the way back.

“If she’s lucky, if she’s smart about it, if she doesn’t get injured, I think she could be a very, very serious competitor in Snowbasin for the Olympic Games,” Demschar says.

This year, Street has steadily improved as she works her way toward Showtime--the women’s Olympic downhill Feb. 11.

She is not the Picabo of old, yet two top-10 finishes in World Cup downhill races this year prove she is capable of pulling off the improbable in her signature event. Street is ranked 12th in World Cup downhill.

But because she finished a lackluster 38th, 40th, 48th and 33rd in four World Cup super-G races, Street will probably not get to defend her Olympic title in that event. Kirsten Clark, Caroline Lalive, Jonna Mendes and Katie Monahan have secured the four available U.S. slots based on results. Street was not included in the super-G lineup when the U.S. Olympic team was announced Monday, although the U.S. does not have to make its final decision on the racing slots until just before the Feb. 17 event.

Super-G has never been Street’s best event. Her Olympic triumph was her only major win in the discipline, while in downhill she has won nine World Cup races, two overall titles, a world championship and a silver medal at the 1994 Lillehammer Games.

She is able to “categorize” her fear again and says performing on her home stage has become more significant since Sept. 11. She has always been paranoid about security at big events, but says her patriotism in the face of terrorism has “upped the ante for me.”

She says, “I would have loved nothing more than to go to New York and been there since Sept. 11 until now, cooking burgers, or giving massages, or washing firefighter clothes, scrubbing, doing something.

“But this is my something. So, come February, my something better be great. It’s a different something, but it’s still something.”

Those who doubted Street now think she has a legitimate chance of pulling it off.

“She could rewrite history,” Demschar says. “I was looking at the statistics, and everyone that does knows if you’re gone from the World Cup for two years, well, basically no one so far has made it back on the podium.

“But I saw her [race] at Lake Louise [Canada]. The way she is going now, chances are she could have a very good result. At this stage, for me, it’s not a surprise anymore.”

The Olympics are, in many ways, a medal crapshoot. In Nagano, Street won her gold by 0.01. The weather cleared and hardened the course just before she raced from the No. 2 start position.

There is no guarantee Salt Lake will provide another “godsend.”

Marjan Cernigoj, the current U.S. coach, says Street is still possessed by demons at times.

“It’s normal,” he says. “She got banged up in the past and she remembers those days. It’s hard to block that out totally.”

Cernigoj says it will take the right set of circumstances.

“If she’s well, if it’s perfect weather conditions, if she’s confident at the start and it’s just a good environment for her to go all out.”

If the conditions are poor and the light is not good?

“You’re going to see Picabo protecting herself,” Cernigoj says, “and that is the smart thing to do. This is how you survive the game.”

Street proved in Norway and Japan she is capable of instant karma.

“I know how to do it now; I’ve done it twice,” she says. “I can create it again.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Making the Cut

The United States Alpine Skiing team with competitor’s home town and events:

WOMEN

KIRSTEN CLARK...Raymond, Maine

Downhill, super-G, giant slalom

LINDSEY KILDOW...Vail, Colo.

Combined

KRISTINA KOZNICK... Burnsville Minn.

Giant slalom, slalom

CAROLINE LALIVE...Steamboat Springs, Colo.

Super-G, downhill, combined

JULIA MANCUSO...Squaw Valley, Calif.

Combined

JONNA MENDES...Heavenly, Calif.

Downhill, super-G

KATIE MONAHAN...Aspen, Colo.

Super-G

TASHA NELSON...Mound, Minn.

Slalom

SARAH SCHLEPER...Vail, Colo.

Slalom, giant slalom

ALEX SHAFFER...Park City, Utah

Giant slalom

PICABO STREET...Park City, Utah

Downhill

*

MEN

JAKE FIALA...Frisco, Colo.

Downhill, super-G

CHIP KNIGHT...Stowe, Vt.

Slalom

SCOTT MACARTNEY...Redmond, Wash.

Slalom, giant slalom, combined

BODE MILLER...Franconia, N.H.

Slalom, giant slalom, combined

CASEY PUCKETT...Aspen, Colo.

Combined

DARON RAHLVES...Sugar Bowl, Calif.

Downhill, super-G

TOM ROTHROCK...Cashmere, Wash.

Slalom

ERIK SCHLOPY...Park City, Utah

Slalom, giant slalom

DANE SPENCER...Boise, Idaho

Giant slalom

MARCO SULLIVAN...Squaw Valley, Calif.

Downhill, super-G

THOMAS VONN...Newburgh, N.Y.

Giant slalom, super-G