Diana Golden

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.