Good Vibrations On Picabo Street "I just wanna feel the vibe of the slope" - is how Picabo Street describes it when she skis slowly down a run that she will later be racing on.Picabo likes to survey the terrain just to gauge what "Vibe" a course will throw her way. One time, following knee surgery, Picabo was unable to ski herself. So she hopped on her coach's back and let her coach do the skiing while she did the vibe-checking, Vibes and good vibrations have always played a big deal in Street's family, ever since she got her colorful name from her ski-bum-hippie parents. As a child, her father once told Jean-Claude Killy: "I've got a daughter who's going to win a gold medal some day." Killy, the French god of skiing, sincerely replied: "Good for her. I hope she does." At the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, Picabo Street's deep belief in the Vibes was completely, utterly, reinforced when she was impatiently standing for her turn to walk up onto the awards-dais to accept her gold medal for winning the Super G. She felt the Vibes pass through her body when she saw it was Jean-Claude-Killy - the man her father had made a promise to when she was a little girl - who would be slipping the medal around her neck. "We vibrate on a high level in our family," says Picabo. ©1999 Middlefork Press << BACK TO EXCERPTS