A Fight On The Slopes, But A Cinch On The Ice

Americans once thought that a Winter Olympics was something that happened in a Sonja Henie movie, but that was before Squaw Valley and a ski boom that now finds even 5,000 Texans belonging to ski clubs. Pre-ski boom and pre-TV, figure skating and bobsledding were the glamour events of the Games, the first one because of its grace, the other because of its speed. But today the millions of Americans who ski identify with the Alpine racer, and ski racing has become for Americans the No. 1 attraction.

Everybody seems to have heard of our Olympic medal winners Billy Kidd and Jimmy Heuga (see cover), who once again lead the U.S. Alpine squad, and of their predecessors, Gretchen Fraser, Andrea Mead Lawrence, Penny Pitou, Betsy Snite and Jean Saubert. If you count the medals they have won—10 in all—it appears that most of our heroes are heroines. But if you count further all the medals that U.S. teams have won since the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix in 1924, you will discover that while skiing may be the glamour sport as far as Americans are concerned, it is not one in which we have exactly covered ourselves with glory. The U.S. has won a total of 63 golds, silvers and bronzes in the Winter Games: 19 in figure skating, 14 in speed skating (both events will provide our surest medals at Grenoble—page 28), 14 in bobsledding, 10 in Alpine skiing, six in hockey and none in the Nordic events.

Win or lose, one of the major forces responsible for the popularization of Alpine ski racing is Bob Beattie, the aggressive coach of our national team, who has had our efforts under his boot for almost seven years. Beattie has yet to produce a Jean-Claude Killy, but what he has done is get the sport on television and keep it there, build a broad national junior racing program and persuade big business to subsidize it, and help invent the World Cup.

Like most men of action, Beattie lives in a tangle of problems and criticism, both at home and abroad. Untiringly, he bores through, twisting rules, defying committees and traditions, seizing every tiny positive result as a sign of hope. Last weekend he was at it again, remaking, 10 days before the Games begin, the squad he thinks will do best at Grenoble.

The men's team was fairly easy to determine. The leaders, of course, are those two old campaigners—old at 24—Billy Kidd and Jimmy Heuga, silver and bronze medalists in slalom at Innsbruck in 1964. Downhillers Jim Barrows and Dennis McCoy also are set, along with slalom and giant-slalom specialists Rick Chaffee and Spider Sabich, and Jere Elliott, who will probably compete in all three events.

Heuga and Kidd are the Americans with the best chance going into the pressure of Grenoble against the likes of France's Killy and Guy P�rillat and Austria's Gerhard Nenning and Karl Schranz. They know and understand this pressure and have survived it many times before, being the most decorated skiers in U.S. history.

They are totally different types of racers and personalities. Heuga is outgoing, impulsive, impressionable, a neat, friendly, fun-loving young man from Tahoe City, Calif. whose successes come in streaks. His determination is well hidden, but it is there, usually when the odds are most against his winning. In the Innsbruck Olympic slalom, he was back in the second seed on a steep, rutty course, but he flashed to third place. A week later in Garmisch, he won the single biggest trophy any American racer ever has won, the Arlberg- Kandahar combined, whipping everyone who had been an Olympic star the week before.

With Kidd injured in 1966 and 1967, Heuga carried the whole weight of the U.S. team. Although a slalom specialist, he had to ski the downhill in the world championships in Chile and the other two events as well. He raced to fourth place in the world combined standings. Last year it was Heuga more than anyone else who pushed France's Killy to his brilliant season.

Heuga has been far from dazzling in January's pre-Grenoble races, mainly because he is a notoriously slow starter. "I'm beginning to get really nervous now, and that's good," he said last week. "When I'm sort of on the ropes, that's when I've been at my best."

While Heuga is a purely instinctive and emotional racer, Billy Kidd is a scientist. The son of a motel owner in Stowe, Vt., Billy studies a slope like Ben Hogan studies a golf course. Slightly intellectual and very introspective, Kidd would be the last man on a dance floor, just as Heuga would be the first—and best.