An Olympic moment unlike any other
As Games approach, Fletcher recalls hard-luck experience
P am Fletcher’s life revolves around the skiing world. She promotes her family mountain, Nashoba Valley, where she can often be found giving ski and racing tips to guests, and she provides color commentary for the Pro Men’s Tour.
So as the Winter Olympic Games in South Korea approach, the difficult memory of her own experience — 30 years ago now — is never far from her thoughts.
Fletcher, a World Cup winner and the leader of the U.S. women’s ski team at the Calgary Olympics in 1988, was poised to possibly do something no U.S. woman had done in decades: medal in a skiing event at the Olympics. But the unthinkable happened. Moments before her big run, wearing the coveted bib No. 1, she was involved in a devastating course-side collision that left her splayed next to the course she’d hoped to champion, her fibula broken and her chance at victory dashed.
“The hardest part was, this man got up and skied away,” said Fletcher, 55, looking back on the incident. “I never saw him again.”
Looking back, Fletcher said she can remember it all. She’d just wrapped a final training run and was heading down a side trail to exit the course. Only as she did, 27-year-old course volunteer Steve Lounds suddenly appeared — skiing directly at her.
“I see him on my right, so I move to the left and he moves to the left,” she said. “I dodge to the right and he does the same. I’m 5-foot-4 on my best day with mousse in my hair, and this 6-2, 220-pound man was coming straight at me.
They crashed. She screamed, and coaches and medics came immediately.
“Coach said, ‘See if you can get up,’” she remembered. “I moved my leg and heard these pops. I could feel movement in my bone. I knew it was over.”
Rushed to the on-site emergency area, Fletcher was met by her father, Al, the founder of Nashoba Valley Ski Area.
“He was pretty inspiring right off,” she said. Her father reminded her, as she lay there having her bone set, of the amazing thing she had already accomplished in making it there as a member of the U.S. ski team. “He told me to remember what it felt like to walk into the opening ceremonies. He reminded me that few people get to do that or have that feeling.”
While word spread that Fletcher was out of the competition, she did something that those who know her and who raced with her were not surprised by — she insisted on being brought out to the race course to cheer her teammates on before receiving any medical attention.
But that went awry too. Giant gusts of wind kicked up, actually endangering skiers (one was blown off course; a jumper in another event was blown into TV equipment on the hill). Two racers in, the event was postponed.
“I guess some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed,” Fletcher mused, with the same sense of humor that led her to call the incident, “The Agony of de Fibula” on national TV.
Fletcher, an Acton native, did return to racing a year later, making the podium at Vail’s very first World Cup event, a memory she holds dear. But she never did make another Olympics as a racer. Back then, she said, racers were considered old at 25 or so. Today, they are just getting to their prime at that age. Much of that is because of equipment technology. Fletcher raced on wildly long, wickedly straight skis. A year after she retired from racing, shaped skis began to hit the market. And while she sometimes wonders how things could have been had she been able to race on those newer skis, she never looks back bitterly on the crash that stole her Olympic dream.
“If I had hung on to (the anger), I would be a wreck,” she said. “You have to move on with your life. You need to let go of the things that go negatively or don’t go your way. Sometimes the path you think you are on isn’t the path you should be on.”
These days, Fletcher skis with a joy that is not just palpable but contagious. She’s still friends not only with her teammates from 1988 but with many of the current world stars.
There is one thing she wishes had gone differently — that she’d had the chance to meet Lounds. The Calgary native held a press conference after the incident in which he was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “I haven’t had a chance to say anything to her. She was crying and quite upset. I was trying to find my skis.”
Fletcher simply hoped for closure on the situation.
“It would have been nice to be able to say to him, ‘You know, it’s OK. This was an accident,’” Fletcher said. “It would have been great for me, but for him, too. He has to be walking around with bricks on his shoulders over this, even after all these years.”
When U.S ski team member Steven Nyman crashed Jan. 27 in one of his last races before the Olympics and was forced to drop out, her heart sank.
“My heart just broke,” she said. “His Olympic dream was ended. I know how that feels.” She also knows how to move on.
“You need to just hang onto yourself and believe in you,” she said. “You have to be open to the change it will bring. I know. It all works out OK.”