Diana Golden

1963-2001

American skier

Diana Golden lost her right leg to cancer at age 12 and then went on to become a world champion disabled skier. During her career, she won ten world champion titles and 19 national titles. She also won the gold medal for disabled skiing at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta. More than any other disabled athlete, she helped to popularize disabled sporting events. She retired from competitive skiing in 1990, becoming a motivational speaker and a spokeswoman for the right of disabled athletes to be recognized as athletes first. She died of cancer in 2001 at age 38.

Golden grew up in Lincoln, Massachusetts. She began skiing at age five, and the sport quickly became her passion. However, when she was 12, bone cancer in her right leg forced the amputation of the leg above the knee. She asked immediately after the surgery: "Will I still be able to ski?" Golden discovered that she could still ski, and only six months after the operation that saved her life but took her leg, she was back on the slopes.

She retrained at a school run by the New England Handicapped Sports Association for disabled skiers in Mount Sunapee, New Hampshire, where her instructors and fellow students were Vietnam veterans who had lost limbs, blind people, and paraplegics. One of her instructors later remembered Golden as "the most precocious kid I'd ever met," Scott S. Greenberger wrote in the Boston Globe.

A keen sense of humor carried Golden through the challenges of relearning to ski. Once, while practicing, a group of boys cut her off on the slope, causing her to lose her balance and tumble down the hill. She pulled off her artificial leg and threw it at the boys, according to Michael O'Connor of the Boston Herald, saying: "Look what you guys did! You knocked my leg off!"

After graduating from Lincoln-Sudbury High School, she attended Dartmouth College, continuing her training with the school's ski team. She graduated from Dartmouth in 1984. She then went on to international competition, earning gold medals at the World Disabled Ski Championships; she won ten gold medals lifetime at this event. In addition, she won 19 gold medals at the U.S. Disabled Alpine Championships, in the giant slalom, the slalom, the downhill, and the combined events.

Sense of Humor

Uncomfortable with suggestions that she was especially brave for having an international skiing career despite having only one leg, Golden preferred that people respect her for her skiing skills. She successfully fought for the right to compete with fully abled athletes, discarding ski equipment designed for use by disabled people, in favor of ordinary equipment, which could give her faster times.

The victory for which Golden became best known was her gold medal at the first Olympic games that included disabled skiing—the 1988 Winter Olympics at Calgary. The International Olympic Committee named Golden Female Skier of the Year.

Golden took about two and a half years off from skiing, from 1982 through 1985, saying it helped her perspective both on and off the slopes. "It gave me time to find my identity apart from my skiing so that when I came back to skiing it was something I wanted to do for me and not because I needed that image from other people," she said.

After she retired from competitive skiing, Golden became a motivational speaker, exhibiting the same passion. "I loved the speaking," she told the Boston Globe. "There was no gold medal at the end, but to succeed you had to touch someone's heart."

Golden's illness, however, took an emotional as well as physical toll; she made at least one suicide attempt. But she rebounded, while battling the cancer. She took up mountain climbing, once climbing the more than 14,000 foot summit of Mount Rainier in Washington state.

Golden compared her fight for the rights of disabled athletes to the women's movement. "Think about women," she told Sports Illustrated 's Kostya Kennedy. "People used to pat us on the back and say, 'Isn't that sweet? She's competing.' Now they don't do that anymore. It's the same with the disabled. People treat us with dignity."

"To me it has to do with the dignity of each person. Each person is worthy of respect, so it's a matter of if I choose to live with that dignity myself."

In 1997, Golden married Steve Brosnihan. Brosnihan had noticed Golden years before, while they were both students at Dartmouth. He was on the school's baseball team, and he noticed her running on the baseball fields on crutches. "I remember watching her," Brosnihan said. "I admired her so much, she was always so vivacious. Sometimes I'd see her crossing the college green on crutches, and I'd speed up just to get ahead of her, so I could see her smile. She doesn't remember any of that." The two didn't get to know each other until years later, in Bristol, Rhode Island, where by then, Brosnihan was a freelance cartoonist.

Golden's cancer, in check throughout her skiing career, returned full force. In 1993, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Then, after undergoing a double mastectomy, she learned she had cancer of the uterus and underwent a hysterectomy, destroying her ability to have children. The cancer still spread, again attacking her bones in 1996, as it had in her childhood. By 1999, the cancer had spread to her liver, and she was not expected to survive more than a few years. She died at Women's and Infant's Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2001. She was survived by her husband, her mother, Sylvia Finlay Golden, her sister, Meryl Lim, and her brother, Mark.

Golden's Legacy

While many admired Golden for overcoming obstacles, she insisted on being an athlete, period. In an interview shortly before her death, Golden described herself as a Type A personality and said, "It wasn't about wanting to overcome cancer; it was about wanting to kick butt."

She frequently scoffed at suggestions about her courage. "Sometimes, stereotypes make me laugh," she said. "Often, I've heard it on television, 'We're talking with a girl today who had cancer when she was 12, beat the odds and now she skis.' I say: 'Now wait a minute. I don't just ski. I'm the best in the world and I train my heart and soul out for this and I ski 150 days and I work out in the weight room, and to me courageous doesn't imply any of that.'"

"Athletes don't want to be courageous. They want to be good."

Chronology

Awards and Accomplishments

Among her biggest fans was filmmaker Warren Miller. Golden skied for three minutes in Miller's film, "Escape to Ski." Said Miller: "After you're with her for a few minutes, you totally forget her handicap. She has her act together, and it's not an act."

FURTHER INFORMATION

Periodicals

Araton, Harvey. "Sports of the Times; A Champion Slips Away Unnoticed." New York Times (August 30, 2001): D1.

Greenberger, Scott S. "Diana Golden Brosnihan, 38, Champion Skier, Motivator." Boston Globe (August 27, 2001): C11.

Kennedy, Kostya. "Inside Out; News and Notes from the World of Adventure Sports." Sports Illustrated (September 17, 2001): A17.

Litsky, Frank. "Diana Golden Brosnihan, Skier, Dies at 38." New York Times (August 28, 2001): B7.

Sullivan, Robert and Lynn Johnson. "Love is a Reason to Live." Life (October 1997): 44.

Other

Hirschfield, Cindy. "In Memoriam: Diana Golden Brosnihan." SkiingMag.com, http://www.skiingmag.com/skiing/skiing_scene/article/0,12910,328545,00.html (February 9, 2003).

Sketch by Michael Belfiore