Megan Harrod, a backer for the United States Alpine team, accepted his death. Johnson, in crumbling health, had a alternation of acclamation in contempo years afterwards comestible academician blow in a skiing blow in 2001.
Downhill racers, who bung themselves down slick, boundless slopes, are hardly retiring, but Johnson’s assumption stood out. Like Muhammad Ali, who predicted the annular in which he would stop an opponent, Johnson promised Olympic gold in 1984, at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. Everybody else, he said, “could action for second.”
After acceptable the gold convincingly, at 23, he was asked what it meant.
“Millions,” Johnson said with his brand smirk. “We’re talking millions.”
It was a exciting time for Johnson afterwards that triumph. President Ronald Reagan bidding the nation’s pride at a White Abode reception, cogent him, “You gave your country thrills above description.” There were a bulk of endorsement deals, annual covers and, in 1985, a fictionalized television cine about his life, “Going for the Gold: The Bill Johnson Story,” starring Anthony Edwards as Johnson.Johnson affiliated and bought a abode in Malibu, Calif., and a Porsche. His victories in two World Cup contest the ages afterwards the Olympics presaged a ablaze able-bodied future.
But all that was commencement to a continued slide. Johnson was afflicted time and again, accomplished lackadaisically and sparred with coaches, one of whom he hit on the shin with a ski pole. He competed until 1989, but there were no added Olympics and just a brace of seventh-place finishes in World Cup events. (Before his Olympic triumph, he had been the aboriginal American man to win a World Cup decline competition.)
If his ski career bore a affinity to the 1969 cine “Downhill Racer,” starring Robert Redford, it was not coincidental. As a youth, Johnson — who was albino (like Mr. Redford), 5 anxiety 9 inches and raced at 170 pounds — watched that blur abounding times. The artifice involves an ambitious, blowhard racer who rubs everybody the amiss way, again redeems himself by acceptable an Olympic gold medal.
After backward in 1989, Johnson fabricated a benevolent bid to play able golf, briefly ran a ski school, formed as a carpenter and an electrician, absent money in the banal bazaar as a day trader, confused 11 times in 12 years and sometimes slept in his R.V. He still lived dangerously, active his Harley actual fast, surfing at midnight, antagonism snowmobiles in Alaska, cutting his accoutrements and bubbler heavily.
In 1991, his 1-year-old son, Ryan, somehow climbed into a hot tub and drowned. In 1999, his wife, the above Gina Ricci, larboard him; they afar the next year. She confused to Sonoma, Calif., with their two sons. Johnson got into alehouse brawls and spent a night in jail.
He was 40 and acquisitive to put his activity aback calm if he absitively to acknowledgment to skiing and attempt to accomplish the American decline aggregation for the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. He said he anticipation his wife would appear aback if he were successful. He got a new boom on his appropriate accept for the occasion: “Ski to Die.”
In his aboriginal races, he accomplished endure and appropriately started endure in the next ones. But he boring avant-garde in the rankings and was assigned bib No. 34 in a acreage of 63 downhillers for the civic championships, on a advance alleged Corkscrew at the Big Mountain Resort in Montana. It would be “the improvement of the millennium,” he proclaimed.
Then came disaster. In the finals, on March 22, 2001, Johnson, traveling added than 50 afar per hour, absent his antithesis and comatose headfirst into hard-packed snow, again cartwheeled through two layers of careful netting. With two astringent arch injuries, he was in a blackout for three weeks, his academician assuredly damaged.
Johnson had a above achievement in 2010 and bottom ones afterwards that. He was said to drive a automatic scooter at abounding acceleration at the assisted-living ability in Gresham. Interviewed for a 2011 documentary, “Downhill: The Bill Johnson Story,” Johnson’s above wife said she had been afraid that he anticipation he could “fix” his activity and accompany her aback by a acknowledgment to skiing.
William Dean Johnson was built-in in Los Angeles on March 30, 1960. At 4, he was chock-full by his grandmother as he was about to jump off her roof. He took up skiing at 6 or 7, afterwards the ancestors confused to the Mount Hood arena of Oregon. His parents blimp the ancestors in a base wagon to yield him to ski meets, sometimes sleeping in parking lots to save money. Johnson was a acceptable student, absence two years of elementary school.
He commonly defied authority, already blame his top academy principal. If he was 17 he blanket a car, and a adolescent adjudicator gave him a choice: several months in bastille or acquittal on the action that he appear the Mission Ridge Academy, a ski academy at Wenatchee, Wash. He chose the academy and got up at 5 a.m. to ablution dishes at a Big Boy restaurant to pay his fees.
When reporters after appear the car-theft incident, Johnson abhorrent his father, adage he had leaked the advice to the account media in the acceptance that humans would acknowledge affably to the abstraction of a poor boy convalescent from abashment to exhausted affluent athletes in an aristocratic sport. Sure enough, a London abridged proclaimed Johnson’s achievement with the banderole “Car Thief Steals Gold in Sarajevo.”
In 1979, Johnson accustomed a scholarship to appear the Alpine Training Center in Lake Placid, N.Y. Wind adit tests there apparent that he had aerodynamic ability that gave him a 3 to 5 percent advantage over anyone abroad who had taken the test. Most skiers accept to plan at “the tuck,” the position acclimated by decline skiers: anatomy angled over angled knees, fists in foreground of the face, poles acicular beeline back. But it seemed to appear by itself to Johnson, who was compared to a gravity-powered rocket.
He was called to the civic team, but was abandoned in 1982 for abnegation to run or lift weights. The next year he bedeviled the Europa Cup tour, skiing’s top-rung accessory league. He was the aboriginal American to win the decline and all-embracing titles in the series.
He started 1983 boring on the World Cup circuit, finishing 26th, 42nd, 20th and 23rd in the year’s aboriginal decline events. Again came his breakthrough, in amazing fashion. In a World Cup chase in Wengen, Switzerland, in January 1984, Johnson seemed to lose ascendancy at 70 m.p.h.: one ski went right, the added left. He counterbalanced on one ski for a atom of a additional and attempt a few yards off the track, but he regained ascendancy as if annihilation had happened and went on to his aboriginal World Cup victory.
It set the date for the Olympics. The Swiss and Austrian skiers who bedeviled the action were aboveboard audacious of the decline run at Sarajevo. “This is basically a advance for 8-year-olds,” said the Austrian Franz Klammer, the world’s best decline racer in the mid-1970s. If Johnson did well, he said, it was abandoned because he could rocket beeline down and would not accept to about-face much.
The two were exemplars of two altered styles. If Klammer was the Gene Kelly of decline skiing, effectively able-bodied on steep, icy courses, Johnson was Fred Astaire, adroit and aqueous and landing agilely off a jump. Johnson launched his gold-medal-winning coast by aboriginal pointing his ski pole down at the advance advance beneath him, a action evocative of Babe Ruth’s with a bat in baseball lore. Klammer accomplished a abroad 10th and said he was “surprised.”
Johnson is survived by his mother, D. B. Johnson-Cooper; two sisters, Victoria Johnson and Kathryn Pundt; a brother, Wallace; and two sons, Nicholas and Tyler.
In his after years, Johnson filed for bankruptcy, lived abandoned in a adaptable home and was accused of advancing badge admiral who had chock-full him for a cartage violation. The badge said he had taunted one administrator by bouncing his gold badge in his face. The badge was one affair he did not let blooper away.
“I fabricated the top, and I was the aboriginal to do it,” he said in 1985. “No one can yield that abroad — ever.”
Blogger Comment
Facebook Comment