A victory just to race
SAN SICARIO, Italy – Remember her name the next time you’re tempted to say that some Olympic medal favorite “failed” because they didn’t make the podium. The best performance by anyone Wednesday at the Turin Winter Olympics was an eighth-place finish by American Lindsey Kildow in the downhill.
Kildow spent Monday night in the hospital and by her race Wednesday could still barely walk. She doesn’t plan to look at the replay of the horrific training crash that sent her bouncing down the course Monday like a rag doll until after the Games.
But when she does, Kildow will see how her ski caught an edge and her knee buckled violently, her body slammed to the ground and her head snapped back before she went soaring 15, maybe 20 feet into a horrible free fall just before crashing down again, this time on her tailbone before sliding to a stop, her mouth agape.
The only thing people could compare it to was Austrian legend Hermann Maier’s fall in the 1998 Nagano Games.
Officials estimated the 21-year-old Kildow was traveling 60 mph when she wiped out. It was so ghastly, one French skier at the bottom of the hill said she turned her head away from the finish-line videoboard, fearing the worst. A helicopter arrived quickly and rushed Kildow to a Turin hospital 70 miles away. Kildow’s boyfriend of two years, former U.S. Olympic skier Thomas Vonn, Wednesday said when he first saw the accident: “I honestly thought I’d be in the U.S. right now with surgery scheduled for her. Before I went to the hospital, I put my things together to go. The first report I got on her was a broken pelvis and massive head trauma.”
The final report was a bruised pelvis and left hip contusion but, miraculously, no broken bones. No knee injury. No concussion.
Vonn shook his head. “I thought she was exceptional before. But now?”
Now, just 24 hours after she’d been released from the hospital, Kildow had willed herself back into the starting gate yesterday, and she was staring down at the same mountain that could have killed her. She said she was back because she was determined to conquer the ghosts in her head, if not the rest of the world-class field – though given the fact that she was here at all, she didn’t rule out that.
“All I remember (of the crash) is being in my racing tuck and all of a sudden I was flying over the gate that I just went past,” Kildow said.
She had just walked stiffly and very, very slowly down the long outdoor cattle chute where Olympic press interviews are conducted, and she had to lean on a ski pole at times to steady herself. The pain she was riding out seemed to be excruciating. “I can’t even describe it,” Kildow said.
And yet, Kildow insisted, not racing “was also really not an option for me. That’s how I looked at it. I was going to do anything I could to be out there. It was important to me to know I could do it. I was pretty nervous at the start. Then I just told myself, `Don’t think. Just go.’ “
Kildow ended up seven places and 1.29 seconds behind Austrian gold medalist Michaela Dorfmeister’s winning time of 1:56.49. Martina Schild of Switzerland won silver and Anja Paerson of Sweden took the bronze.
But Kildow knew her time wasn’t really the point. It was a victory for her just to race and to finish upright. She said she took note as she passed through the same haunted portion of the course where she had crashed. Her skis were visibly rattling because of the tricky, rolling terrain but she tried not to pull back and sailed safely through.
The Olympic course was already the longest women’s downhill in the world, at nearly two miles. Now it was harder, too.
But you don’t make it this far as a ski racer if you can’t conquer fear. You know sooner or later, you’re going to wind up injured, probably more than once. And so Kildow cried. She raged against the bad luck that brought this upon her now. Then she came back and raced.
She’s still entered in the combined slalom and Super G in these Games, and still stubbornly thinks she can medal.
The last thing she said Wednesday as she limped off was, “Don’t count me out.”