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End of the Line (Cont.)

For a short while after he won the gold, Johnson was a national hero. He made the cover of Sports Illustrated. He got a Porsche 911 and an Audi Quattro, along with fat victory payouts from Atomic and his other gear sponsors. Corporations paid him to show up at their ski outings.

He did not, to put it mildly, husband his resources carefully. He bought a house overlooking California's Malibu Canyon; a pickup truck; a speedboat. He paid for most of it with cash. Herhusky remembers seeing him once with $40,000 worth of $100 bills in his pocket; the serial numbers on the bills were consecutive.

Johnson met and later married a waitress from Lake Tahoe named Gina Ricci, and the couple traveled in style. "I visited them once at a resort and they were in a high-rise suite, with flowers all over the room," says Herhusky. "We were eating chocolate-covered strawberries and drinking champagne."

Johnson lived like a rock star, and his skiing suffered for it. He showed up for the 1985Ð1986 season out of shape and he crashed hellaciously in Italy, wrenching his knee and herniating disks in his back. "He came to Tahoe to visit me in a cast, bent and broken," recalls Herhusky, "and he just went crazy, gambling, partying. He went to the casino four days straight."

His 15 minutes of fame were over. The endorsements stopped flowing, and in the late eighties he sold the Malibu house. He and Gina began wandering California and Oregon in an RV, with Johnson, a skilled carpenter, picking up money here and there doing renovation work.

"Americans want Olympic athletes to be wholesome, to have integrity, pride, and sportsmanship," says Ryan Schinman. "Bill was outlandish."

He eventually landed a job with Crested Butte Mountain Resort in 1990; as the mountain's "ski ambassador," he was paid to schuss with visiting journalists and corporate bigwigs. But Johnson had a bad habit of bombing the hill and leaving civilians in the dust. In 1995 Crested Butte canceled his five-season contract a year early.

As his old teammates built solid careers in the ski industry, the gold medalist found himself on the margins. "Americans want their Olympic athletes to be wholesome—to have integrity, pride, and sportsmanship," says Ryan Schinman, president of a New York marketing firm called Platinum Rye Entertainment, which has represented Picabo Street and other star performers. "Bill was outlandish, and he had his mother as his agent. What did she know about corporate America?"

For a few years after leaving Crested Butte, Johnson eked out a living on the appearance fees he made at King of the Mountain, a downhill series for retired greats. He never worked a steady job but spent his days scheming—trading stocks on the phone and laying plans to launch a senior ski-racing tour. After he and Gina moved to San Diego in 1996, he played tons of golf. "He fell in with a bunch of guys who had nothing to do but play golf with a bottle of Jack Daniel's," says Herhusky. "He'd stay out for days at a time."

There was tension in the Johnson household, and also bad luck. In 1991, while Bill was caring for his one-year-old son, Ryan, the boy quietly let himself outside and into the hot tub. He didn't drown, but he came so close that, after he spent three hopeless weeks on life support, the Johnsons made the agonizing decision to let him die. They had two more boys—Nicholas in 1992 and Tyler in 1994—but the marriage ended for good in 2000.

Gina now lives with the kids in Northern California, where she works as an orthodontist's assistant. She did not return my phone calls. Bill sees her and his sons rarely, and since his crash he has lost all comprehension of why she vanished from his life. "The real tough part is my wife, the thing with me and my wife," he says. "I don't understand why she doesn't want to be with me. I told her all I want is love. She doesn't understand I don't have a life. My whole life is lost."

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