Having blown both knees, the Olympic champ is back with her twice-proven prescription for total recovery

By Chris Keyes

Mike Powell/Allsport

The wreck was only the latest in a string of skiing accidents that have seriously battered Street's knees. Picabo, now 29, is arguably the finest example—inspiring proof, really—of what a top-notch knee-rehabilitation program can do for an athlete. She's far down the road to recovery and, if all goes well over the next year and a half, to an unprecedented third comeback on her home turf at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Since the crash in Switzerland, Street has battled through five surgeries, endured two and a half years of physical therapy, and overcome a bout of depression. This after already having twice accomplished the improbable: She recovered from an ACL tear in her left knee in 1989 to win Olympic silver in 1994, and suffered the same injury again in 1996, recovering in only 14 months to win her gold in Nagano in 1998. Now she has a handy blueprint she believes can bring her, or any other athlete, back to peak performance.

Every year, 50,000 recreational and professional athletes in America are sidelined either by tearing an ACL, the ligament that stabilizes the knee, or by rupturing a meniscus, the cartilage that acts as the knee's shock absorber; knees are the joints treated most often by U.S. orthopedic surgeons. Such injuries can be significant bumps in the road (or trail, or ski run), but advances in arthroscopic surgery and refined physical therapy protocols mean that given the proper approach, you can mend. Here, then, is how Picabo Street is doing it. If you're among the many thousands who, like her, stand on wounded knees, there's plenty of fresh hope on the horizon.

Scalpel, Please

Since the 1998 crash, Street's biggest challenge has been staying out of the operating room. Doctors inserted a steel plate and nine screws to stabilize her femur right after the accident, and a month later they arthroscopically sewed up her torn lateral meniscus. Because meniscus-surgery patients aren't supposed to bend their knees more than 90 degrees, and ACL therapy requires a fuller range of motion, Street postponed the ACL reconstruction to simplify recovery. Then in October of that year, with strengthened quadriceps but flimsy ligaments, she reinjured the lateral meniscus while stepping out of her car.

"Two days later I was back with Dr. [Richard] Steadman," Street explains, referring to the Vail-based orthopedic surgeon—one of the best in the country—who has performed all of her knee operations. "I just said, 'Fix it. The whole damn thing. I'm not coming in here again.'" Rebuilding the ACL and lateral meniscus simultaneously meant much more complicated rehab, and worse, a second year away from competitive skiing. For Street, it was a dismal prescription. "That broke me—having to go to camp again on crutches in front of all my teammates," she says. "The thought of missing two seasons was just too much. It was too close to the retirement zone."

She plunged into depression. Some mornings she lay in bed for hours, replaying the crash in her head, unmotivated to get up and uninterested in seeing herself on crutches. When she did venture out of bed to work on her right knee, she had to shift her weight onto her partially healed left leg, where scar tissue from the steel plate limited her range of motion and made any exercise extremely painful. In March of 1999, Street took a second calculated risk and had the steel plate removed. "They told me, 'If we take this out, there is no guarantee that the nine holes going through your femur are going to close.' But I went for it. I just knew that my femur would be solid and never an issue again in my entire life." It paid off; X rays show a completely healed bone.