Andrea Mead Lawrence, 76; Vt. native, skier won gold twice
LOS ANGELES - Andrea Mead Lawrence, who learned to ski in her native Green Mountains and became the only American downhill racer to win two gold medals in a single Olympics, has died. She was 76.
Ms. Lawrence, who moved to the Sierra Mountains of Northern California and became a leading conservationist, died Monday at her Mammoth Lakes home of cancer, said a son, Matthew.
She was a 19-year-old coming off a dream year - Ms. Lawrence had won a dozen international races and appeared on the cover of Time magazine - when she arrived at the 1952 Winter Games in Oslo. After taking the giant slalom, she captured a second gold, in the slalom, after falling on the first of two runs.
During her final slalom run, she often recalled that she had an amazing sense of clarity and purpose that allowed her to go "like a bullet down the course."
The accomplishment "helped lay the groundwork for the rest of my life," she told the Los Angeles Times in 2004.
A three-time Olympian, Ms. Lawrence had been named to the 1948 Olympic team at 14 and competed in the 1956 Games after having three children. Yet she would not allow her experience as a top athlete to define her.
"I've never wanted celebrity status unless it furthers the things I'm involved in and have a passion for," she told the Oakland
In 1998, Ms. Lawrence told Olympic historian David Wallechinsky that she had asked herself: "What if I could take the same sort of striving for high-quality perfection that I did with my skiing and apply it to something good, something relevant to life?"
"That's how she became an environmentalist," Wallechinsky recalled Tuesday.
After moving to Mammoth Lakes in 1968, the newly divorced mother of five began transforming herself into an environmental activist. Local business leaders asked her to spearhead the battle against construction of eight-story condominiums. Her group, the Friends of Mammoth, halted the project in a case that reached the state Supreme Court. That early 1970s decision laid the foundation for citizen enforcement of the California Environmental Quality Act.
Ms. Lawrence spent 16 years as a member of the Mono County Board of Supervisors, battling unchecked development and testifying before Congress for environmental causes.
Bud Greenspan, an Olympic historian and documentarian, used a formula that took into account post-Olympic accomplishments when he put Ms. Lawrence atop his 2002 list of greatest winter Olympians of all time. "Andrea personified the Greek concept of the Ideal Athlete . . . excellence both in body and mind," Greenspan said in an e-mail. "It is indeed rare to find someone who throughout her life pursued two passions in the purest and highest form of the human spirit."
She was born in Rutland, Vt., one of two children of Bradford and Janet Mead, who founded Vermont's Pico Peak ski resort.
By 6, she was absorbing the lessons that the resort's Swiss ski pro gave others. At 10, she took a run down a ski course in Lake Placid, N.Y., and had an epiphany during a hairpin turn.
"It was so natural, it was like a psychic click. . . I knew instinctively that's what I was meant to do," Lawrence said earlier this year on Vermont Public Radio.
At the 1948 Olympics in Switzerland, she met David Lawrence, a member of the US men's ski team. They married in 1951.
In addition to her son, Matthew, Ms. Lawrence leaves another son, Cortlandt; three daughters Deirdre, Leslie and Quentin; a brother, Peter Mead; and four grandchildren.
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