All downhill for Daron

Rahlves scores breakthrough win at Kitzbuhel

In the world of alpine skiing, nothing earns a racer credibility among his peers quite like a win on the treacherous, icy Hahnenkamm downhill course in Kitzbuhel, Austria. The run is like Wimbledon to a tennis player or Augusta to a golfer, multiplied tenfold.

Consider that when Bill Johnson won the Olympic downhill in 1984 on a forgiving, gliders' course in Sarajevo, with few turns and tame flats that were navigable even by skiers from the Caribbean, Franz Klammer, the '76 Olympic champ, dismissed Johnson's achievement by saying, "So? It's not as if he won Kitzbuhel."

Last weekend, Daron Rahlves, the defending world champ in the Super G, became the first U.S. man in history to win a World Cup race on the notorious Streif since the circuit was created in 1967. "I feel like this is my destiny," Rahlves said after the race. "It's every downhiller's dream to win on the Hahnenkamm." The host Austrians, who swept the last four downhills there, were kept off the podium.

The course includes a 60-degree drop known as the Mouse Fall and a ripping turn, often made against the wind, into the Steilhung, which pulls skiers, at 100 miles per hour, against the direction they plan to go. Training in lovely Aspen and Park City doesn't even prepare you for the start gate in Kitzbuhel. Rahlves, a former jet-ski champ who claims dirt bikers as his heroes, was perfectly suited for the course's malevolence.

New pool shark

It's time to add a new face from a surprising place to the mix of swimmers to watch as we hit the pre-Olympic season.

Argentina's Jose Meolans upset marquee favorites Pieter van den Hoogenband of the Netherlands and Ian Thorpe of Australia to win the 100-meter freestyle at a World Cup short-course event in Berlin over the weekend. Granted, both van den Hoogenband and especially Thorpe claim other distances as their best (200 and 400, respectively), but the Dutchman is the defending Olympic champ in the 100 and Thorpe has swum some of the most memorable 100-meter relay legs in the history of the sport over the last few years.

Meolans is for real, even though short-course events, with twice as many turns in pools that are half the size of Olympic venues, are a different race. The 23-year-old Argentine-record holder, who clocked a 47.32 in Berlin, used to hone his form by watching tapes of Russian Olympic legend Alexander Popov. Meolans was one of the few swimmers to reach the semifinals in the 50-, 100- and 200-meter freestyle events at the 2001 worlds in Fukuoka, Japan, but he really emerged at the short-course worlds last year, upsetting a lesser field in the 100.

If Meolans were to win in Athens, he'd snap a lengthy national jinx: The last Argentine Olympic swimming champ was Alberto Zorrilla, who won the 400-free gold medal at the 1932 Games in Los Angeles.

Jumping to higher ground

The track world mourned another loss recently with the passing of Russia's Valery Brumel, one of history's greatest high jumpers, who died Sunday at age 60.

Brumel set five world records and won Olympic gold at the 1964 Tokyo Games. He became one of the first Soviet sports stars to make a dent in the American consciousness when his cross-continent clashes with Boston University student John Thomas became featured events on ABC's Wide World of Sports.

After watching the stylish Brumel win a silver medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics, a 6-year-old Californian named Dwight Stones promptly stacked a few mattresses on his front lawn and began imitating what he had just seen. Stones would later break the world record on three different occasions in the mid-'70s.

Brumel's life was often troubled. In 1965, while on a ride with motorcycling champ Tamara Golikova, he nearly lost his right leg in an accident. Brumel, who was married to another woman at the time, eventually lost more than his track career: His wife left him, the sports pages in Moscow briefly treated him as a nonentity, and he soon began collecting and redeeming bottles, at 12 kopecs apiece, to support himself. When his name resurfaced three years later, some erroneous news reports out of Moscow said that he had committed suicide. "I hope readers looking for a good story will not be disappointed," Brumel said at the time, "but I am still here. I hope the refutation of the end does not spoil the plot." The Associated Press ran a story soon after with the memorable headline: "Brumel claims he is not dead." Had Brumel been an American baseball player, Johnny Carson would have had a field day with that news.

Brumel's greatest achievement was coming back to compete again in masters' events, when there was no living to be earned from them and no favors to be won from government officials for his triumphs. He missed clearing 7 feet by a mere quarter inch five years after the accident. As news reports began to paint him as a sympathetic figure, he made public appearances, earned a degree in sports psychology from Moscow University, wrote a novel and became known as a lively public speaker with a sly sense of humor. It was only after failure that his successes could truly be appreciated.

Sports Illustrated staff writer Brian Cazeneuve covers Olympic sports for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com.

 

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