This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Vancouver, British Columbia » Aspen's Andy Mill was in the Florida Keys on Wednesday, watching NBC's "Today" show before going shark fishing, when he heard Lindsey Vonn talk about the shin injury that has jeopardized her medal hopes at the Winter Olympics.
Mill's first thought: That's what happened to me in 1976.
Mill's story is part of U.S. ski racing lore. He crashed in the trees on the first downhill training run at the 1976 Innsbruck Olympics, sustaining a painful shin injury. He would compete in the Olympic downhill and finish sixth, tying what was then the best Olympic downhill result for an American man, only after burying his leg in snow to numb it.
Mill was on crutches for two days after his crash. The day after the injury he went through the starting gate on one ski to satisfy a requirement for an official start before pulling off the course. The next day he iced his leg and ran a full training run.
"I went to the starting arena, stuck my leg in the snow and buried it," Mill recalled. "I froze it for about 40 minutes."
Mill made it through the training run. Barely.
"About halfway down, the numbness kind of wore off and it was just killing me," Mill said. "I thought, 'I've got to stop,' but I was going so fast and it was so icy, I thought, 'Just try to go faster.' "
He iced it again before the race the next day, then missed a bronze medal by less than half a second in the most famous downhill of all time, won in a death-defying descent by Austrian Franz Klammer.