Picabo Street thinks fast, as if she were in a time zone all her own. It was about a year ago, when she was still falling through the air at about 70 m.p.h., that she started planning for her comeback. She had been streaking along on a training run at Vail, Colo., when she encountered a smooth spot where a speed bump had always been. "So I didn't have to make some real crappy turn like we usually do up there. I carved a fatty," she says with some admiration for the slingshot turn that blew her off the fast track to Olympic gold. "That's when I decided, when I saw where I was going to hit, that the potential for me to blow out both my knees right now is pretty high, so I'd better just blow my left one out again. [The surgeon] can clean it up when he goes in there to fix it." The crash went according to plan; with an awful pop, Street tore the anterior cruciate ligament. The damage-control maneuver, she explains, was just like jumping off a big roof. "You wouldn't try to land on both feet, you'd kind of slide out of it." Of course. Just like jumping off a roof.
Well, look out below. The ponytailed tomboy queen of the downhill is back, running on Picabo Standard Time. A human cannonball at 5 ft. 7 in. and 158 lbs., she recovered from her injury about twice as fast as most people would have. But most people don't have Olympic gold as the top item on their list of unfinished business. Street has lately zoomed close to her world-beating form, posting a fourth-place finish in a World Cup downhill at Cortina, Italy. But her comeback took a scary detour in a downhill last Saturday at Are, Sweden, when she crashed at about 75 m.p.h. and was knocked briefly unconscious. Afterward, coach Herwig Demschar proclaimed it "just a normal crash" and said the worst damage was to one of Street's favorite skis. Her father, Ron Street, predicted she would be fit for Nagano, despite a bad headache at the moment: "This will just make it more interesting."
When Street won the silver at Lillehammer in 1994, the freckle-faced 22-year-old instantly vaulted beyond the celebrity of any run-of-the-hill medalist, thanks to her peek-a-boo catchy name, a superabundance of personality and a mountain-hippie upbringing. During the next two years, she matured into a dominant athlete as well. She not only became the first American to win a World Cup downhill title but did it two years in a row. Now she's rich too, from endorsement deals with the likes of Nike, United Airlines and Chap Stick. Her signature cross-training shoe, the Air Max Electrify, is scheduled to hit shelves this month. Her career dreams go even beyond all that: she aims to become a talk-show host. "Every time I watch Rosie O'Donnell, I think about it more," she said last month as she waited to climb up on an awards podium in Lake Placid, N.Y. "I want to do that with athletes so that the world can see all these powerful and funny personalities." For Picabo, stage fright will not be an obstacle.