Chapter Seventeen
Blaire woke with the familiar pre-race nerves in her muscles feeling different now that she knew this was the last Olympic downhill she’d ever race.
The bruises from the training crash ached when she sat up.
It was a dull reminder of how close she’d come to ending her medal-filled career the wrong way.
She went through her routine slower than usual, not out of hesitation, but because every motion felt like a small goodbye: pulling on her base layers, taping the same ankle she’d taped a thousand times, checking her phone one last time before setting it aside.
Isaline’s text from the night before still sat at the top of her thread. Don’t you dare scratch from the downhill—I still want you in that race.
Blaire allowed herself one quiet exhale that might have been a laugh, might have been more along the lines of a moan.
She put her outer layers on with a deliberate focus on every movement she made.
She laced her boots with the same ritual she’d used since she was a kid in Sun Valley and stepped into the corridor.
The village at dawn was different from the daylight energy.
It was quiet, almost reverent. A few early risers moved through the halls like shadows, their footsteps muffled on the industrial carpet.
Blaire took the stairs instead of the elevator, letting her legs wake up naturally, before she pushed through the doors into the cold mountain air.
At breakfast, the room hummed with the nervous energy of race day.
Her own table threw out the standard banter, but Tess and Jordy kept their conversations with Blaire lean: logistics, weather, bus times.
The medal from the Super-G sat back in the room, not around her neck.
She didn’t need a reminder. Her body remembered every race, every podium, and the way the anthem had sounded.
Across the hall, she caught a glimpse of the Swiss table.
Their eyes met for a fraction of a second.
There was no wave, no exaggerated smile, just a small acknowledgment that they both knew what today was.
Blaire looked away first, not out of rejection, but because if she kept looking, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to swallow around the lump in her throat.
The day landed on her with the weight of finality and possibility at once. She wanted to walk out of these Games as the woman who had chosen her own ending, not the one the dangerous sport had chosen for her.
On her way out of the dining hall, she touched the USA flag patch on her jacket once, a quiet grounding gesture, and headed for the shuttle without waiting for anyone to call her name.
~~
On the hill for inspection, Blaire side-slipped down a steep section with Tess just ahead.
Her skis chattered softly against the hard-packed snow.
The course stretched below them in the crisp morning light.
Every gate placement was visible, making the fall line almost too inviting.
She paused at the compression that had eaten her in training.
She planted her poles as she looked at the blind roll beyond.
Tess glided back up beside her. “Good snow today. Fast but forgiving if you don’t fight it.”
Blaire nodded as she remained laser focused. The spot didn’t look dangerous now. It just looked like terrain. She let herself feel the residual ache in her ribs from where she’d hit the fence.
“That crash scared me,” she said quietly.
Tess didn’t flinch. “That’s good. Means you’re paying attention.”
“Not the fall. The reason.” Blaire shifted her weight, testing her edges. “I skied like I was trying to outrun something instead of toward something.”
Tess studied her for a long beat. “And how are you feeling about it today?”
“Today I’m one hundred percent here.” The words came out simpler than she had expected. “Not letting anything get in my way. Not proving anything. Just skiing because I still can.”
They finished the inspection in silence.
Blaire memorized transitions more through her body than her mind.
At the start area, she clicked out and stood with her skis planted in the snow, staring down the course one more time.
Other athletes moved around her—nervous chatter, last-minute wax checks, coaches shouting reminders.
She tuned it all out.
In her head, she laid out the contract with herself: she would not ski to erase Isaline from her thoughts.
She would not ski to bury the crash or to crown herself untouchable one last time.
She would ski because this was what she loved—the terrifying, exhilarating act of standing at the top of a mountain and choosing her own path down it.
Whatever came after—gold, nothing, everything in between—would be hers. No apologies and no regrets.
The fear didn’t vanish. It settled into the landscape of her focus, just another feature to manage alongside wind and gradient and the ticking clock. She took one slow breath and felt her ribs expand against the bruises. Then she made her way back toward the warmup area.
Tess fell into step beside her. “You good?”
Blaire glanced sideways, and the ghost of a smile tugged at her mouth. “I’m golden!”
Blaire slid into position at the starting gate of her final Olympic race.
With her ski tips hovering over the wand, the countdown clock ticked in her peripheral vision.
Around her, the noise of the start house compressed into white static—radio chatter, wind buffeting the gate tower, someone calling splits from below.
None of it reached her. Her tunnel narrowed to snow and gradient and the clean thump of her own heartbeat.
She flexed her fingers around her poles, feeling the familiar weight. The gate official’s voice cut through: “Racer ready.”
She dropped her chin once.
“Ten seconds!”
Her breath slowed. In. Hold. Out. It was the same rhythm she’d used since she was seventeen.
“Five!”
For a fraction of a second, an image flickered unbidden…
Isaline in the start house somewhere behind her on the list, waiting her turn.
Blaire didn’t push the thought away. She let it settle beside everything else—the years, the crashes, the medals, the nights she’d spent alone because she had a singular goal.
All of it poured into the same reservoir that had always powered her best runs.
This wasn’t just about outrunning fear anymore. It was about proving she could still choose her race when it mattered, even with the end of her career on the table.
The beep sounded.
Blaire exploded forward, driving through the wand with her full weight.
Her poles snapped back as she found her tuck.
The first few gates blurred past in a familiar rhythm—pressure, release, balance.
The snow felt fast beneath her, alive in a way that made her edges sing.
She tucked tighter, letting gravity pull her into the death-defying speed she’d spent a lifetime learning to trust.
At the first steep pitch, she committed early, the way she always had. Her body remembered what her mind didn’t need to argue with anymore. The first turn loomed ahead. She saw the line, felt the exact moment to pressure, and drove through it without hesitation. No second-guessing.
The inner ski held.
Her breath punched out in a sharp exhale as she launched into the next section. The wind tore at her suit, and every muscle fired in perfect sequence. This was why she’d come back for one last race and why she’d fought through the ache and the fear and the weight of knowing it was ending.
Because nothing else in her life had ever felt this good.
The upper gliding section flew by in a familiar rush: tuck low, hands forward, weight perfectly balanced.
She felt the skis come alive under her. They practically sang on the hard surface.
Every small terrain ripple transmitted through her legs like an intricate language she’d been fluent in for decades.
She hit the first real technical section and trusted the line she and Tess had picked.
No extra safety margin, no defiant overcommitment to prove she wasn’t scared—just the exact risk profile of a woman who knew this hill and her body inside out.
The compression where she’d crashed in training loomed, the one that had eaten her and spit her out in training.
For a split second, muscle memory flashed the wrong edge, the phantom sensation of the ski hooking sideways.
She overrode it, rolled her ankles just so, and cut through clean.
The relief lasted half a breath before the next demand hit.
Mid-course, the Italian racer, who’d been strong all season, had set a sharp benchmark.
Blaire knew she needed to be both precise and brave to claw out time.
She carved the long, sweeping turns with flawless timing.
By letting the skis run just a breath longer than comfort allowed before setting edges, she gained speed instead of fighting it.
Every gate she cleared felt like one more door closing behind her, sealing off the past.
On the final pitch, legs screaming, she stayed low, resisting every instinct to rise even a centimeter.
The burn turned to fire, and her quads threatened mutiny, but she held the tuck through sheer stubborn will.
She rode the last gate transition like she was on a tightrope.
Her heart was pounding so hard it drowned out the roar building in the stadium.
She held her tuck all the way through the finish.
She crossed the line, shot through the beam, and looked up.
Her name flashed to the top of the board, green and first. The time gap over the field was small—hundredths—but enough. The stadium roared, creating a sound she felt as much in her bones as in her ears.
It felt like the purest version of why she’d ever done this: not for the cameras, not for the contracts, but for the simple, savage joy of nailing something that could have gone wrong in a hundred ways and didn’t.
She let out one sharp shout—part laugh, part release—and coasted to the stop area. Her lungs were burning, and she knew without a doubt she’d just skied the downhill she wanted to remember for the rest of her life.
Blaire climbed into the leader’s box and swapped her race helmet for a beanie as her heart still thundered in her chest. Reporters shouted questions she barely registered.
The Italian racer—one of the clear medal threats—came down the hill a few numbers later.
Blaire watched the big screen, tracking every line choice the way she used to do as a hungry twenty-year-old.
The Italian attacked the hill with beautiful aggression, taking similar lines in the key sections.
At one split, the clock flashed red, then green, then red again.
Blaire’s stomach tightened; she hadn’t expected to care so much about staying on top in this exact way.
When the Italian crossed the line, the time slotted just behind Blaire’s—close enough to make the replay editors happy, not enough to bump her.
Italy slid into second, Germany held third, and the rest of the field still had something sharp to chase.
They shared a brief exchange in the corral—a nod, a few words of respect. It was the type of acknowledgment only people who’ve thrown themselves down the same wall of ice can give each other. Blaire meant it. This was the kind of race she respected. The Italian had earned it.
Seeing Italy lock provisionally into silver while Germany clung to bronze narrowed nothing in terms of risk; there were still fast women in the start house, Isaline among them, and any of them could redraw the entire podium.
What it did sharpen was the shape of what Blaire wanted—her name on top, with Isaline somewhere in that top three, if the mountain allowed it.
She stepped back into the leader’s box and pulled her jacket tighter around her.
Her focus remained on the board as bib numbers ticked closer to the one she knew too well.
Around her, the stadium churned with noise—announcers building drama, other nations’ fans cheering their racers through sections.
Tess appeared at the edge of the corral with Jordy.
Both were watching the screen, and both were deliberately not looking at her face.
Blaire’s fingers curled around the railing.
The rational part of her brain cataloged splits, the course deterioration, and wind reports.
The rest of her was thinking about bronze slipping to fourth, about another Swiss racer climbing past Isaline before she even left the start, and about how badly she wanted to see that name—Senn—light up next to hers on the final results.
She exhaled slowly, letting the cold air bite her lungs, and kept her eyes locked on the screen.