CESANA, Italy (AP) – As Samantha Retrosi’s limp body skittered across the ice, her face pressed against the frozen surface, silence fell over the high-speed luge track atop this sleepy Alpine village.

Retrosi’s terrifying crash on Monday provided a scary reminder of how dangerous riding a sled at 80 mph can be.

And, that the Olympics aren’t always fun and games.

“It was a bad crash. But the bottom line is that she’s going to be OK,” U.S. team leader Fred Zimny said.

Retrosi, a 20-year-old from Saranac Lake, N.Y., competing in her first Winter Games, sustained a concussion and cut her chin in a wicked spill on the first day of women’s luge when several of the world’s top racers failed to stay upright.

Though she suffered short-term memory loss and is out of the games, Retrosi is fortunate to have escaped far more serious injuries. After being examined at the track, she was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Turin for observation.

“Everything is looking good,” U.S. Olympic Committee sports medicine director Ed Ryan said late Monday. “All of her scans have come back normal. She will spend the night at the hospital because she had a slight concussion. … She’ll be re-evaluated in the morning and we expect her to be discharged from the hospital tomorrow.”

As she neared the bottom of the speedy course – redesigned last year because of safety concerns – Retrosi smacked the wall, flipped her sled and appeared to be unconscious as she slid facedown with her right arm twisted awkwardly to her side.

The uprighted 50-pound sled briefly covered Retrosi, shielding her from view. When she finally stopped, fans standing alongside the retaining wall in turn 18 waved their arms for medical personnel to hurry down the slope.

As she was speaking with reporters, Germany’s Tatjana Huefner gasped when she saw Retrosi’s crash on a large video screen and stared blankly at the image for several seconds.

As Retrosi was being attended to, athletes, coaches and officials somberly huddled in front of TV monitors at the finish area, staring in silence and hoping for word that she was fine.

Fans sitting nearby, some of whom had been dancing earlier in the day, stood quietly while competition was halted for 15 minutes.

Zimny said that by the time she was transported to an on-site medical facility, Retrosi was conscious and complained of knee pain.

“She doesn’t remember the crash, which is probably a good thing,” he said.

Others probably won’t forget it or a few of the other wrecks, including one by Italy’s Anastasia Oberstolz-Antonova, a pre-Olympic favorite, who couldn’t even make it to the bottom of the first run on her home ice.

Ranked fourth in the world this season, Oberstolz-Antonova had been expected to challenge the powerful Germans for a medal. But approaching the bottom, she went high into a curve, brushed the wall and was thrown from her sled. She walked away and didn’t appear to be injured.

American Erin Hamlin was lucky, too. She nearly crashed on each of her runs, but managed to finish. The 19-year-old said that seeing Oberstolz-Antonova unable to navigate her home course was somewhat startling.

“It definitely caught me off guard,” said Hamlin, of Remsen, N.Y., “You never know. She’s probably had more runs here than anyone, but anything can happen.”

The lightning-fast track, built for the Turin Games, was reconfigured in 2005 for safety reasons. Test events were canceled after a Brazilian sustained a serious head injury and a Romanian broke an arm.

Some of the changes included raising the ice base between curves 16 and 17 – near where Retrosi banged into the wall.

In practice Sunday, Anne Abernathy, the 52-year-old slider nicknamed “Grandma Luge,” broke her right wrist in a crash and had to pull out of her sixth Olympics.

Czech slider Marketa Jeriova also wiped out in the opening round. And Natalia Yakushenko of Ukraine didn’t start her second run after banging the wall hard.

Argentina’s Michelle Despain looked like a frozen pinball as she bounced back and forth off the barriers.

Several other racers had near-crashes, making some wonder if the track is too dangerous – especially for inexperienced sliders.

“It’s a very hard and difficult track,” said Germany’s Sylke Otto, the defending gold medalist, who twice lowered the track record and has a commanding lead over teammates Silke Kraushaar and Huefner. “Crashes are always possible, but it’s not dangerous. But it is a track where you have to concentrate the whole time.”

Zimny doesn’t buy the idea that it’s perilous.

“It’s just tricky,” Zimny said, referring to the left-left-left turn sequence toward the bottom of the track. “It’s an extremely technical track and extremely fast down there at the bottom. If you get something wrong in a curve, it’s just the way the curve sends you. You get shot up to the roof.”

Retrosi’s accident tempered a big day for the American team: Two-time Olympian Courtney Zablocki of Highlands Ranch, Colo., will enter the third run trailing Huefner by just .004.

The U.S. team has never won a singles luge medal at the Olympics. The Americans narrowly missed in the men’s event when Tony Benshoof finished fourth. Now it’s Zablocki’s turn for a shot at history.

“I feel a little relief going into the second day,” she said. “I hope I can get up there again, and if I can’t, I’ve shown that my sliding has improved in the last few years.”

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AP Sports Writers Tim Reynolds and Jerome Pugmire contributed to this report.

AP-ES-02-13-06 1808EST