NEW YORK — Bill Johnson, a swaggering skier who in 1984 became the first American man to win an Olympic gold medal in downhill skiing, but whose life took a sharp, precipitous turn soon afterward, died Thursday at an assisted-living facility in Gresham, Ore. He was 55.
Megan Harrod, a spokeswoman for the US Alpine team, confirmed his death. Mr. Johnson, in declining health, had a series of strokes in recent years after suffering brain damage in a skiing accident in 2001.
Downhill racers, who hurl themselves down slick, dizzying slopes, are seldom retiring, but Mr. Johnson’s brashness stood out. Like Muhammad Ali, who predicted the round in which he would stop an opponent, Mr. Johnson promised Olympic gold in 1984, at Sarajevo. Everybody else, he said, “could fight for second.’’
After winning the gold convincingly, at 23, he was asked what it meant.
“Millions,’’ Mr. Johnson said with his trademark smirk. “We’re talking millions.’’
It was a heady time for Mr. Johnson after that triumph. President Ronald Reagan expressed the nation’s pride at a White House reception, telling him, “You gave your country thrills beyond description.’’ There was a slew of endorsement deals, magazine covers, and, in 1985, a fictionalized television movie about his life, “Going for the Gold: The Bill Johnson Story,’’ starring Anthony Edwards as Mr. Johnson.
Mr. Johnson married, bought a house in Malibu, Calif., and a Porsche. His victories in two World Cup events the month after the Olympics presaged a bright athletic future.
But all that was prelude to a long slide. Mr. Johnson was injured time and again, trained lackadaisically, and sparred with coaches, one of whom he hit on the shin with a ski pole. He competed until 1989, but there were no more Olympics and just a couple of seventh-place finishes in World Cup events. (Before his Olympic triumph, he had been the first American man to win a World Cup downhill competition.)
If his ski career bore a resemblance to the 1969 movie “Downhill Racer,’’ starring Robert Redford, it was no accident. As a youth, Mr. Johnson — who was blond (like Redford), 5 feet 9 inches, and raced at 170 pounds — watched the film many times. The plot involves an ambitious, self-centered racer who rubs everybody the wrong way, then redeems himself by winning an Olympic gold medal.
After retiring in 1989, Mr. Johnson made a quixotic bid to play professional golf, briefly ran a ski school, worked as a carpenter and electrician, lost money in the stock market as a day-trader, moved 11 times in 12 years, and sometimes slept in his RV. He still lived dangerously, driving his Harley very fast, surfing at midnight, racing snowmobiles in Alaska, shooting his guns, and drinking heavily.
In 1991, his 1-year-old son, Ryan, somehow climbed into a hot tub and drowned. In 1999, his wife, the former Gina Ricci, left him; they divorced the next year. She moved to Sonoma, Calif., with their sons Taylor and Nick. Mr. Johnson got in barroom brawls and spent a night in jail.
He was 40 and hoping to put his life back together when he decided to return to skiing and compete to make the US downhill team for the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. He said he thought his wife would come back if he were successful. He got a new tattoo on his right shoulder for the occasion: “Ski to Die.’’
In his first races, he finished last and consequently started last in the next ones. But he slowly advanced in the rankings and was assigned bib No. 34 in a field of 63 downhillers for the national championships, on a course called Corkscrew at the Big Mountain Resort in Montana. It would be “the comeback of the millennium,’’ he proclaimed.
Then came disaster. In the finals, on March 22, 2001, Mr. Johnson, traveling more than 50 miles per hour, lost his balance and crashed headfirst into hard-packed snow, then cartwheeled through two layers of protective netting. With two severe head injuries, he was in a coma for three weeks, his brain irrevocably damaged.
Mr. Johnson had a major stroke in 2010 and lesser ones after that. He was said to drive a motorized scooter at full speed at the assisted-living facility in Gresham. Interviewed for a 2011 documentary, “Downhill: The Bill Johnson Story,’’ Mr. Johnson’s former wife said she had been astounded that he thought he could “fix’’ his life and bring her back by a return to skiing.
William Dean Johnson was born in Los Angeles on March 30, 1960. At 4, he was stopped by his grandmother as he was about to jump off her roof. He took up skiing at 6 or 7, after the family moved to the Mount Hood region of Oregon. His parents stuffed the family in a station wagon to take him to ski meets, sometimes sleeping in parking lots to save money. Mr. Johnson was a good student, skipping two years of elementary school.
He habitually defied authority, once kicking his high school principal. When he was 17 he stole a car, and a juvenile judge gave him a choice: several months in jail or probation, the latter on the condition that he attend the Mission Ridge Academy, a ski school at Wenatchee, Wash. He chose the school and got up at 5 a.m. to wash dishes at a Big Boy restaurant to pay his fees.
When reporters later revealed the car-theft incident, Mr. Johnson blamed his father, saying he had leaked the information to the press in the belief that people would respond sympathetically to the idea of a poor boy recovering from shame to beat rich athletes in an elite sport. Sure enough, a London tabloid proclaimed Mr. Johnson’s victory with the headline: “Car Thief Steals Gold in Sarajevo.’’
In 1979, Mr. Johnson received a scholarship to attend the Alpine Training Center in Lake Placid, N.Y. Wind tunnel tests there discovered that he had aerodynamic gifts that gave him a 3 to 5 percent advantage over anyone who had taken the test. Most skiers have to work at “the tuck,’’ the natural position of downhill skiers: torso hunched over bent knees, fists in front of the face, poles pointed straight back. But it seemed to come naturally to Mr. Johnson, who was compared to a gravity-powered rocket.
He was named to the national team but dropped in 1982 for refusing to run or lift weights. The next year, he dominated the Europa Cup tour, skiing’s top-rung minor league. He was the first American to win the downhill and overall titles in the series.
He started 1983 slowly on the World Cup circuit, finishing 26th, 42nd, 20th, and 23rd in the year’s first downhill events. Then came his breakthrough, in spectacular fashion. In a World Cup race in Wengen, Switzerland, in January 1984, Mr. Johnson seemed to lose control at 70 miles per hour: one ski went right, the other left. He balanced on one ski for a fraction of a second and shot a few yards off the track, but he regained control as if nothing had happened and went on to win, his first World Cup victory.
It set the stage for the Olympics.
The Swiss and Austrian skiers who dominated the sport were openly contemptuous of the downhill run at Sarajevo. “This is basically a course for 8-year-olds,’’ said the Austrian Franz Klammer, the world’s best downhill racer in the mid-1970s. If Mr. Johnson did well, he said, it was only because he could rocket straight down and would not have to turn much.
The two were exemplars of two different styles. If Klammer was the Gene Kelly of downhill skiing, powerfully athletic on steep, icy courses, Mr. Johnson was Fred Astaire, graceful and fluid and landing lightly off a jump. Mr. Johnson launched his gold-medal-winning descent by first pointing his ski pole down at the course unfolding below him, a gesture reminiscent of Babe Ruth’s with a bat in baseball lore. Klammer finished a distant 10th. Klammer said he was “surprised.’’
Complete information on Mr. Johnson’s immediate survivors was not immediately available.
In his later years, Mr. Johnson filed for bankruptcy, lived alone in a mobile home, and was accused of attacking police officers who had stopped him for a traffic violation. The police said he had taunted one officer by waving his gold medal in his face. The medal was one thing he did not let slip away.
“I made the top, and I was the first to do it,’’ he said in 1985. “No one can take that away — ever.’’
