Hobbling Toward the Podium

Removing the plate loosened up internal scar tissue, easing Street's knee pain, broadening range of motion, and sparking her competitive drive: "I swear to God, that night I felt better. By six that evening I had my range of motion back and I said, 'Ohhh, yesss!'" She launched into a seven-day-a-week rehab process. Following her strategy in 1997, Street infused her monotonous daily regimen of upper-body weight training and plyometrics in the pool with short-term goals, like getting rid of the crutches by week six and moving workouts from pool to grass after a few months. The idea, she says, is to map your recovery in increments that lead to the ultimate objective, which in her case is carrying the American flag at the opening ceremonies of the Salt Lake Games.

"If all an athlete thinks about is winning again, or getting back into their sport, they get really frustrated early on," says Steadman. "What I do is give people short-term goals. That way they can go from one goal to the next, and at the end, the Olympic gold medal becomes realistic again."

Rather than dwelling on the tediousness of, say, running in the pool with a flotation belt for non-impact workouts, she visualized these sessions as steps toward the bigger picture—stabilizing her knee and getting back on skis. "It's like a scientific equation," Street says. "By building a recovery from start to finish, and bringing all the little things together first, I have a day-to-day recipe for success that I can't screw up, and that leads me to where I want to be." She treated even small rehab victories with the same zeal she demonstrated during World Cup wins. "She called me one time after throwing up from a sprinting workout on the stadium steps," says Matt James, the trainer who helped orchestrate her 1998 comeback. "She was excited because she was able to push her body to the point of getting sick instead of her knee preventing her from continuing because of pain. I mean, she was fired up about getting sick!"

By September 1999, 18 months after her Crans Montana crash, Street had linked these lesser victories to her first giant step—medical approval from Steadman to click into her skis and hit the snow.

Exorcising the Speed Demons

Her knees cleared for takeoff, the final challenge for Street became recapturing the aggressiveness that had made her a champion. "That aspect of me didn't go anywhere," she says. "A few femur fragments didn't run away with my bag of confidence." As if to prove her point, on her very first run last December at her home base, Park City Mountain Resort, she didn't just ski down, she tucked down Payday—the same run where, at age 12, she won her first downhill race.

In May, a month after a final arthroscopic procedure to remove scar tissue from the knee, Street rejoined the U.S. Ski Team for an on-snow camp in Mammoth, California. Her coaches started with a slow progression of speed workouts, increasing the risk-taking at subsequent camps on Mount Hood in June and in Chile in September. The approach focused on "lots of GS turns, a little bit of Super G, and some methodically controlled downhill runs to get the wind in her face," says women's downhill coach Jim Tracy. "Every step gives her a new benchmark for confidence."

While Street is getting stronger every day, she's still far from gold-medal form. She's tentatively scheduled to compete in her first race on November 16 in Park City ("I'll be skipping the race in Crans Montana, thank you very much," she laughs). And while she'll race a full schedule this season, it won't be to win races as much as to polish her rusty technique and build toward the big show in 2002. "I'm going back out there to have a good time," says Street. "If I don't win anything, so be it, but I'll have control over my body again."

Telemark skier Chris Keyes is an assistant editor at Outside.