As the rest of the world watches the end of the 2016 Summer Olympics this weekend, so are two local Juneau residents who have their own medals at home.
Pat Pitney earned a gold in women’s air rifle during the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The state’s budget director said she’s been following the current summer games “off and on,” and is mostly keeping tabs on the shooting events online.
“It always brings back great memories,” she said.
Hilary Lindh, who won a silver medal for downhill skiing during the 1992 Winter Olympics, has been watching the Summer Olympics in Rio on TV with her 10-year-old daughter Riaya, who’s into gymnastics.
They both see elements of their own story in today’s athletes. Lindh said she related to a young female track athlete who, just turning 17, spoke of feeling overwhelmed.
“I went to my first Olympics when I was 18 and I had no idea what the expectations would feel like and to be prepared for that. There’s not really any way to know that unless you experienced it. There are a lot of people watching you,” she recounted.
Lindh said she didn’t handle that well during the 1988 winter games in Calgary.
“I felt like everyone expected me to win a gold medal and that was not realistic. I didn’t want to disappoint people because there was so much support from Juneau and the state,” she said.
[A snow-side chat with skier Hilary Lindh]
It was at the following Winter Olympics in Albertville, France when she was able to reframe the expectations surrounding her.
“The next time I went I was just able to change my perspective on what other people’s expectations might be and to kind of understand that people are just expressing their support and it’s OK if I don’t win a medal.”
But she did. Lindh seized a silver. After she finished her event, she checked out the leader board.
“When I looked up to see that I was in second, I was just jumping up and down with all my gear on,” she said.
“I had a plan for the day and I was able to actually execute it without getting distracted by other people’s expectations or my own thoughts of what might happen,” Lindh continued.
Pitney said she identifies with American athlete Virginia Thrasher who recently won gold in the same event Pitney earned her top medal — 10-meter air rifle.
“She is in the exact same position life-wise. She’s between her freshman and sophomore year in college. We don’t know each other, but I’m watching a lot of her experience now going back to West Virginia University — I was at Murray State University at the time — but kind of the fanfare that she’s getting going back to the university and hoping that she’s enjoying it because it’s a new role,” Pitney explained.
Prior to the Olympics, Pitney said she was a private person. She was known in the shooting world, but not outside it. After the Olympics, everything changed and she took on a more public leadership role.
“It was a switch,” she said. “You turn the switch and you are the ambassador for your college, for the Olympic experience, for your sport.”
Pitney is from Montana and moved to Alaska in 1987, where her gold-medal name Pat Spurgin got changed to her lesser-known married name Pat Pitney.
“I tried to hyphenate it for a while but, god, it’s really long so I gave up. I was too lazy. We had kids so it was so much easier to have my married name,” she said.
Not everyone in Alaska knows about her Olympic glory.
“There will still be people who have no idea and they’ve known me for 20 years,” Pitney said.
But it definitely comes up more around Olympic season. She’s recently given budget talks to a local Rotary group and the Juneau Bar Association, and “since it was during the Olympics I actually brought my medal in and let them pass it around while I was talking budget issues.”
After Lindh won her medal in 1992, she briefly returned to Juneau where a crowd of people and a limo were waiting for her at the airport. She was the guest of honor at a reception at Centennial Hall. In 2009, Lindh was inducted into the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame.
Every couple of years still, someone asks Lindh if they can see her Olympic medal. It’s the only time she takes it out of a goggle bag tucked in a bedside table, she said.
“Silver tarnishes if you don’t polish it, so it gets pretty tarnished,” Lindh said. “Fortunately, my daughter took it to preschool and they had silver polish there. That was the last time it was polished — when she was in preschool.”
While the attention both Pitney and Lindh experienced from winning Olympic medals may fade in and out, the drive and ambition established early on in life never went away.
“When I was six years old, I told my mom I wanted to go to the Olympics and when I was 13, I wrote down goals for winning Olympic medals,” Lindh said. “Then experiencing it and having some success at one of them anyway, it’s had a big influence on my life. Learning how to perform under pressure and in the spotlight like that — it’s skills for life.”
Pitney agreed. As the budget director for a state in a budget crisis, Pitney said she utilizes her Olympic determination.
“You have to have a positive attitude, you have to be solution-oriented, you have to be disciplined and focused,” she said. “All of that, I trained for day in, day out from the time I got serious when I was 11 and that’s what I did until right before my first child was born in 1988, and then it carried on. I just applied those to a different part of my world.”
• Contact reporter Lisa Phu at 523-2246 or lisa.phu@juneauempire.com.
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Pat Pitney (then Pat Spurgin) with her father, sister and mother at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles where she won a gold medal in women’s air rifle.
