For 10 years, Kirsten Clark was the U.S. Ski Team’s woman of steel. There was no big red “S” under her racing bib – that probably wouldn’t have gone over too well with the Internation Ski Federation – but there may as well have been. Clark was invincible.

She raced the same steep and icy trails, and she traveled at the same fifth-gear speeds on the same sharpened narrow slats of carbon fiber as everyone else, but somehow Clark always managed to elude the kinds of major injuries that often plague the careers of young up-and-comers.

We’re talking 40 races a season on the World Cup circuit, multiple World Championships and two Olympics – she’ll be in Torino, Italy, next week for a third appearance. Yeah, there were bumps and bruises here and there, but never anything that kept her off the slopes for more than a week or two.

Until Jan. 30, 2004.

That’s the day Clark, a Raymond native and Carrabassett Valley graduate, has been trying to forget for two years now. That was the day she realized she wasn’t invincible.

Clark’s mom, Joan, and her dad, George, had made their once-a-year trip to Europe to see their daughter ski. They were at the bottom of the downhill run in Haus, Austria, watching on the big screen as Clark carved her way toward them and then careened out of control, bouncing across the ice and snow.

While Joan and George watched their daughter get airlifted off the mountain, Clark already was taking stock of her body parts and drawing some painful conclusions.

“I knew I had broken my wrist because I looked down and my wrist was crooked. So I knew that my wrist was done and I would probably need to have surgery on that,” said Clark, 28. “My knee was sore, but I had never experienced an ACL tear before.

“But when I was walking down and my knee gave out I realized that I had (torn) my ACL, too, just from hearing other athletes talking about how your knee gives out when your ACL is torn.”

At the hospital, Clark found out that the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee was, in fact, torn and her right wrist was, in fact, broken. Plus, she had strained the medial collateral ligament in her right knee.

Prior to the injuries, Clark had been skiing well. She reached the podium with a third-place showing in the giant slalom at Lienz, Austria, on Dec. 27 and followed that up with a sixth in the Super G in France and a fourth in the downhill in Switzerland.

“It was definitely hard to swallow at that period of time,” she said, “just not wanting to think about the next year and the rehab process that I was going to be going through.”

The question was never if Clark would rehab the knee – when you’ve been doing something since you were 3 years old, adversity is a hurdle, not a roadblock. The questions were more pointed: How long would the rehab take? Would she regain her confidence? Would she return to the elite level she was used to? Could she make a push for her third straight Olympic games?

“I took it pretty slow,” said Clark. “I didn’t want to develop any of the tendonitis that athletes tend to get if they push too hard to come back too soon.”

By taking it “pretty slow” Clark was back skiing by the end of June. When the 2004-05 World Cup season began the following October, though, she couldn’t settle into a groove.

“I really struggled to have that mental edge of putting everything on the line,” she said. “The training had all been going really well, and I had been fast in training in the summer, but once the races came it was really hard for me to trust myself and go that 100 percent right out of the start and risk everything to be the fastest to the finish.

“So, mentally it was hard for me, but when you’ve been in the sport for as long as I have, the desire to win sort of propelled me to keep going.”

Clark’s husband, Andreas Rickenbach, a former World Cup racer and U.S. coach, was there for support, as were teammates Caroline Lalive and Libby Ludlow, who had both been through similar injuries.

It was all about the confidence, though, and eventually it started to come back.

“I think it says a lot about her determination,” said George Clark. “She’s always been more than willing to work 150 percent to do something, but her determination to come back from this is really special. It was tough. Last year when she was skiing and it took her six, seven, maybe eight races to get her confidence back.”

Clark closed out the 2004-05 season with a pair of 11th-place finishes. She may not have been on the podium, but she wasn’t finishing 43rd or 37th as she had in Italy a few weeks before. Things were looking up.

And then, this past September, Clark’s invincibility took another hit. During a routine arthroscopic procedure to remove a cyst that had developed on the back of her surgically reconstructed knee, Clark contracted a staph infection. She ended up spending a week in the hospital while the bacteria was being cleaned out.

Clark finally made her 2005-06 World Cup debut in Canada on Dec. 2, and finished 43rd in the downhill. Since then, she has had a seventh, a fifth, an eighth and a fourth.

“Each day I have more confidence and I’m feeling more and more comfortable on my skis,” she said.

The 2006 Olympics are about to start, so the timing is perfect.

With Joan and George, as well as her brother Sean, his wife, Carey, and Andreas and his son (Clark’s stepson) in attendance, Clark will be looking to improve on her 12th (downhill), 14th (Super G) and 26th-place (giant slalom) finishes at the 2002 Games.

“I’m going in with the knowledge that I’m able to win races and I am a contender,” she said. “I have the experience of what the Olympics all entail as far as the credentials and the whole hoopla of it all.

“But there’s a starting gate and there’s a finish line, and I’m just trying to keep it as simple as I possibly can and trying to treat it like a normal race, go out there and give my 100 percent and whatever happens in the finish I did my best.”

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