Tamara McKinney came to Vail for the 1989 world championships as the hard-luck heroine of American ski racing.
She was the first U.S. woman to win the World Cup overall title, claiming it in 1983 at the age 20, but was shut out of medals at the 1984 Olympics.
She came to Vail with 18 career World Cup victories — still No. 2 on the all-time U.S. women’s list behind Lindsey Vonn — but had struggled a year earlier at the Calgary Olympics. Between Calgary and Vail, she lost her mother to a long cancer battle and a brother to suicide. She was the only hope in Vail for a U.S. Ski Team at low ebb, but in the twilight of her career she won a gold medal in combined and took bronze in slalom.
“She performed under a pressure cooker,” recalled John McMurtry, a Denver native who was the U.S. Ski Team alpine director in 1989. “We had come off the Olympics in Calgary, and the outlook was kind of bleak but hopeful. She had the burden of the whole U.S. Ski Team to perform, and she came through.”
She also was still mourning the loss of her mother and brother. Her father had died in 1985.
“There was a huge flood of emotion and memory,” McKinney said last week, recalling Vail ’89. “I had some really great years early in my career and then a number of years where things hadn’t gone as well. I had some injuries. I lost my parents and one of my brothers.
“I came in not as the favorite (but) sort of as, ‘She’s washed up and it’s never going to happen.’ I remember thinking, ‘OK, this one, this is my time.’ “
McKinney used grief for her mother as fuel.
“To lose her great spirit — and my dad and my brother — it was really something to be able to take the positive energy out of that and find a new level of strength in my skiing,” McKinney said. “It was definitely a powerful couple of weeks there.”
One of her favorite memories of Vail ’89 was the graciousness shown by the great Vreni Schneider of Switzerland, who won gold medals in slalom and giant slalom but took silver behind McKinney in the combined. That race — and Schneid er’s embrace — .
“She came up and gave me this big hug and said, ‘Tamara, for me the silver medal is the same as the gold. I am so happy for you that you won the gold medal,’ ” Mc Kinney said. “That’s what I would love the next generation to take with them. You can be the best in the world and still cheer for your competitors, and when somebody pulls out the run of their lifetime, appreciate it. You can push each other and learn from each other, but also applaud each other.”
