Yes, we’d seen Monika Behr fall before. Who hadn’t? More than one of her falls—not just her last one, on that course in Italy—is repeatedly shown in video highlights, whenever winter sports are on television. Monika’s career as a downhill racer ended at Cortina in December 1976. She was Franz Klammer’s age, but she would watch herself falling in video highlights for the rest of her life. She was a crash-or-win downhiller, but mostly a crasher. Monika was an all-out, go-for-broke girl. Molly and I did not share my mother’s affection for Monika Behr. The way that Austrian downhiller skied was the way she did everything else.

After a World Cup race at Val d’Isère in 1974, she had been arrested by the French police for assaulting a photographer. Monika had hit his telephoto lens with the heel of her hand, driving the camera into the photographer’s face, injuring his eye and cutting the bridge of his nose.

She’d crashed in World Cup races at Garmisch and Jackson Hole in 1975. Both times, she’d been accused of assaulting the medics who attended to her after she was airlifted from the course. The way Monika Behr skied, she kept crashing, but she was not airlifted again until they lifted her lifeless-looking body from the course in Italy. She’d bounced from one hip to the other in that final crash, and had not appeared to be conscious after her initial contact with the piste—on the back of her neck.

There was other trouble before the Cortina crash. A fistfight with a downhiller on the U.S. women’s team at a World Cup race at Wengen in 1976—two big girls throwing punches and kicking each other with ski boots, in that restricted area behind the starting gates. Monika Behr had been screwing the boyfriend of the U.S. skier, a brash young man on the U.S. men’s team—he was not without troubles of his own. Then, just two months later, during the World Cup events and festivities in Aspen, Monika Behr had been arrested for lewd behavior in the car belonging to that same male skier; the unfortunate Monika got caught with her panties down, still screwing the guy.

No matter what you thought of Monika Behr, it was hard to watch how she fell at Cortina, or how she looked when they airlifted her that last time—she looked dead.

“Oh, my God, that poor girl—she broke her neck!” my mom cried, shielding her eyes with her hands. She wouldn’t watch the replays. Molly and I were riveted—we watched Monika Behr fall, again and again. If you’d ever skied at all, it was as hard not to watch how she fell as it was to watch.