TURIN, Italy – Tensions ran unusually high at the starting gate of the women’s downhill competition yesterday.

American hopeful Lindsey Kildow stared down the same icy slope where a dramatic crash on Monday nearly ended her Olympic debut, not to mention her life. Fidgeting nearby was the defending gold medalist from France, Carole Montillet-Carles, who also tumbled badly on Monday. The third woman to go down on that slick practice run two days before, Canada’s Allison Forsyth, injured her left knee so badly that her Olympics were already over.

The most anxious athlete at the top, though, was probably Austria’s Michaela Dorfmeister. She said later that her knees actually shook in anticipation. She was considered the best women’s skier on that mountain never to have won an Olympic gold medal, and at 32, this was her last shot.

Starting in the 23rd position, Dorfmeister launched down the steep and icy piste, negotiated the bumps to perfection and bested the mark set by Germany’s Petra Haltmayr by 1.2 seconds. It turned out to be good enough for a gold medal, one that had long eluded her and her country.

As she accepted her medal on the podium, she covered her face to hide the streaming tears.

“This was my last dream,” she said. “Now I will be able to retire with a perfect feeling and I can’t wait to start a new life.”

Her skiing-crazed country breathed a sigh of relief. Before yesterday, Austria had only one bronze and one silver in a venue that usually sees the redand white athletes with a trove of medals. More to the point, the Austrian women’s ski team had broken a long-standing curse. They are regulars on every skiing podium but the last time they took home an Olympic gold was 26 years ago in Lake Placid.

Dorfmeister had come excruciatingly close in 1998 in Nagano, where the two-time world champion was edged out by Picabo Street in the Super-G by one one hundredth of a second. This time, she had more breathing room, though she had to wait a long time at the bottom to see if the list of top-ranked women after her would make a mistake.

This was a particularly technical course by design. Many athletes, including Kildow and Montillet-Carles, had complained after past competitions here that the course was too easy and petitioned for something more demanding. Officals at the San Sicario resort made sure the Fraiteve Olimpique piste would have tougher curves this time. And the already treacherous conditions were made even trickier on Wednesday by an overcast day, because the flat light made it difficult for skiers to see contours in the snow.

Dorfmeister saw the closet threat to her medal come just three runs after her in the form of Martina Schild, of Switzerland, whose silver-medal time of 1:56.86 was 0.37 seconds short. Sweden’s Anja Paerson took the bronze.

Kildow’s eighth-place finish behind teammate Julia Mancuso was more extraordinary than Dorfmeister’s run, considering she had just been released from the hospital the day before.

“I thought I had it in me,” she told a reporter from the U.S. ski team afterward. “I was okay in the warm-up but I have a lot of pain in my back. My left butt cheek doesn’t seem to work.”

On Monday, she was coming over a jump on the training run when she caught an edge, spun around halfway in the air and slammed down on her back and head. She was evacuated by helicopter to the trauma center of a Turin hospital, where she spent the night for observation. X-rays showed that she had no broken bones and doctors said she did not suffer a concussion, so she signed up on Tuesday for the race.

“I just wanted to know I could have done it,” the 21-year-old Minnesota native said. “I think I did pretty well in the middle part of the course, but when I got to the part where I crashed, I was a little nervous.”

Kildow is signed up for Friday’s combined competition, though she said she would see how she feels before entering, as the event demands a great deal of agility in the lower back.

jmoretti@nysun.com