For the Olympic Games, this is the tone setter, the big, prime-time glamour event on the first full day of competition next Sunday. It is thrilling, it is beautiful and, in a word, dangerous. Your typical sports cliche -sudden death-is rather a different matter in the downhill. Two weeks ago Ulrike Maier, 26, a two-time World Cup champion and, more important, the mother of a 4-year-old daughter, swerved on the downhill course at Garmisch, Germany, crashed into a straw-padded timing post and broke her neck. Two hours later she was pronounced dead. After watching her colleague bundled into a body bag, bound for a rosestrewn funeral, the reigning Olympic downhill champion Kerrin Lee-Gartner said she might not defend her title. The Canadian intends to go to the Games but said, “I’ll know when I’m standing in the start. Unless I’m 100 percent confident, I’m out of there.”
The wonder is that they’re ever there. “To ski the downhill is to defy death every time out,” says Andy Mill, a former downhiller, who is now a CBS ski analyst and better known as the husband of Chris Evert. In 1976 at Innsbruck, Austria, Mill finished sixth in the Olympic downhill on one leg, his other being so battered and bruised he could hardly fit a boot on and had to bury his lame wing in the snow to freeze the pain before the race. “You’re probably born to the task. Either you grow up wanting to play in the garden … or you’re a wild child.”
When the wondrous Italian medallion, Alberto Tomba, was starting out, his mother took a look at the downhill and said No. And to his everlasting credit the otherwise bluff and macho “La Bomba” himself has always publicly agreed: he sticks only to the comparatively tame events of slalom and giant slalom. “We are the ones who meet the ultimate test: skier against the mountain,” says Bill Egan, who coaches the downhillers on the U.S. team. “We have the [football] linebackers’ mentality: attack and destroy. You have to be consumed with the downhill, totally one-dimensional, to be great. I get so excited. And all I do is watch!”
Now the downhill returns to the place where skiing began. Norwegians were the first hearty souls to lash their feet to wooden slats and then try to move. If they weren’t the first, they at least were the first to live to tell about it: the earliest pictorial representation of skiing is a rock carving dating from Roday, Norway, in 2000 B.C. Awaiting them is a course (diagram) that makes for a classic downhill: high-speed turns, a section where speed can be sustained in a prolonged tuck, a testing of endurance and the penultimate moment, when the skier must combine technical expertise, mental discipline and sheer courage. The piste (the ski run) at Kvitfjell (pronounced the way it’s spelled, key-Feel) is what Stein Eriksen calls “a racer’s dream, beautifully contoured for setting up a rhythm.” Eriksen should know. Among other things, he helped invent the idea of skier as hunk. A native Norwegian, he became a legend in the 1952 Games at Oslo, a stylish, handsome champion who turned his gold and silver Olympic medals in the slalom races into fame as a glamorous ski instructor-at Heavenly Valley, Calif., Sugarbush, Vt., Snowmass, Colo., and Park City, Utah, among other vistas.
Alva Ross Kitt IV, or “AJ” one of America’s best hopes in the men’s downhill, agrees with Eriksen about the course outside Lillehammer. “Good air,” he says, adding still more mystique to the occasion, “with contoured, natural jumps off the rolls. It’s the best downhill course we could possibly have.”
Kitt, 25, the son of a family of lawbook publishers, cut his ski teeth on tiny Frost Ridge outside Rochester, N.Y. He has the ideal downhiller’s frame: pear-shaped; hugely muscled in the thighs and buttocks to absorb the shocks of the blistering terrain, narrow in the shoulders and upper arms to slice through the wall of wind on the piste. oh yeah, and he’s shaved his head. “Because my mother kept saying I looked too much like Bruce Willis,” he says.
What attracts this wild child? “At first I hated the event,” says Kitt. “But at the academy [the Green Mountain Valley Ski School in Waitsfield, Vt.] I realized I could go down the hill as fast as I could without worrying about hitting anything … or about the ski patrol stopping me. I think I’m challenged by risk-taking.”
No kidding. While Kitt has been sidelined for portions of his career owing to sprained knee ligaments and broken arms, he still has become a major celebrity in Europe, largely based on his winning the World Cup race in Val d’Isere and placing second at the Hahnenkamm, the annual Austrian downhill/carnivale, both in the ‘91-‘92 season. The screaming tabloids on the continent became so infatuated with Kitt they reported that AJ stood for “Angel Jesus,” a product of his “devout Mormon” family. “We aren’t even into religion,” replied Alva Ross Kitt III, his father.
Speaking of which, hanging around outside a Michael Jackson press conference when Michael Jordan enters arm in arm with Madonna might give voyeurs an idea of the chaotic response engendered by the beloved downhillers at Kitzbuhel’s Hahnenkamm, which annually draws your basic 40,000 maniac spectators. Streets are filled with fan clubs wearing matching jackets, carrying banners and singing songs. People climb to the tops of shops, trees and outhouses to catch a glimpse of the race. A witness swears that Kitt was once approached by a fair young thing who opened her blouse so he could autograph her breasts, saying, “Left or right, take your pick.” Egan, the U.S. coach, says no, the girl offered the American men’s team her (fully clothed) body to autograph.
That would have included America’s other top male downhiller, Tommy Moe of Palmer, Alaska, the former “golden child” of the international junior circuit. Moe, who will turn 24 during the Lillehammer Games, finally has settled down after “partying and landing on probation” when he joined the team in ‘86. “I was drinking, smoking marijuana, raising hell, acting stupid,” says Moe. “I realized early it’s a sport where, just to survive, you have to bust ass. I’m down to earth now, but if I ever started winning big I’d be cocky and flamboyant. What I want to be is a legend.”
Perhaps a marketing one such as Billy Kidd, cowboy gear askew in those ads for his Colorado resort; following the ‘64 Olympics in which Kidd and Jimmy Huega finished silver-bronze in the slalom, they were two days late in showing up to make a ski film. “Coach,” they telephoned to Bob Beattie of the U.S. team, “we went the wrong way. We’re in Hawaii.”
Or maybe a truly cocky and flamboyant one such as Bill Johnson, the infamous dead-end surf rat and reformed juvenile delinquent who, Namath-like, told everybody they were skiing for second place and then proved it by winning the downhill in the ‘84 Games in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia-America’s only Olympic gold in the event, ever. What did this mean to Johnson? “Millions, we’re talkin’ millions,” he said.
For all that, the downhill is not so much win oriented as performance driven. As the renowned Austrian team manager Karl (Downhill Charlie) Kahr once said of Ken (Crazy Canuck) Read who-damn the victories, the parties or the consequences-was always crashing somewhere: “Ken Read skis faster than he can ski.” Or as America’s Kitt says: “Race wins are wonderful, but I’m really concerned about how I ski. My second place at Kitzbuhel . . . that was the race of my life, the best I’ve ever skied. I’ll never forget it.” But an Olympic gold medal? “Well,” says Kitt, “now we’re talkin’ history.”
History? Then we’re talkin’ Franz Klammer. In 1976 the 22-year-old from Mooswald, Austria, arrived at the Olympics in Innsbruck, having won eight of nine World Cup downhills the previous ski year and four already that season. The 15th starter of the day, he fell far behind the defending champion Bernhard Russi’s pace at the top of the hill. Then he fought back wildly, scrambling down the piste, hurtling every which way, several times coming this close to wiping out, forging the final 1,000 meters into legend. it didn’t hurt that this was the first time television carried the downhill top to bottom. But mostly it was the way Klammer skied. All over the mountain. Out of control. Carelessly. Wondrously. The way Everyman skis. Do I go that fast? At the end of the most replayed and most famous downhill run in history, Klammer had beaten Russi by .33 of a second. He had won his gold. And he had positively made the downhill as a TV event for all time. “I thought I was going to crash all the way,” he said. “Now I’ve got everything … I don’t Deed anything else.”
It must have been a similar feeling-the downhill as religious experience-that transformed the very personality of another champion. That would be Pirmin Zurbriggen, a rural innkeeper’s son from the tiny village of Saas Almagell in the Valais Alps of Switzerland. Zurbriggen had made pilgrimages to Lourdes; he carried a picture of the Virgin Mary in his address book. He also was favored to win gold medals in all five alpine races when he came to Calgary in 1988. He ended up winning only one. But he didn’t care. It was the downhill. Afterward, Zurbriggen echoed the feelings of all who aspire to the top and survive the bottom of skiing’s magnificent monster. “I don’t have enough violence left in me anymore,” he said. He had won the World’s and he hadn’t lost his soul.
Norwegian ski legend Stein Erikson, who has seen a lot of great skiing, calls Kvitfjell “a racer’s dream.” Carved into a rural peak, the made-for-the-Olympics run starts with a 30-degree speed plunge and then quickly whips into the sorts of turns and jumps that downhillers love to hate. Both men and women will race the same course, though the women’s start will be slightly lower. Success or failure, says American skier AJ Kitt, rests along the narrowest of margins: “There is absolutely no room for error.”
START: Kvitfjell starts with a steep 30-degree drop that leads into a tight turn and dramatic jump.
The course’s middle stretch may seem innocuous after the violently tilted start. In fact, it will produce speed in excess of 90 mph.
A tight S-turn will force skiers to quickly swap speed for control.
THE FINISH: The finish drops off a 64 degrees, encouraging absolute abandon on two jumps that punctuate the finish.
