Andrea Lawrence

What makes an Olympic athlete the greatest? In my mind, it's not the number of gold medals or world records but what one does with the rest of one's life.

Andrea Mead Lawrence, who died on March 31 at age 76, always strove to be exceptional throughout her life. And she was. At 15, Andrea made the U.S. ski team that competed at the 1948 St. Moritz Olympics, where she finished eighth in the slalom event. She was the youngest U.S. skier ever to compete at the Olympics.

Four years later, Andrea was on the cover of TIME (the first U.S. skier to be so honored) the month before she competed in the Oslo Olympics. She won the giant slalom, but it's her slalom victory that still amazes me today. In her first run, she missed a gate and had to backtrack to go through. She finished that run in fourth place. Yet her second run was so spectacular that her total time was good enough for a second gold medal, making her the first female skier to win two golds at the same Olympics. And she remains the only American female skier to have done so. Eight years later, at the Squaw Valley Olympics, she became the first woman in Olympic history to escort the final torchbearer at the opening ceremonies.

In the following decades, Andrea's love of mountains (which so strongly defined her) only increased as she became a leading conservationist, founding several environmental organizations, including the Andrea Lawrence Institute for Mountains and Rivers.

Her philosophy: "Being able to contribute and put back into the world some of the energy that you've taken out of it ... I would like to think that my energy has gone back out into the world and hopefully in as many positive ways as possible."

Greenspan is an Emmy Award--winning Olympic documentarian