Sixty-two years after she won a pair of skiing medals — and 16 years after her death — Vancouver’s Gretchen Fraser still provides an Olympic yardstick.
Her name became part of the Winter Games conversation a few days ago when American skiers followed the route Fraser pioneered to the Olympic medals stand.
Fraser was the first American skier to win an Olympic medal when she took silver in the Alpine combined in the 1948 Winter Games at St. Moritz, Switzerland. She topped that two days later by winning a gold medal in the slalom.
Fraser’s role as an Olympic trailblazer was acknowledged several times in stories from Whistler, B.C. Reporters noted that Julia Mancuso was the first American woman to medal in the combined or super combined since Fraser.
Mancuso also was described as only the fifth American woman to win two Alpine medals in the same Olympics — a list that started with Fraser in 1948.
It was a remarkable silver-gold finish for the 28-year-old Fraser, an unlikely member of a lightly regarded U.S. women’s team.
In a 1980 interview with The Columbian, Fraser recalled her transition from Vancouver housewife to Olympic athlete.
Her husband Don — who had skied in the 1936 Olympics — was with a Navy fighter squadron during World War II. Gretchen spent the war years at Sun Valley, Idaho, developing a ski program for amputees who’d lost limbs in military service.
“We were trying to develop an oil business in Vancouver after the war when the next Olympics came up. Don said I’d never know what I could do unless I tried, and said I’d always regret it if I didn’t go to the tryouts,” Fraser told The Columbian.
She won a spot on a women’s team that wasn’t exactly regarded as a powerhouse.
“We didn’t even have a coach when we went to St. Moritz. Members of the men’s Alpine team would take turns coaching us each day. They resented being with us, and did pretty much what they wanted,” Fraser, who died in 1994, said. “If one wanted to sleep in, he’d show up at 11.”
A donor provided money to hire a coach, a Swiss skier who missed making the host nation’s men’s team.
Cooling her heels
In the slalom, Fraser took the lead with her first run. Then she endured an agonizing delay before the second run that clinched the gold medal.
“I had to wait 18 minutes at the starting gate while they fixed a phone connection that was part of their timing system,” she said.
That medal was six ounces of solid gold, Fraser added — not a gold-plated piece of metal.
“I’ve worn it to dinner, and had it swing forward as I was being seated,” Fraser said in the interview. “It broke the dinner plate.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story, or just tell a story.
