 |
| |
|
 |
 |
Maier's return is a huge boost to skiing Posted: Friday January 17, 2003 10:07 AM
People saw a familiar face and the whispers began, invoking -- and sometimes limited to -- a single name. Hermann! The place was a mountainside in Wengen, Switzerland, a breathtakingly beautiful village in the face of the towering, craggy Eiger and the Jungfrau. The occasion, on Thursday afternoon, was the second training run for the Lauberhorn downhill, one of the most treasured stops on the annual winterlong carnival known as the alpine World Cup. Wengen is not an easy place to reach, even if you are already nearby. (And it is darn near impossible to reach from the northeastern United States; trust me on this. But that's a story for another day. Besides, the scenery alone makes the trip worthwhile.) The village allows almost no automobile traffic, so from anywhere on earth your trip to Wengen will end with a nearly straight, clunking uphill tram ride from a place called Lauterbrunnen. From there, you walk roughly two miles along snowpacked trails to the finish line. Yet the people who came to Wengen and to the Lauberhorn on Thursday came to see Hermann Maier ski again. Oh, they came to see others, too, such as their own Swiss favorites, Didier Defago, Didier Cuche and Bruno Kernen, among others. And they came to see all of the greatest skiers in the world, including Austrian Stephan Eberharter and Bode Miller of the U.S. But when training was done and members of the powerful Austrian team left the finish corral to mix with the populace, it was clear that Maier has lost none of the buzz that made him the most popular skier in the world during his sudden and dominant reign from the end of 1997 through the 2001 season. During that period he not only won 41 World Cup races, the fourth-most in history in by far the shortest period, but he also established himself as one of the most daring skiers in history. His backstory helped: Just before taking the World Cup by storm, Maier had been a bricklayer who was overlooked by the powerful Austrian Ski Federation. (This remains a sore spot with the Austrians; I wrote about it in 1998 and there are coaches and administrators who won't speak to me because of it). Maybe best of all, Maier flew off the side of a mountain in Hakuba, Japan, during the 1998 Olympic downhill, one of the most spectacular crashes in history (although, thankfully, not one of the more damaging) and then recovered to win two gold medals, in Super G and giant slalom. In late August 2001, the Herminator nearly lost a leg in a crash on his beloved motorcycle. He tried to come back for the Olympic Games, but he wasn't close to ready. He tried to come back for the start of the World Cup this year, but got hurt training in Chile. Then, on Tuesday at a giant slalom in Adelboden, Switzerland, Maier surfaced again. He did not ski fast enough on the first run to qualify for second place, but don't be misled. "Pretty amazing," said Miller. "I mean, he didn't win the race, but for as long as he's been away from racing, he looked pretty good to me." Maier wasn't entirely pleased. He had hoped to ski faster from the start, had hoped that his muscle memory would recall 1998 and not 1996, when he was a struggling youngster. The Austrian team didn't expect Maier to come to Wengen. He wasn't sure himself. But here he is. He ripped the second training run Thursday. He's not ready to win yet, but it might not be long. Maier winning would change everything. Right now, however, the kings of the circuit are Eberharter, the stone-cold 33-year-old who won the overall title and two Olympic golds last year in Maier's absence, and Miller, the swashbuckling, rising American who this year has added speed events to his slalom and GS. However, if Maier comes back and starts winning (still a big if), he will again move to the center of skiing's universe. He and Miller are the only performers on the circuit whose names, when announced over a race PA system, cause heads to snap around to attention. Maier has the longer résumé and the home-continent edge for most of the winter. As soon as he wins again, he becomes the figurative king of the hill. I don't expect Eberharter to go away. He is a brilliant skier and a tough, ballsy competitor. But he is cold and devoid of real personality in public, still carrying a chip on his shoulder because the Austrians once dumped him and because so many people added an asterisk to his great year in 2002, because Maier was absent. The truth hurts. But skiing needs juice, at least in North America. The possibility of Maier returning to his former self and racing a still-climbing Miller is intoxicating. It is the type of thing that might -- might! -- make a few Americans turn on their television to look for skiing in the dark corners of cable, helping to shine a light on the sport. Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. Click here to send him a question or comment.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
