Ski racer Bill Johnson lived life in the fine tradition of ski culture: on the edge. The 1984 Olympic Gold Medalist in the downhill in Sarajevo died this week of complications from severe strokes.
Johnson became an American hero when he called his win at the Olympics, beating heavily-favored Europeans like Franz Klammer, even giving a pole point while standing on top of the course moments before his medal-winning run, like Babe Ruth calling a home run.
But the ski racer’s mercurial rise was followed by a steady fall from grace. According to the New York Times, Johnson, who was born in Los Angeles and who’s family taught him to ski while living in Hood River, Oregon, never again made the Olympics, plagued by poor training habits and injuries. But even when his skiing career was essentially over, he continued to live fast, drinking heavily and driving his motorcycles faster.
And he suffered through tragedy: in 1991, his one-year-old son, Ryan, managed to crawl into a hot tub and drowned. He eventually split from his wife, Gina Ricci, with whom he had two other boys, Taylor and Nick. When he made a dramatic comeback to ski racing in 2001, attempting to make the 2002 Olympic team, his motivation was said to have been to win his wife back. But his comeback ran into disaster when he suffered a hellacious wipeout that sent him careening down the course at Montana’s Big Mountain Resort and into a coma for three weeks due to head trauma. While he would ski recreationally again, he would never fully recover. He suffered a severe stroke in 2010 and several lesser ones after. Still, he lived his life as fast as he was able: anecdotes from an assisted living center he was in have him driving his motorized scooter at breakneck speeds.
Johnson was the first American to win a World Cup event and the story of his rise is certainly grand: at 17 he stole a car and instead of jail, the judge granted him parole on the condition he’d join the Mission Ridge Ski Academy in Wenatchee, Washington where he was living at the time. He eventually earned a scholarship to attend the Alpine Training Center in Lake Placid, N.Y. But his injuries from the sport eventually caught up to him.
“Bill believed he was destined for greatness,” said Christin Cooper, a silver medalist in slalom, commentator and teammate to Johnson. “He spoke about it all the time. And in the end, he wasn’t wrong. I’m proud to have known him and to have been witness to one of the wildest, most unlikely, rides into history ever taken on skis. The good, the bad and the ugly. That was Bill. And he proudly, even gracefully in the end, owned all of it. He gave us his irrepressible unapologetic, self. A rare gift indeed.”
