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Setting the record straight Skier Johnson reigned at more than just Sarajevo
I didn't cover skiing at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, the site where Bill Johnson won America's first gold medal in the downhill. But I was there, and I cringed along with everyone else when the brash 23-year-old from Van Nuys, Calif., responded to the question of what the gold medal meant to him by saying, "Millions. We're talking millions." One press-box wag, aware of Johnson's bad-boy reputation and checkered history, predicted with uncanny prescience: "There's one gold medal that's destined for the pawn shop." It could have happened. Johnson was dead broke when he began his comeback attempt last fall at the age of 40, and he had to sell the skis on which he'd won the historic gold medal to pay his traveling expenses. (His mother, DB, who learned from a friend that Johnson was preparing to auction those skis on eBay, bought them for $4,000 to give to his two children, Nicholas, 9, and Tyler, 6.) Who knows if the gold medal might have been next? But Johnson's comeback attempt was derailed on March 22 by a tragic mid-race crash at Montana's Big Mountain Resort, which has left him in a coma. I wrote about the poignant story of Johnson's life since Sarajevo in this week's issue of Sports Illustrated (the one with the Masters on the cover), but because of space considerations I didn't get into one of the things I learned while researching the piece. Contrary to most of what's been written, Johnson was not just a one-race wonder. For a brief period of time, about three months, Johnson was the best downhill skier in the world, and it marked the first time an American had ever been top dog in skiing's glamour event. I asked former U.S. Olympian Billy Kidd, who won a silver and a bronze in the 1964 Innsbruck Games, about Johnson's legacy in American skiing. "That Sarajevo win was not just a lucky win," Kidd said. "Bill was a great athlete, and he went on to win World Cup races in Aspen and Whistler [British Columbia] that year. But to me his most impressive race came one month before the Olympics in Wengen, Switzerland. It's a great course, a classic downhill course, which contradicts the notion that Johnson was nothing but a 'glider.' I happened to be there doing television commentary for CBS, and there was a series of big, condominium-sized bumps near the bottom. Johnson caught an edge there, and one ski flew up by his ear. He nearly lost it when he landed, and the other ski flew up by his other ear. Then he hit one of those bumps and flew backwards, so that his back hit the snow. He bounced up, skied off the course and back on, all at 70 miles per hour. Then he goes on to win the race. It was the first time an American -- man or woman -- had ever won a World Cup downhill. And it was the most incredible series of recoveries I've ever seen in ski racing." Kidd believes that the Wengen win, coming a month before the Games, gave Johnson the confidence to make his infamous declaration that all the other skiers at the Olympics were vying for second place. "If he could beat the best in Europe on a classic track while falling down and skiing off the course, he knew he could beat them in Sarajevo, which was a course that favored his gliding ability. He was also playing with the minds of the Austrians. He was a street-smart kid and intuitively knew his prediction would just add to the pressure they were feeling. And the pressure kept building because heavy snowfall at the Olympics delayed the downhill several days. Johnson was talking about how great the powder skiing was, and the Austrians were wound up with nerves." Johnson had further reason to be confident in Sarajevo. Wind-tunnel tests taken the year before had shown he was a bullet aerodynamically. When Johnson fell into his natural tuck he gained five percent more speed than any skier who'd ever been tested, according to his former coach, Erik Steinberg. Sarajevo's course, which didn't have many technical turns in it, was made for Johnson's special strength. But it wasn't his only strength. Johnson, lax about training in the offseason, never got himself in top physical condition again after that 1984 season. "But for a while," says Kidd, "he was the best downhill skier in the world." Sports Illustrated senior writer E.M. Swift is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com.
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