CESANA, Italy - 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, “everything is looking good,” said Ed Ryan, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s director of sports medicine. “All of her scans have come back normal.”

Retrosi was taken by helicopter to CTO Hospital in Turin where she will be re-evaluated Tuesday morning, Ryan said, adding that “we expect her to be discharged” at that time.

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.

Two large plastic screens, used to shade the track from the sun, were pulled down to shield Retrosi as family members rushed to the scene. Her grandfather, Don LaBarge of Tupper Lake, N.Y., wiped away tears with a handkerchief as his granddaughter was loaded into an ambulance, accompanied by her mother.

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.

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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.”