Athlete profile: Thomas Prugger

Posted: Tue February 3, 1998 at 5:00 PM ET

Athlete notes

Prugger picked a great time to notch his first international career win...cheered on by a boisterous home crowd, Prugger won the giant slalom at the 1997 World Championships in San Candido, Italy...Prugger stunned the snowboarding world with his victory, while the strong Austrian contingent mustered just a sixth-place finish from star Peter Pechhacker...coming down the course in the 25th position, Prugger's clean second run placed him almost a full second ahead of runner-up Mike Jacoby, a huge margin by snowboarding standards...and oh did they celebrate for the boy they call "Tommy"..."The win was huge for me. All my family was there, all my colleagues. It was a big party," he says. "Except we didn't have much time to celebrate. The slalom was the next day"...Prugger did not take the typical route to the world title, but he is not your typical athlete either...he once broke his arm on a gate in the middle of a race only to finish in the top five...he originally started out on a swingbow, which he describes as a "skateboard with straps"...but at age 13 he saw an American snowboarding film by the Burton Snowboard company and he has been hooked ever since...he now trains with the national team in the French Alps, or by himself at Cron Plitz in the Italian Dolomites...he seems happy with the treatment from the Italian federation..."Snowboarding is really new for them. Skiing is still everything, but they are getting better," he notes. "For a few years it was considered ‘extreme'"...well, if snowboarding is not extreme anymore than some of Prugger's hobbies might be...he loves to hang-glide and has been doing it for seven years...he even gears up for the annual European "Harley-treff," or Harley round-up ...last summer he rode his '96 Harley Fat Boy to Kitzbühel, Austria for what he termed a "fashion-mode Events "-- not your typical American Harley gathering...and the car he drives, oh, it is a Jeep...all these things lead one to ask if there might be a screw loose in Prugger's head, sort of like "Tommy-boy" himself, Chris Farley..."Sports-wise I might be a wild-boy," he admits, "but privately I am not at all"...at home, Prugger's father owns a business that deals with wood and lumber, and his mom works around the house...his little brother also snowboards competitively, but not in major competitions...Prugger's solid results placed him eighth in the '97 World Cup standings and he hopes to improve on that in Nagano, where he placed fifth and sixth at the Olympic test events..."I liked the piste in Shiga Kogen," he says, "and the competition there was very well organized"...Prugger speaks fair English and excellent German, which, coming from northern Italy, is actually his first language...