The 30-year-old has labored in the shadow of household names like Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin. On Sunday, she made history of her own
F
or years, Breezy Johnson was the other American alpine skier. The one with the near-misses, the injuries, the suspension and the unfortunate timing to exist in the same stable at the same time as Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin. On Sunday, three weeks after her 30th birthday in the shadow of the Dolomites above Cortina d’Ampezzo, she became an Olympic champion.
Johnson crossed first in the women’s downhill at the Milano Cortina Games by four-hundredths of a second – the slightest winning margin in the event’s Olympic history outside the dead heat in 2014 – to become just the second American woman to win the sport’s most prestigious title. The only other was Vonn, who took gold in Vancouver 16 years ago.
Johnson’s winning time of 1min 36.10sec held off Germany’s Emma Aicher, earning the United States their first medal of these Olympics. Four-hundredths of a second isn’t much time at all: the blink of a camera shutter, the wingbeat of a hummingbird, the duration of Muhammad Ali’s phantom punch. But on a sun-splashed morning, it was enough to lift the skier from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, into winter sports immortality.
