Episode 4 - Picabo All American, Part 2

After sensationally winning the silver medal at the 1993 World Championships, Picabo Street started her Olympic career and continued her journey to the top of the world of ski racing. The second and last part about Picabo Street tells the story from Lillehammer 1994 to Salt Lake City in 2002, through both incredible heights and the darkest of moments. 

Transcript

Hey there and welcome to Ski Heroes! My name is Eivind, and today is Sunday August 21st 2022 as I’m recording episode 4 from the ski lodge in Houston, TX, the skiing capital of the world. 

Yesterday I celebrated my 40th birthday so I’m hurting a bit today as you may or may not be able to hear from my somewhat raspy voice. Although my actual birthday is not for another four days, we had a great time celebrating and if I didn’t feel 40 years old last night I definitely did this morning.  

The theme for the party was 1982, easy enough. And of course I had to dress up as my biggest childhood hero, Finnish ski jumper Matti Nykanen. In 1982 he won the World Championships in Oslo in Norway, and he even wore start number 40 while doing so! So it was too perfect, and after a quick google search I even found a company that could make a replica of his bib from that competition. I’ve posted a picture of Matti and me on the Ski Heroes Instagram so you can decide yourself how close to the original I managed to get. 

But enough about my birthday, let’s get back to skiing. 

One thing that really hit me when working on this series was how marginal of a sport alpine ski racing is. I mean, where American Football is a game of inches, alpine racing is a game of split seconds. A few tenths of a second, or even just a few hundredths of second will make the difference. You can’t even blink your eyes that fast! I guess I always knew this growing up and watching ski racing on TV, but I think I just normalized it to myself, that if someone had taken the lead by half a second that was a huge lead. Half a second really is not very much of a difference after a lot of skiers have skied for 1.5 or 2 minutes down a challenging course! But for some reason it hit me when watching some of Picabo’s races how close of a sport this really is, and how a tiny mistake can make or break your race. And with that, let’s dive into the second and final part of the story about Picabo Street:

In the previous episode we covered Picabo’s childhood and upbringing in Triumph, ID, and how she got started skiing in the Sun Valley ski resort. And we went through her formative years, including her rebellious 1989-1990 season when she was kicked off the US ski team, but managed to fight her way back and eventually won a place on the world cup team where she made her debut in the 1992-93 season. And we also covered how she sensationally won silver at the 1993 world championships in Morioka in Japan. During her first world cup season, Picabo was a 20s and 30s kind of skier with two exceptions:
 her silver medal in the world championships, and a second place in the 1993 downhill world cup race in Hafjell in Norway, the place where the Olympic downhill race was to take place the year after. Picabo had a huge competitive advantage with her wide stand tuck position that she had discovered by accident while training in a wind tunnel, and this made her glide through the flatter parts of a slope faster than anyone else. And the Hafjell slope that was intended for the women’s Olympic downhill race was indeed very flat. So perhaps it was not that surprising that she got her first world cup podium at this course. 

Going into the 1993-94, the season of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer in Norway, Picabo’s results started to improve some, but she was still far away from making an impact on the world cup. Of the five pre-olympic races she participated in she finished 16th, and 17th, 8th, and then two 7th places one from in Cortina in Italy, and one from Garmisch Partenkircken in Germany leading up to the 94 Olympics. The race in Garmisch was the same race where Austrian skier Ulrike Maier died after suffering a major crash and I to this day have vivid memories of watching that live on TV.

Although Picabo’s results had improved, she was hardly considered a favorite for a medal during the games, and at best an outsider. To make matters worse for Picabo, the original women’s Olympic downhill course at Hafjell had come under scrutiny because it was too flat and not challenging enough for the skiers. I actually remember this debate, as the men’s downhill slope was in Kvitfjell, and this is a very challenging course. But the women’s original course posed very few challenges for the female skiers. The German team protested and requested the women’s race also be moved to Kvitfjell, and the Olympic arranging committee eventually did, making history as this was the first time the women would compete on the same downhill course as the men in the Olympics. Too bad for Picabo, because the Hafjell course was as built for her and her gliding technique. And as I just mentioned, the one world cup podium she had was at Hafjell during the trial-games in the previous season.  

Prior to the Olympics the Sports Illustrated magazine had run a hit piece on the US Olympic ski team saying that the team had been lousy for 10 years, and blamed everything from mismanagement to poor coaching and unmotivated athletes, calling the team a bunch of pampered rich kids. All 7 million Austrians and half of Switzerland’s cows can ski faster than the US ski team the article claimed, ending with calling the team “Uncle Sam’s lead-footed snowplow brigade”. If anything, the article fired up the US team. Tommy Moe shocked the skiing world by winning the men’s Olympic downhill race ahead of Norway’s Kjetil Andre Aamodt, a shock that I don’t think Norway has still gotten over. Then first-lady Hilary Clinton was at the race as a US ambassador and when interviewed by the Norwegian TV channel NRK afterwards she thanked Norway for being such good hosts to let the United States come in first. 
 Sure Hilary…Sure..
 And only two days later, US skier Diann Roffe Steinrotter won the women’s Super G. Tommy Moe followed up his gold with a silver medal in the men’s Super G. Three races, three medals for the US, including two golds. Yep, American’s and the Olympics strike again. 

On February 19th 1994 Picabo Street made her Olympic debut at the women’s downhill race in Kvitfjell.  Wearing bib-number 8, she gripped around her ski poles at the start house, took a deep breath, and launched into the steep slope on her long Rossignol downhill skis. The German racer Katja Seizinger, the racer who would become Picabo’s arch rival in her career, had already skied and had a large lead after her run. At the first split timer Picabo was 0.28 seconds behind Seizinger, the second fastest time of the day. At the second split the difference had grown to 0.71 of a second. The gold was definitely going to Germany at this point, but Picabo was still competing for a medal. Toward the end of the slope Picabo makes up some ground on the flatter parts with her superior gliding technique and she finishes 0.66 seconds behind Sezinger. And it’s enough for a silver medal! Again, Picabo had come more or less out of nowhere and finished on the podium when it really mattered. At the interview after the race, Picabo in her usual confident manner stated that “yeah, I expected a medal”. Safe to say, she was probably the only one who had expected just that. Picabo is ecstatic, she and soaks up every moment of attention she gets from the press. At the medal ceremony that evening she is besides herself with joy as she jumps up on the podium to receive her medal, but she makes a stark realization as the national anthem starts playing to honor Katja Seizinger’s gold. It’s not the American National Anthem being played. Picabo swears that next time she’s on an Olympic podium it will be the US anthem and not the anthem of some other country playing. 

During the Olympics she also competed in the super combined event, taking the lead after downhill part, but finishing 10th after the slalom around. And following the 94 Olympics, Picabo went back to her off-podium results, finishing 11th, 14th, and also 4th in the three world cup events she competed in to finish off the season.  Yet, something had happened at this point, because Picabo was gaining traction. With her unusual name, and unorthodox behavior, she had started to make a bit of a name for herself. Even in the US she started getting some brand recognition! The town of Sun Valley did a reception for her when she came home, and they revealed that they had named a local street after her. And yep, you guess it, it was named Picabo Street. In 1994 Picabo even appeared in an episode on Sesame Street where she tried to explain to Elmo that Picabo was her name, and that it was not the sport that she had won an Olympic medal in. And then she and Elmo play Picabo for a while. It’s all on Youtube and it’s all quite fun to watch  😊.

Going into the 1994-95 season, Picabo was on fire. 
 In fact, she was on fire for the next two seasons, and it’s almost a bit boring to cover these seasons as the story of Picabo is not really about things going well, and rather it is about her fighting for everything she’s got. Her first ever world cup win came in Lake Louise the following in December of 1994, beating team mate Hilary Lindh and Germany’s Katja Seizinger on the downhill. And as the 95 season kept going, so did Picabo. Starting in Mid January 1995, she reached the podium in every race that she finished in both downhill and Super G. And in downhill she was just unstoppable, winning five world cup events in a row, marking the first time any American had accomplished this, male or female.  And she also became the first American to win the downhill overall world cup title that year. 

And I need to do a brief digression here, because in 1995 Picabo Street also visited my hometown in Voss, Norway. And during her visit I actually met Picabo. Or, mer her is probably too generous to say, but at least I was able to say hi to her as I saw her in the lift line😊. She had made friends with the Voss own world cup ski racer Astrid Lodemel and came to Voss to participate in three FIS races, finishing third in two GS races, and winning the Super G race which took place down the old downhill course in Voss. Of course, I had to look up the articles in the local Voss newspaper about Picabo’s visit and in an interview she was praising the town and the ski resort, saying that she was jealous of her friend Astrid Lodemel for having grown up in such a beautiful place. So there it is, some shameless advertisement for a ski trip to Voss 😊And I hope I don’t get in trouble for posting the article on the Ski Heroes Instagram page, but I do happen to know the chief editor of the local paper quite well so hopefully it will be OK.. 

Following the 95 season, Picabo had become a household name in the US, scoring a sponsorship with Nike who launched the Picabo shoe. Wearing her shoes that year was a young American skier who had watched Picabo all season and who realized that if a female ski racer can get their own shoe named after her, there was no reason for her to not go for it 100% and try to become a champion herself. The young skier would later become known as Lindsay Vonn. 

The town of Sun Valley again hosted a reception for Picabo after the 95 season with a huge crowd turnout. During the event, the host presented Picabo with a congratulatory letter from president Bill Clinton, and her first comment was “Finally!”. Staying quite on character there.. 

So yeah, Picabo Street is doing really well at this time, winning races, winning the downhill world cup title, scoring sponsorships, making good money. And going into the 1996 season, Picabo continued to dominate. The World Championships were taking place in Sierra Nevada in Spain this year and Picabo won gold in the downhill event, with both her parents in the audience. And she followed this up with a bronze medal in the Super G. And in the World Cup she continued to dominate, winning the overlal downhill world cup once again, marking the first time an American had done this back to back. 

Picabo was at the height of her career, and the only thing that could stop her was herself. 

And as the 1996-97 season started, Picabo did just that. During training in Vail, Colorado in December of 1996 Picabo crashes and injuries herself, tearing the ligaments in her left knee. And I guess I can say Finally, it feels like we’re talking about Picabo again, because now she started on the long and slow recovery, and she worked damn hard to come back. Being a celebrity in the America at this point, Picabo’s injury received a fair amount of attention in the press. And further adding to her tough image was the video footage of her surgery where she had insisted on staying awake during the whole procedure instead of being knocked out by anesthetics. So let’s just jump to the next season and the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano in Japan right away, because Picabo missed the remainder of the 1997 season due to the knee injury. 

Its Wednesday February 11th 1998, the day of the women’s Olympic Super G competition She’s not even supposed to be starting this race. Or be at the Olympics for that sake. It had been 14 months since she suffered the major injury and had to have the joint in her left knee completely rebuilt. She had started skiing again just 8 weeks prior to the Olympics. And although she finished 4th in the downhill race on her favorite course in Cortina in Italy, she had suffered another major crash just 12 days prior to the Olympics during a race in Are in Sweden. A crash that knocked her unconscious and gave her a mild concussion. And to top it off, two days prior to the Olympics she sprained her right ancle playing volleyball and were it not for the stiff plastic ski boots she couldn’t even stand up straight. 

The Super G is Picabo’s first competition at the Nagano games. Three days later the Olympic downhill competition will take place, and Picabo is considered an outsider for a medal in the downhill event. But Super G is a different story. Despite several podiums, Picabo had never won a super G race neither on the world cup stage nor in a world championship or Olympic competition.

The Super G course in Nagano is fairly straight forward, and not too technically challenging. With one exception, there are no major turns on the course. And there’s also several fairly flat areas where the skier will need to glide in the tuck position. Picabo decides to go for it. It’s no or never, and the course is a perfect fit for her. Instead of clicking in to her Super G skis, Picabo decides to go for the longer, faster, but also less maneuverable downhill skis, and as the only skier at the race she races on downhill skis. It’s actually the same skis that she won silver on in the 94 Lillehammer downhill competition.  She gets to the start area fairly late, only about 15-20 minutes before she’s supposed to start. On her headphones, Tupac’s “Never had a friend like me” is blasting as loud as it’ll go. The song is aggressive, and further drives the take no prisoner attitude into her mind. 

Katja Seizinger was the big favorite to win the race. During the 6 Super G world cup events earlier this season, Seizinger had won 4. Seizinger is by now Picabo’s arch-rival, and had been so for a long time. And Picabo just called her the Executioner for her brutally effective way to attack a race course and just leave the competition behind. 

The only really challenging part at the Nagano course was named the Sun Terrace and consisted of a jump and an almost 90 degree hairpin turn. Loosing too much speed through this turn could be detrimental as you needed to carry this with you for the remainder of the run. 

Picabo started with bib number 2, the only skier who had gone before her was Norwegian Ingeborg Helen Marken. Picabo comes blazing out of the start house and skis superbly at the top of the course, using both her superior glide as well as any advantage she can get from her downhill skis through the steep part of the course with fairly straight forward turns. Her time of 35.75 at the first split timer is by far the fastest time of the race. But going into the Sun Terrace hairpin, she misses the jump. As so often before, her weight shifts backwards, her skis catch air, and she jumps too far landing deep down in the turn instead of keeping the ideal high fall line through it. Although she loses some speed, Picabo preserves as much momentum as she can into he remainder of the race. She zips through the next few gates and drops into her characteristic wide stand low tuck toward the end of the course, trying make up any lost ground. She crosses the finish line 1.14 seconds ahead of Marken, a very clear lead, but her main rivals are also yet to ski. The next real competitor is start number 5, Austria’s Alexandra Meissnitzer. Although she skis well at the top, she is 27 / 100th of a second behind Picabo at the first split. Picabo’s by far best part of the race was the first part, and Meissnitzer catches up with her throughout the course, but crosses the finish line 0.07 behind. Picabo has survived the first real attack at her gold medal. The next real attempt at Picabo’s time came at start number 10 from Austria’s Renate Goetschel. Goetschel was over half a second behind Picabo at the first split timer, however; she skied superbly during the middle stretch where Picabo made her mistake through the Sun Terrace hairpin turn and she takes the lead at the second split timer by 0.02 seconds! The final part of the course though she can not keep up with Picabo’s glide and she finishes 0.3 seconds behind. Picabo has dodged yet another bullet. 

Starting at 11 was the big favorite Katja Seitzinger. Watching her race, there is really no big mistakes you can detect. She keeps a perfect form through the entire course, and even keeps a super high line through the Sun Terrace. But for some reason, this was not Seitzingers day, and she crosses the finish line 42 hundredth of a second behind Picabo and ultimately finishes 6th in the race. Picabo eyes the gold medal, but one final skier is left who can steal the gold away from her, Austria’s Michaela Dorfmeister. I mean in general, you do not mess with the Austrians when it comes to Alpine skiing! If another nation is in the lead, Austria will just send one star skier after the other for the attack! And Dorfmeister attacks the course with everything she’s got. Off to a bit of a slow start, she is 0.41 behind Picabo at the first split, but then she catches her stride and skis faster than anyone else in the competition from that point and down. At the second split, Picabo’s lead had shrunk to 0.26 seconds. And when Dorfmeister crosses the finish line she is 0.01 seconds behind Picabo. One-onehundreth of a second! Picabo Street had her Olympic Gold Medal. And she had delivered on her promise from Lillehammer in 1994 that the next time she was on the podium it would be the American National Anthem playing, and not the anthem of some other country. At the medal ceremony that evening the gold medal was presented to Picabo by legendary French skier Jean Claude Killy. After he retired from competitive skiing in 1968, Killy had purchased property in Sun Valley, ID, and was often seen skiing there during the winter.  And many years prior to the Nagano games, Picabo’s dad had been the ski-bus driver for him in Sun Valley and had proceeded to tell him that his daughter was also a ski racer and that she too wanted to become an Olympic skier. Killy had asked him her name and said he would follow her as she kept racing. And as he handed her the gold medal he said “I have been waiting for this moment for a long time!”. And then he said “I will be back here in three days for the downhill ceremony, how about you?” to where Picabo answered “I sure hope so, see you Saturday!”. Unfortunately for Picabo, it did not quite turn out that way. She finished 6th at the downhill downhill. Still a really impressive performance given her all her troubles leading up to the season, but it also really didn’t matter. Picabo had her Olympic gold. 

And this is where the story of Picabo Street could have ended. And probably should have ended too. After the Olympics she went to Maui, HI with her parents, her brother, and her boyfriend to celebrate, and they spent 10 days in the sun eating, drinking, and celebrating. Ever since Picabo was 10 years old the family had poured every penny, every ounce of energy, everything they had into Picabo and her skiing career. And it had succeeded! Picabo had won silver at the 1993 world championships. She won silver at the 94 olympics. She dominated downhill skiing in 1995 and 1996. And she had completed the perfect comeback story from the late 1996 season crash and had won the Olympics in 1998. But the 1998 World Cup season was not over yet. And as the vacation in Hawaii ended, she felt the need to finish the season. Just one more race. And the final race of the season took place in Crans Montana in Switzerland, March 13th 1998. Conditions were poor. The race had already been postponed by one day. The second day the race was off, then on, then off, then on again. The officials finally decided that the race was happening. The men’s competition starting at 11am, the women’s about two hours later. The night before, Picabo had gotten in a huge fight with her coach Herwig Demschar. Herwig felt she was not focused enough, her mind was not in the race and he said she should consider sitting this one out. Picabo, the fiercely competitive and stubborn Picabo, was not gonna listen to that. And instead of listening to her coach, who all things considered had her best interest in mind, she decided to show him and to race. 

But Herwig had been right, her mind was not in this race. As she passed the first split timer on the course and was approaching a major jump, she hits the jump too far to the left and flies way too far through the air. Again she makes the mistake of her weight switching too far back in the air. She tries to catch herself as she lands, but her weight is too far back and she wipes out crashing into the fence with her ski tips first, pulverizing the skis and crumpling her left leg like a piece of paper and she goes from 100 kph to 0 in an instant. 

The end of her thighbone is broken, her femur is snapped in two. The pain is intense as the jagged bone end rips through her quad-muscles. Picabo screams in pain and shear terror as the race medical crew rushes to assist her. As she’s being strapped to a stretcher her coach Herwig gets to the crash scene as well. He looks at Picabo, and Picabo looks at Herwig. And without exchanging a single word they both know that their coaching relationship is over. Picabo is flown to the local hospital and as she gets there she realizes that she has also ripped the ligaments apart and displaced the meniscus cartilage in her right knew in addition to the broken bone in her left leg. If the injury in 1996 had been bad, it was nothing compared to what she was facing now. 

Her mom told her that you need to fight and do everything in your power in order to come back as a top class athlete. Because even if you don’t manage to compete again, with that mindset you might just be able to walk up and down the stairs for the rest of your life. That’s how serious the injuries were from the 1998 Crans Montana crash. 

And Picabo gave it one last shot! With the 2002 Olympics taking place in the United States, in Salt Lake City in Utah, Picabo at least wanted to finish her career on her own turf. Win, lose, or draw, she saw this as her final opportunity to compete. After 20 months of rehab she was finally back on snow skiing again, determined to make it to the Olympics one more time and end her career on her own terms and on her own turf. 

In December 2000, 2.5 years after the crash, she was back at the world cup stage competing again, finishing 34th in the Super G in Val d’Isere in France. [And Picabo makes the 2002 Olympics.] Throughout the 2000-2001 season, as she was working her way back into racing, her results started to improve toward the end of the season. She finished 7th in the downhill race in Lenzerheide in Switzerland in late February of 2001. After that she left the world cup stage for a bit and competed on the North American Cup, winning 6 out of the 7 Super G and downhill competitions she participated in, and finishing 2nd in the downhill US national championships.  Going in to the 2001-2002 olympic season, Picabo finished 5th and 6th in the early season competitions in Lake Louise in Canada, and then finished 10th in the Saalbach downhill competition in Austria just a month before the Olympics. Could she stage one last amazing comeback? Although she did did make the US Olympic team one last time, unfortunately she ended without a medal this time. On February 12th 2002, at the downhill course in Snowbasin in Utah Picabo Streets career ended. She gave it her best, and ultimately finished 16th on the Olympic downhill. An amazing performance given her struggle to even be able to walk again, not yet compete in the Olympics! 
 And this is where our story ends too. Although she could not stage a medal comeback, being able to come back from the horrific crash in Crans Montana from 1998 and compete again at this level I think should be considered as good of a victory as any. 

 The sources I used for the story on Picabo street were mainly Picabo’s autobiography from 2002 called Nothing to hide and the documentary called Picabo, which is co-produced by Lindsay Vonn. 

In addition, I used open sources on the internet. I had a great time putting this together, and especially watching some of her races on Youtube. As I mentioned at the outset of the series, alpine skiing is a sport that I don’t know quite as well from a technical standpoint. I grew up just 5 minutes away from the Voss ski resort and although I did some alpine skiing for a few years in my childhood, I never raced or did it competitively, so it was also great to learn more about the technical part of the sport, especially as Picabo had her own style and technique. 

I’m sure there will be other multi-episode series in the future but for next time I think we will do a shorter story than what the case was this time. And I also think it’s time we go to the alps next time, as we have not covered any skiers from that part of the world yet. I’ve come across a fascinating story of a French ski racer, innovator of the sport, and eye-wear fashion icon, and with that I’m sure some of you can already guess who we will be covering next time. 

Until then, continue your snow dances, and I hope you’ll tune back in to Ski Heroes in a couple of weeks.