“That toughness allowed him to reach heights in the skiing world that few will ever accomplish.”Ĭonditions in Sarajevo helped. “Billy was a fighter and went about things his way,” said Phil Mahre, a teammate and Olympic medalist.

Then, a month before the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, he won the famed Lauberhorn downhill in Switzerland, a sign that he had a chance at the Games, a stage normally dominated by Europeans. Subsequent results, however, were less impressive. Johnson made his World Cup debut in 1983 with a promising sixth-place finish at the downhill in St. Once you stood up to him, he respected you.” “It was like the bully on the playground. “We traded flesh once or twice,” his former coach, Erik Steinberg, told The Times in 2010. They added him to the national team in 1979, kicked him off shortly thereafter, then brought him back. ski officials soon came to know “Wild Bill” as confident and iconoclastic. It turned out that Johnson had the perfect body for the downhill, with knees and elbows that fit neatly into a tuck and narrow shoulders that gave him a bullet shape as he flew down the hill. Arrested at 17 for stealing a car, he encountered a judge who sent him to ski academy instead of prison. It took an unlikely push to get his athletic career going. He gravitated to the slopes after his family moved to Idaho and, later, Oregon. William Dean Johnson was born March 30, 1960, in the last place you would expect to find a skier: the San Fernando Valley. “Such a glorious, unlikely and eminently sad tale,” said Christin Cooper, a former teammate.

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