Was Dorothy Hamill Almost Attacked At The 1976 Olympics?

Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush caught up with gold medal figure skating legend and Access guest correspondent Dorothy Hamill at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver to discuss an incident that might surprise people. In 1976, at the Winter Olympic Games in Innsbruck, Austria, Dorothy claims she was almost struck by a car that a figure skating competitor was in while she was walking down the street with her coach, Carlo Fassi.

Dorothy explained to Billy, “Nobody bashed me in the knee or anything. I was in the Olympic Village with my coach and the Olympics were very small in those days, and there was a car that was driving and there weren’t very many cars in the village and I was sort of looking down with my coach Carlo Fassi and this car came straight at us. It wasn’t going to stop. I really didn’t see it, but Carlo did, and he looked up and grabbed me and pulled me across the front and the car went right over where I had been standing an instant later and then I looked up and I saw the two faces,” Dorothy continued. “I’m not going to say who it was. I don’t think anybody was out to kill me or hit me with a car, but it was a competitor and she was with her coach and it was kind of scary and they laughed.”

Billy asked if the car would have hit her if she had not moved. Dorothy replied, “I don’t know,” claiming, “[t]hey weren’t going fast, but it was just the whole idea of it. And when our eyes met and they were laughing… it just kind of was a little freaky. If it had hit me it probably wouldn’t have hurt me much, but it was just the idea that anybody would think of doing that.”

Dorothy went on to say, “I really don’t think anybody was out to run me over at like 60 miles an hour. It wasn’t like that. It’s because I hadn’t seen the car coming right at me.”

After the incident, Dorothy went on to win the gold medal in women’s figure skating and said that she didn’t let it get to her. “We had a bit of a rivalry, not that we were unfriendly, but you know, it’s figure skating and we didn’t train together and workout together. So, we didn’t really know each other that well,” she explained.

Dorothy also admitted she never confronted the person whom she alleged was involved in the incident. “No, I really haven’t seen them… I really haven’t seen them face-to-face. They know and I know and it’s not a big deal.”

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