I’ll never forget the awards ceremony at the 1998 Nagano Olympics when Picabo Street received her gold medal in super-G only 14 months after suffering a devastating knee injury on a training run in Vail.
There was a gorgeous full moon that night, and I recall asking her about it. Her face lit up like the moon that shone on her, and even now — almost 14 years later — I can still see the look on her face.
“I remember it being just the brightest full moon I’ve ever seen in my life,” Street said, remembering my question that night. “That was a perfect little cherry on top.”
But that night might not have happened for Street if not for a secret training camp at Copper Mountain three months earlier, involving only her and a handful of coaches while the rest of the World Cup racers were beginning their seasons. With a desperate need to catch up on the training she lost while rehabbing her knee, Street checked into a Summit County hotel under an assumed name and got to work.
“I think I can honestly say that if I hadn’t had that training in the fall, I wouldn’t have been ready,” said Street, who returns to Copper today for the grand opening of the U.S. Ski Team Speed Center. “I wouldn’t have come into the season with that confidence and gotten my head of steam up.”
Three months after those days of intensive super-G training at Copper, Street would win the Nagano super-G by 0.01 of a second, the smallest margin measured in ski racing. But at Copper in November, the glamour and glory of ski racing seemed far, far away. It involved hard work in uncomfortable conditions in the early morning hours before the area opened for public skiing.
“We would go up on the chair at 6:15,” said Herwig Demschar, one of the coaches who helped Street. “There were guys from the ski patrol with two or three Ski-Doos because it was still dark, they were behind me (with headlights) so I could see when I was setting a course. We trained super-G. We had no safety (nets) left and right. I don’t go to church, but after each training run I made a little cross and thanked whoever is up there that nothing happened.”
Earlier that fall when Demschar watched Street train with her teammates at Beaver Creek, he noticed she seemed unbalanced on her skis in a way that made him concerned for her safety. So, he proposed the Copper camp.
Street went to Copper knowing she was behind — and running out of time.
“We were definitely scrambling to get enough miles under my belt to make me comfortable going into the race season,” Street said. “I benefitted greatly. Copper just kind of laid out the red carpet for us.”
Street needed a race course long enough for super-G training that also had varied terrain. Copper gave her everything she needed.
“I don’t know if it was so much doubt as, ‘I’m not ready yet, and I need more miles,’ ” Street said. “I just didn’t want to do it in race season. I wanted to do it before. I was very nervous. I felt like I was at 65 or 70 percent. By the time I got done with that specialized training, I was probably 85-95 percent.”
Street skipped the first speed races of the season at Mammoth, Calif., and Lake Louise, Alberta. But the week before Christmas at Val d’Isere, France, she finished 10th and 11th. She was on her way.
“She came back to the World Cup tour, and she was ready to go,” said Demschar, now a front office executive for Powdr Corp., which owns Copper.
In conjunction with the U.S. Ski Team, Copper today unveils what promises to offer the world’s best early-season downhill and super-G training, a venue so beneficial to American downhillers that chief executive Bill Marolt calls it a “game changer.”
Street, now a mom raising four boys ages 8 years old to 11 months near Birmingham, Ala., is envious. So envious, in fact, she issued a challenge to the athletes on the team now because of what Copper and the ski team have given them.
“They’ve taken it to a whole other level,” Street said. “It’s really the missing piece to the puzzle that could really make the difference in sustaining talent on the team year after year. A lot of us alumni have been kind of joking like, ‘Ha, there’s no excuse now! These kids have everything.’ Their amenities are starting to rival the Euros. Yeah, there’s no excuse now. Let’s see it.”
