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Outside Magazine February 2002

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End of the Run
Two decades ago in Sarajevo, Bill Johnson won America's first Olympic gold medal in the downhill with an astonishing kamikaze performance. Now, in the wake of a comeback attempt that almost killed him, skiing's crash-course survivor struggles with the consequences of a life lived too fast.

By Bill Donahue


	Johnson and his mother, DB, at home near Portland, Oregon, November 2001

The house was empty and it would soon be demolished—wrecking balls and all that—so they decided to have one last party there, the real estate agent and her friends. It would be a white-trash theme party—the Corn Dog Hoedown. Guests showed up in cutoffs and gingham halter tops. A tattoo artist named Bill Conner laid out his needles on a table by the sliding-glass door overlooking the pool and waited. Conner had traveled here to San Diego all the way from Miami Beach, where he worked at Tattoo Circus, rendering Harley logos, pinup girls, whatever, for tourists. On this February night in 2000, he was doing tats for practically nothing.

Pretty soon along came this guy—muscular, intense, somewhat inebriated. He would get in a fistfight later that evening, after trying to hit on some marine's girlfriend. Conner remembers seeing him with a gash on the head, being escorted off the property. But right now all he wanted was a tattoo, an over-the-top number he'd thought of himself. "I drew up a little skull with flames coming out of it and a banner underneath with the words 'Ski to Die,'" Conner says. "He was stoked."

Drunk-guy tattoos are often a source of serious regret, but not this time. The man who got it was an unrepentant speed demon, a former world-class skier who'd attained a brief flash of stardom, ages before.

On February 16, 1984, William Dean Johnson, then 23, won the men's downhill at the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. On that cold afternoon he became the first American man in Olympic history to earn a gold medal in an alpine skiing event. Perhaps you remember his run: the hissing violence of his skis as he knifed through the tight turns on the upper half of the course, the wild looseness of his body flowing over the jumps, that ultratight tuck, and the euphoria with which ABC announcer Bob Beattie shouted, "Yes, he's done it! He's done it!"

The spectacle was even more poignant because Bill Johnson was a working-class kid, a onetime juvenile delinquent snatching victory in a sport long ruled by the rich. Johnson had grown up near Portland, Oregon, in the logging town of Brightwood, and his family was so strapped for cash that at times they had to sleep in the car when they traveled to ski races. As a kid, Bill broke into houses for kicks. He once stole a Chevy; he spent three days in jail.

He was brash, abrasive, and wholly surprising. When he arrived in Sarajevo, he wasn't even among the world's top ten downhillers. Yet the course—relatively straight and flat—was tailor-made for fast gliders like Johnson, and he saw this, cockily predicting, "Everyone else is here to fight for second place." He backed it up, too, trouncing his closest competitor by 0.27 seconds. When one reporter asked about the value of his gold medal, he swaggered and said, "Millions. We're talking millions."

He was not a bad guy, actually. He responded to all of the 50 or so fan letters he got each week, and after winning the gold he remained the consummate buddy to a tight band of friends, most of them skiers. "He's loyal to the death," says retired U.S. Ski Team racer Mark Herhusky. "He's the kind of person you'd want on your side in a barroom scuffle."

But Johnson's crash-and-burn style was better suited to the slopes than to daily life. He drove fast, partied hard, shot guns, surfed at midnight, and in general carried on as if those clichéd extreme-sport adages—Rip it! Tear shit up!—were his holy credo. In the end, the fire that propelled him, that youthful fearlessness, would devolve into a sort of desperation—nihilism, even. He would become the stereotypical ex-jock who destroys himself trying to act young, and his life would serve as proof that you cannot burn on forever. There he was at the white-trash party—unemployed, of no fixed address, in the midst of a divorce, and pathetically intent on reconnecting to his glorious past.

Ski to Die. Right after the ink dried on his shoulder, Johnson—who was about to turn 40—launched a long-shot bid to make the 2002 Olympic ski team. Almost no one has stayed on the team past 30. Johnson had retired from the World Cup circuit at 29 and had spent much of the past decade off skis, working as a freelance carpenter. He had herniated five disks and his shoulder was held together with pins, thanks to old ski-racing injuries. Without any sponsorship of note, he had only one pair of new skis instead of the five or six that elite racers typically need.

Nonetheless, last winter he began tooling around the West in his '84 Ford pickup—going to races and slowly climbing out of the basement of the national rankings. By March 2001, when it came time for the U.S. Alpine Championships at Big Mountain in Montana, Johnson was starting 33rd in a field of 63 racers. He hoped to triumph by skiing fast through an icy, rutted dogleg turn near the base. He hit the turn at 50 miles per hour. Then he caught an edge, his legs went spread-eagle, and his body flew sideways through the mesh fence marking the course. His helmeted head smacked the snow, hard; his brain rotated inside his skull, and tissue tore and bled. Within minutes he was in a coma.

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