|
 |   |
|
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Multimedia Central Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities Work in Sports
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE |  |
Following in big footsteps
Posted: Monday February 21, 2000 12:54 PM
LAKE PLACID, N.Y. -- Alex Maier has heard it all, from Minor Maier to Baby Herminator. And those are just the English versions. He is skiing's answer to Tommy Aaron, Patrick McEnroe and Keith Gretzky; he's the Other Brother. He doesn't hurtle and fling as an alpine downhiller the way his elder sibling Hermann does. Alex Maier is a snowboarder. At 25, two years younger than Austria's double Olympic champion, Alex is in his first year on the international circuit. He won a silver medal in snowboard super-G at the Goodwill Games, finishing behind Ian Price of the U.S. "At every start gate always they announce, 'Alexander, brother of Hermann,'" Alex says. "Of course it's pressure because everyone thinks, Oh, Alex is good like Hermann, but I am just new." Alex tried alpine skiing until age 14 but gave up on a career in that sport, realizing he wouldn't make it on the European slopes. At 15 he took a job as a salesman in a bricklayer's workshop. Now he works in the Hermann Maier Fan Shop in Flachau, Austria. Three years ago a friend introduced him to snowboarding. In Alex's first snowboard World Cup event this season in Salzburg, he was given starting bib (i.e., ranking) No. 114 and placed 49th. In November he had his best showing, taking fourth in an event in Madonna, Italy. He has moved up to 24th in the rankings. Alex has taken Hermann down the slopes once on a snowboard. "He made some good turns and he is not falling," Alex says. The younger Maier knows how competitive the older can be. "When we play a game of football," Alex says, "if I make a goal before him he wants to start new. I'm the younger, so I win not so often in football." The two have watched each other compete only a handful of times, but Alex says Hermann always gives him technical advice: "He could make a great trainer. So it is good having such a brother." Revisiting the BriansThey share a common name and a common place in skating history, so why not give them tables next to each other? Last Friday, on an off-night for men's figure-skating competition, Brian Boitano walked into an Italian restaurant in Lake Placid with his coach, Linda Leaver. After a patient half-hour wait, the maitre d' coincidentally sat them at a table next to the party of ... Brian Orser. The two exchanged laughs, waves and brief conversation. Later, when a distant acquaintance came to Boitano's table to say hello, the man asked, "So, how is your Italian restaurant doing? Do you still have it?" Boitano politely told him, "I don't own a restaurant. You must be thinking of Brian Orser." It was only fitting that the next evening the men's final came down to another Battle of the Brians. The field in this virtual legends competition included 1994 Olympic champion Alexei Urmanov of Russia and Ukraine's Viktor Petrenko, who won the title in 1992. But in the end the competition turned into a rematch of the 1988 Calgary Olympics, in which Boitano edged Orser after the Brians performed two of the finest long programs in Olympic history. As in Calgary, judges in Lake Placid gave Boitano the gold, Orser the silver. The rivalry between the two is still friendly, but not entirely forgotten. "It's always fun when you beat other people," Boitano said afterwards. "It's funny, I think each of us has become more well known because of the other. Isn't that weird? Skating's such an individual sport, too." The Brians agree they've faced each other five or six times in professional events since Boitano's victories in Calgary and at the world championships in Budapest two months later, though neither recalls who won what. Orser took the competition here seriously enough to land his first triple Axel since 1988. "I was making changes to my routine over the summer because I knew this was coming up in February," Orser said. "I need to know it's a competition in order to perform better. And this, to me, was a real competition. It's funny, but people still come up to me from time to time and say, 'I saw you in the Olympics. You were great. Now, umm, which Brian are you again?'" Tai and Randy finally make itTai Babilonia and Randy Gardner were the hope of the U.S. figure-skating team at the 1980 Lake Placid Games. They had won the world pairs championship the previous year, upsetting the reigning couple, Irina Rodnina and Alexander Zaitsev of the Soviet Union. But Gardner's groin injury had worsened in the month leading up to the Olympics. When the two stepped onto the ice for their Olympic warmup, he could barely put weight on his bad leg. He tried a jump and fell, tried another and fell again. The pair aborted their Olympic dream. Before the music even started, Tai and Randy skated off the ice and vowed never to return to the arena in Lake Placid. They had six or seven invitations in the intervening years, mostly as professional competitors or exhibition skaters, but always declined. "Our answer was always, Why?" Gardner says. "Why come back to something so disappointing?" So they stayed away until last week, when they returned as judges. Babilonia, now married with a five-year-old son named Scout, judged the ice-dance competition, which she arbitrated while sitting next to her fellow judge, Rodnina. "The first time I walked in this week my palms started to sweat," she recalls. "The butterflies came back. It wasn't all fun, actually. But we had a lot of friends here, so I tried to look at it as a chance to see old friends." Neither Babilonia, 40, nor Gardner, 42, looks a day past 30, and their friendship has aged well, too. They've done numerous shows for Champions on Ice and other tours. They've contributed to one another's scrapbooks, which they've updated since the first day they skated together, when he was 10 and she a frightened eight. "Just being able to hold a boy's hand at that age was the scariest thing," Babilonia recalls, turning to her partner. "Plus you had all these blisters and calluses." Says Gardner, "I was doing rings and parallel bars. My other life. My hands were a mess." They won world bronze medals as a pair in 1977 and '78 before taking the gold in Vienna the next year. The weeks after the Lake Placid Games nearly drove the pair apart. "We struggled," Babilonia says. "But kids would send us their medals. It softened the blow. We didn't realize how many people cared. It helped us get through it." They are still close to their skating roots. Gardner has moved into producing and choreographing ice shows. Babilonia helps design skating wear for older figure skaters. Both say they have mixed feelings about the sport's increasing emphasis on more difficult and numerous jumps. "It's the natural progression of the sport," Gardner says, "but something's been lost. It shouldn't be just jump and get ready for the next jump. You need more than that to appreciate the sport." And to stay with it for so long. Brian Cazeneuve is a Sports Illustrated writer-reporter who covers Olympic Sports and is a frequent contributor to CNNSI.com. Click here to send a question to his Sydney 2000 Mailbag.
| ||||||||||||||||||||
