If you threw a doll against a wall as hard as you could, that's how it looked when Lindsey Kildow crashed. You don't really get what downhillers do until they fall, and lie there like that. Then you look up at the massive tilted ice sheet they just plunged down, and your stomach stands up and tries to walk out of your body, just to get away from the sickish feeling. That's when you realize downhill racing bears no similarity to anything you've ever tried, any job you've ever held, or any stunt you've ever pulled.
Kildow, the 21-year-old medal hope of the U.S. women's Alpine team, was taking a training run on the San Sicario Olympic course when she caught an edge. The phrase "catching an edge" sounds like a paper cut, or mishandling a pair of scissors. In the downhill, when a skier catches an edge it makes the breath die in your throat. The frozen Alps rose up and hit Kildow in the back of the head. Imagine wrecking a car into a mountain wall at 50 mph — without the car. That's what happened to Kildow.
Downhillers are among the least easy athletes to comprehend or identify with at the Winter Games because of the frightening nature of what they do. But it's important to try to understand them, because they aren't just entertaining danger-freaks, they are an enormously valuable brand of competitor with a lot to teach spectators. They investigate fear, toy with it and free themselves from it, on a daily basis.
For instance, it's hard to grasp that after such a horrifying fall and a helicopter airlift to a Turin hospital, where she was treated for severe back and hip contusions, Kildow was still hoping to ski in the Olympic downhill on Wednesday. But it seems important to ask what makes her want to go back to the starting gate.
Kildow looks like a giant milkmaid, as if she was raised on irradiated fresh dairy products. She's 5 feet 10, with flushed cheeks and masses of blond hair. But there's iron in her. She has struggled to become a braver competitor, and succeeded: In her first training run on Monday, she was the second-fastest down the hill.
Kildow was just 17 when she skied for the U.S. team in Salt Lake four years ago, taking sixth in the combined, the best Alpine finish of any American woman. But she struggled to fulfill her promise, and last season faltered in some winnable races, at one point leaving a finish area in tears. Kildow now says she was too driven by her father, Alan Kildow, a lawyer and former skier whose own career was cut short by a knee injury. Finally, she made a change: She cut her father out of her career and told him to stay away from her races.
"My Dad and I made pretty strong goals when I was young, and a lot of that was excessive, maybe they were too high," she said at a news conference earlier this week. "Right now they [the goals] actually aren't that far off. But I've learned that you have to look at them in a certain way. I'm not dictated to by them. I'm not controlled by them. It makes it a lot less stressful."
Kildow has literally learned to control her heart rate and adrenalin surges, with stress relieving exercises. The results speak for themselves: She has won two World Cup races this season. "It's still hard when it comes to important races," she said. "I've just got to breathe and relax and take a step back."
When she won the downhill at Val D'Isere, France, in December, Kildow did a peculiar thing, in the name of skiing more freely from pressure. Traditionally, victor of the race is offered a check for $1,200 — or a cow. At the presentation, she took the cow. "I knew the cow was cute, but I didn't know she was that cute," Kildow says. "She's very serene."
Her name is Olympe, and she is still living in France, until Kildow can arrange to transport her to a barn near her training home in Austria. The cow represented her new, less obsessive attitude toward skiing. "I think I just liked the gesture," she said. "It's about the simple things, it's about the skiing, not the money or whatever, just not taking things so seriously."
Basically, what Kildow demonstrates is that responses to fear and pressure are conquerable. Neuroscientists don't altogether understand fear; it's a shadowy subject to them, but what they do know is that the amygdala nucleus area of the limbic system is responsible for it. Information about the world, such as stimuli warning of danger, moves along the neural pathways to the amygdala, which in turn determines the importance of the stimulus and triggers emotional responses. It signals an adaptive response, such as slowing down, to a sensory stimulus, such as too much speed. It's the lurch in the stomach that makes you or me brake.
These emotions are not just chimeras, they are actual reactions of neurons, and they have concrete physiological and neurological reactions, both voluntary and involuntary. Increased heart rate. Respiration. Cold sweat. Adrenal surges. "It would be interesting to take a blood test in the starting gate," Kildow says.
Downhillers have learned to override those responses, in the name of adventure. On a slope like San Sicario, where you or I would turn sideways, Kildow takes the clamps off and goes straight.
I don't want to do what she does, but I'm glad someone is doing it, and I find it riveting to watch. A downhiller possesses an identity we all wish for. Kildow not only has the courage to hurl herself down the hill, which very few of us may want to do, but she also has courage with a more common daily application: She has the guts to tell a domineering father to back off. And she has the courage to try to get back up after a horrendous fall, so she can point her skis straight down another frightening slope.