Lee-Gartner’s golden legacy remains intact
PY EONG CH A NG • In the starting gate of the race of her life, Kerrin Lee- Gartner began to melt down. She wasn’t nervous early in the day, and she wasn’t nervous for the most menacing downhill course in Olympic history, and then it all hit her at once.
“Carl,” she said to her trainer, Carl Peterson. “I’m nervous, I’m really nervous.”
And he just made a silly face and starting laughing out loud.
“Of course you are,” he said. “It’s the biggest race of your life. Now go.”
And she started laughing too, on her way to history as the only Canadian to win an Olympic downhill race. That was 26 years ago at the Albertville Olympics and in some ways it seems like yesterday for Lee- Gartner — and in other ways it feels like a lifetime ago.
“Wow, I think the one thing that really stands out as I age and more time passes, the more surreal this whole thing becomes, the more I’m almost in awe of the little girl dream I had and realized how bold of me it was.
“I didn’t know the history,” said Lee- Gartner, working another Olympic Games for CBC. “I assumed the Crazy Canucks had won everything. I assumed Nancy Greene had won everything. I didn’t pay attention to history. I’m surprised another Canadian hasn’t won since. Edi Podivinsky came close in the next Olympics. I thought Erik Guay would win. You realize, looking back, how aligned the stars were. I needed to be at my very, very best. I needed to have a course that was awesome for me. So many things went my way.”
The course at Meribel was considered dangerous at the time, so dangerous it has never been run again. “Racers were vomiting in the starting gate,” said Lee- Gartner. “There were a lot of reasons to be scared. People had broken backs, broken legs, torn knees on that course. For some reason, I was fully prepared to embrace that.
“I was a longshot. I wasn’t a favourite. But I was so in the bubble of my little girl dream of winning. I was in my deepest place of belief. My greatest strength as a skier was my mind.”
She drew bib No. 12 for the downhill that Saturday morning in France. The top two racers in the world drew No. 11 and No. 13. “I remember saying to Max ( her husband and sometimes coach). ‘ If they can win with 11 and 13, I can win with 12.’ “
And when she reached the bottom of the mountain, even with a full slate of skiers to go, LeeGartner celebrated as though gold was hers.
“It was brazen of me to do that,” she said. “But honestly, I didn’t think someone was going to beat it. At the moment I thought, this is my dream coming true... I had willed myself to ski that awesome that day. And when you grow up as a shy, timid little girl, who didn’t make the provincial team, you have all these thoughts inside of you. I believed so much in that childhood dream and when I saw No. 1 on the scoreboard, I did this dance and let go with these squeals of joy.”
She won gold by six one hun- dredths of a second.
The older she gets — she’s 51 now — the more meaning she finds from her golden race.
“You realize how much the little things matter,” she said. “When you realize how little you win by, six one- hundredths of a second, you realize the critical role of everything that’s around you.”
And now she works the Olympics as a television commentator. And she will be watching on Wednesday as the women race the same event she won eight Winter Games ago. Almost every Games bring with it a certain memory of the past, something that changes or enhances her view of the Albertville triumph.
“When I interviewed Lindsey Vonn after her win in Vancouver, my teenage girls said ‘ Oh my god, mom, you did that. You won that race.’ That was an ‘ aha’ moment for me as a mom. It’s one thing for me to understand what happened. But for your kids? The more time that passes, the more things seem to add to (the legacy).”
Her memory seems crisp on the events of 26 years ago. Just not everyday. And not all the time. Lee- Gartner suffered a serious neck and brain injury from a car accident in California in 16 months ago. Her brain, she said, works a little differently now. Every day is a challenge of some kind. She wears tape on her glasses to cut down the brightness. She has vision issues.
“My processing is a bit slow,” she said. “I guess you could say I’m a work in progress.
“You can’ t j ust determine your way through this. The brain doesn’t work that way.”
So she fights with the same tenaticy she took to the downhill course at Meribel, not knowing what the eventual outcome will be.