One more turn for the ponytailed phoenix with the nursery-rhyme name and the mystic warrior’s patter. Like an eager child hooked on a new game, she says she wants just one more, even though she has been at this for most of her 30 years.
On the eve of her third Winter Olympics, it is both relevant and irresistible to ask: Picabo, will we see you? In the top 10? On the medal stand?
Two parts of her three-part mission already have been scrubbed. Street lobbied openly for the honor of carrying the flag for the U.S. delegation in Friday night’s Opening Ceremony, but her fellow athletes bypassed her in favor of short-track speedskater Amy Peterson.
On the competitive front, Street will not defend the super-giant slalom title she won in an upset in Nagano four years ago. Her 33rd-place finish Jan. 25 in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, was her highest placement in four World Cup races in the event this season. Five of Street’s teammates have better results and only four U.S. skiers will get to start.
That realization left Street slumped and crying in the snow at Cortina, an image at odds with her public persona as a cheery, competent crusader. By time she arrived in Utah, she had regained her composure.
“If I’d had a better season I’d be more disappointed, but I’ve brought up the rear all season,” Street said.
That leaves Monday’s downhill, which could be Street’s last international appearance, although she has been somewhat equivocal on the subject of retirement. She wants to deliver a vintage performance, and the course at Snowbasin is to her liking. Street won a non-World Cup race there last year in one of the high points of her umpteenth comeback.
The run itself is rather incongruously named Wildflower, a reference to its warm-weather appearance. There is nothing delicate about it in its Olympic incarnation.
“The fastest part of the course is the finish,” Street said. “It starts in first gear and ends in fifth, and you never really downshift.”
The woman who will rev her engine in the start gate Monday is a different competitor than she was in Nagano or in the mid-1990s when she twice topped the World Cup downhill standings and won an Olympic silver medal and a world championship in the event.
A disastrous crash in a World Cup race in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, just three weeks after her Olympic victory kept Street off the racing circuit for more than two years. She talks about bones and soft tissue with the authority of someone who has studied many X-rays; indeed, her last injury was an orthopedic surgeon’s dream or nightmare, depending on interpretation.
Her left femur was fractured in four places. She walked around for a year with a 12-inch titanium plate screwed into the bone to help it heal properly. Meanwhile, the right anterior cruciate ligament, meniscus and ligaments turned into so much spaghetti, requiring extensive rehabilitation.
Street had come back from broken bones, torn ligaments, a concussion and deep bone bruises before, but the ferocity of this impact jangled every cell in her body, including the gray matter. Rebuilding her mental strength and flexibility was, in some ways, more difficult than any weight training or cardio work.
“You don’t do it in reps,” she said while huffing away on a stationary bike.
“The things that are the most applicable that affect both areas are setting a goal, reaching that goal, dissecting how you reached that goal and moving forward. I need goals to be set. The lessons that are within that adventure of reaching that goal.”
The adventure this time involved coming to terms with a psyche altered by fear and humility. In a frank autobiography published last year, Street chronicled her depression over her racing future and the road-map scars on her legs. At various times this season, she admitted she becoming more tentative and less risk-prone, thinking twice in situations that call for hair-trigger reactions.
She might be approaching the slopes with less hubris but Street said she has gained much in her personal life. She is engaged to former U.S. ski team technician John Mulligan, who works for independent skier Kristina Koznick, and said she looks forward to have children.
Where Street once fed off constant activity, she now seeks out at least occasional moments of peace, fighting an old addiction to chaos.
“I don’t, very easily, take the time to just sit down and reflect,” she said. “I spend time making other people happy. I have to focus hard on spending time on me, lighting candles and taking a bath or drinking chamomile tea and breathing and sitting still. Those are all things that are good for me.
“I do those more now and I don’t think I would have started doing them ever had I not gone through a period of time with my injuries where I was forced to, and forced to realize the positive results.
“I still multi-task,” she said, stating the obvious as the exercise bike whirred away. “I keep things pretty busy that way. But I just make sure I take time on the other side to create the balance. I’m figuring out why I ended up in that situation and what I was meant to get out of it, not just physically, but emotionally and mentally as well.
“Was I supposed to become more compassionate? Was I supposed to respect my teammates more? Was I supposed to love my family more or spend more time on the little things, or give little gifts, or say nice little things to people? What am I supposed to learn this time?”
Street still talks fast and she still skis fast on certain days. She has three top-10 finishes in the downhill this season: a fifth and sixth at Lake Louise, Alberta, in November and a 10th in Saalbach, Austria, last month.
“If she can stay with the competition in the technical parts of the course, she still has some of the best gliding skills in the world,” women’s head coach Marjan Cernigoj said.
The free spirit who grew up in the no-barbed-wire world of tiny Triumph, Idaho, has started to realize she has limits, but she continues to aim high.
“I tend to identify with athletes who put a big feat out there and then accomplish it–tell the world what they’re going to do, then go ahead and do it,” Street said last fall.
She’s still not one to cover her eyes with her hands.
