STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Picabo Street’s father Stubby was driving a bus for Sun Valley when he spotted triple-Olympic champion Jean-Claude Killy hopping on. Before Killy had even had a chance to sit down, Street told the French skier  that his teenage daughter was going to be a great ski racer, as well.

“You’ll meet her some day,” he promised. “She’s going to be better than the boys, even though she's a girl.”

Killy remembered that promise. And as he draped an Olympic gold medal around Picabo Street’s neck at the 1998 Nagano Olympics, he bent down to whisper the story in her ear.

The memories came flooding back—for Picabo Street and many in the sell-out audience at the Sun Valley Opera House who had watched her grow up—as the new documentary “Picabo” flashed across the screen.

The 90-minute documentary film, which premiered on Peacock TV and Olympics.com, was directed by former downhill ski racer Lindsey Vonn, who has framed the poster that Picabo signed for her when she was 9.  Co-director was Hollywood producer Frank Marshall, who made “Back to the Future,” “E.T.” and “Indiana Jones.”

The film is packed with action footage, much of it supplied by Joe Jay Jalbert, a former ski racer from the Coeur d’Alene area who shot many movies of skiing in Sun Valley and followed Street for much of her career.

But it also a love story of a family and a young woman with a passion for skiing who grew up in Triumph when the town near Sun Valley sported a sign: “Drive slow. 10 children live in this community.”

Picabo was just trying to keep up with her older brother Baba and his friends when she grabbed Baba’s skis one day and climbed the steep hill behind her family’s house in Triumph, pointing the skis straight down.

“You know you can turn,” her father told her.

“Why? she responded.

She soon joined her father and brother on Baldy where they’d head for the Bowls.

“You’re welcome to join us but you’ve got to keep up or we’ll see you at the car at 4,” Stubby told the little girl.

“I said, ‘I don’t have lunch money. I’ve got to keep up,’” she recounted.

Picabo grew up without TV. But when she saw Sun Valley’s Christin Cooper, Debbie Armstrong and Tamara McKinney at the Sarajevo Olympics in 1984, she knew she’d found her calling.

“Hey, Dad, I want to go to the Olympics and win a medal,” she said.

Her father concurred that it was a good plan and immediately began putting the family’s meager fortunes towards her dream.

A standout with the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation, Street made the U.S. Ski Team at 17 but was sent home for being sassy, irreverent and undisciplined. Her father took her to Hawaii where he put her to work to give her time to figure out whether she really wanted to ski or not.

She decided she did indeed want to ski and became the first American woman to win nine World Cup downhill races and two World Cup downhill season titles.

“Once you win, you want another. It’s addicting,” she said.

Street was sometimes clocked going 70 miles per hour.

“What were you thinking about when you were going that fast?” Vonn asks her in the film.

“I was thinking about how to go faster,” replied Street. “I fell in love with the speed, being able to harness that. I like making it feel not out of control.”

Picabo won a silver in the downhill at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, which she said was “really cool” except for one thing: “It was not my national anthem. I decided I will never step up on stage again and have it be someone else’s anthem.”

But in December 1996—just months after being crowned downhill champion for the second straight year—she decimated her left knee training in Colorado after competing in jut two races and sat out the remainder of the 1997.

Not completely recovered by the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, she inspected the course riding on the back of a coach. She won gold in the Super G nevertheless.

“Sometimes I still have to hold my medals in my hands to realize my dreams really came true,” she said.

Her joy was short-lived though. A month after he rgold medal win, Street careened off course during the final downhill of the 1998 season at Crans-Montana, Switzerland. She shattered her femur in four places and tore a ligament in her right knee.

She insisted on remaining awake during the surgery and was even filmed asking questions of the surgeon during the operation. It would be more than two years before she would race again.

By the time the 2002 Winter Olympics opened in Salt Lake City, the 30-year-old was skiing on the knees of a someone in their mid-60s or 70s. But she couldn’t resist taking part in an Olympics on American turf, and the crowd cheered her on as she carried the torch during the opening ceremony.

She skied her final downhill at those Olympics, finishing sixteenth behind Sun Valley’s Jonna Mendes who finished eleventh. She gracefully took a bow at the finish line as the crowd roared.

Sun Valley’s Christin Cooper, by then a TV announcer, called her the “greatest American downhiller.”

“Nothing but admiration for this Olympic champion who, by all rights, shouldn’t have even been a contender here,” Cooper added.

While much of it is about success, the film doesn’t shy away from the story of a tight-knit family led by a father who offered his daughter the tools for success even as his mood swings caused by his unmanaged diabetes sometimes undercut her success.

Street was arrested six years ago after she and her father, who was suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s and a mental health crisis provoked by low blood sugar, were involved in a domestic altercation.

The charges were dismissed after both her father and mother Dee signed affidavits defending her, but the damage to her brand had already been done.

“What happened in Park City six years ago was so much a mistake, so much a misunderstanding,” Picabo told her Sun Valley audience, dotting her eyes with Kleenex. “I should have never called 911 for help.”

Street, who was known for spending an enormous amount of time signing autographs following her races, spent an afternoon with some of the kids on the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation ski team, telling them to “let this mountain turn you into the skier you will be—because it will.”

“When are you going to sign the helmets?” piped up one youngster in response.

“She was a handful,” laughed Orlie Sather, who coached Picabo when she was a youngster. “I remember she was having trouble getting the concept of a flat ski so we put her on hockey skates and that did it. And no one had a wider stance crossing the finish line of a downhill than she.”

“Everyone knows people so powerful they create their own gravity. When I was a young athlete, we would stand in awe of this woman,” said Scotty McGrew, executive director of Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation.

Street said she didn’t originally want to make the film

“After a while, you get tired of everyone wanting to know your business, judging you,” she said. “When I lived in Alabama, off the radar for a long time, it was kind of nice.”

Street said she saw no reason to do the film unless it was authentic and made a positive point.

“The main reason I did it was for my kids,” she added. “I wanted them to give them a way to understand their mom and her journey.”

Making the film ended up being very therapeutic, Street said.

“I’ve had no negative comments about this project so that’s been a huge breath of fresh air for me. And to see the impact I had on the sport blew my mind.”