With a kiss, Street says farewell
SNOWBASIN,
Utah (AP—With kisses for the crowd and a few tears, Picabo Street said
goodbye to ski racing. She left with no final victory—and no regrets.
"If
I were to die and come back tomorrow, I'd do it all over again," she
said, "and I'd do it exactly the same."
Carole
Montillet of France was the surprise winner in the women's downhill at the
Salt Lake City Olympics, a race finally run after being postponed by high
winds on Monday and delayed for two hours on Tuesday. Two of the prerace
favorites, Isolde Kostner of Italy and Renate Goetschl of Austria, won the
silver and the bronze.
Street
was 16th, the third-fastest American behind Jonna Mendes (12th) and
Kirsten Clark (13th).
Still,
Street—whose skiing career began of the slopes of Sun Valley’s Bald
Mountain—was the show, drawing cheers from a big crowd that appreciated
the way she fought back from the worst of a series of severe leg injuries
to give it one more Olympic try.
This was
why, she explained, she had come back after breaking her left leg and
mangling her right knee in a crash at Crans Montana, Switzerland, in 1998,
just a month after winning the Olympic gold medal in the super giant
slalom.
She
couldn't resist an Olympic downhill just an hour's drive from her Park
City home, "to end my career in the USA with the crowd cheering
louder for me than anybody else."
A
star-spangled, red-white-and-blue heart painted on her right cheek, Street
kissed the snow at the top of the Wildflower Course, and blew kisses to
the big, cheering crowd at the finish. She grabbed a microphone and
thanked the crowd and her parents.
"The
last four years have been about coming into the finish and hearing the
Americans' roar, and see the kids' faces painted with `USA' on them, just
the pride of being an American and being an Olympian," she said
later.
It was
fitting, Street said, that Montillet would win the gold for a French team
coping with the death of its star skier, Regine Cavagnoud, in a training
accident in October.
"I
cannot imagine having to ski losing to any one of my teammates,"
Street said. "I don't know if I could have done it, to be
honest."
But
after two Olympic medals, a gold in Nagano and silver in Lillehammer,
after nine World Cup titles and so many exhausting comebacks, there would
be no more pressure to win, no more fear of injury.
The
30-year-old Street will be married in the fall to ski technician Jerry
Mulligan.
"My
entire wedding party was here in place today to watch me race my last
race," she said.
In a few
years, Street plans to start a family. In the near future, she wants to
lure more young people into skiing.
Ski
racing is over, but the skiing never will be.
"I
love skiing. It will be forever in my life," she said. "I look
forward to many days out sliding around the mountain, not trying to make
some perfect turn and make some perfect line through the gates.
"I'll
always be a child on my skis. It will always be fun. It will be a way for
me to stay young forever."