Starting Out With A Chaser

The hot tip in world ski racing this season is not that Austrian daredevil Franz Klammer will win every downhill event they put in front of him. He has done just about that for two years now. It was no surprise when the king of the mountain threw himself into the first three downhills of the World Cup season and won all three by a mile. There are seven more to go and Klammer looks long gone.

But, hold on. The real drama lies just off center stage in the trickier slaloms, where style is everything and where Klammer usually lands on his ear after bombing the first three gates or so. There a battle is shaping up between Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark, the snakiest racer of them all and last year's World Cup champion, and Phil Mahre, a mop-headed 19-year-old whiz from White Pass, Wash. Mahre won the first move by dusting everybody off, Stenmark included, in the season-opening giant slalom at Val d'Is�re. Two days later, he raced to third place in the second GS to become the leader in the World Cup standings. Because no American male had ever won a World Cup GS in the Alps or any World Cup race there in four years, Mahre became an overnight celebrity. Stenmark, who finished second and sixth, was seen beating the ground with his ski poles at the finish line, a flash of anger that he had never displayed before.

The competition grew more intense when the racing circus moved on to Ebnat-Kappel, Switzerland, where muggy weather had turned the giant slalom courses into something like yogurt. Mahre finished the first run in second place, 16/100s of a second behind the eventual winner and local hero, Heini Hemmi. He started just as hot in the second run, but skied into a hole at the 13th gate. Stenmark, meanwhile, came in 24th in the first run; in the second he made up enough time to finish eighth overall. In the next slalom at Laax, Switzerland, Stenmark finally won his first World Cup race of the season. Back up on the hill, Mahre skied into a gate instead of a hole—and failed to finish. This dropped him to seventh in the standings; Stenmark was in second. And then came last weekend and the GS in Garmisch, West Germany. This time it was Stenmark who crashed. After flashing across the line in 1:36.68 in the first run, the fastest time and seven-tenths ahead of Mahre, Stenmark charged through some 40 gates in the second before his wipeout. Mahre stayed upright and confident, finishing fourth behind surprise winner Klaus Heidegger of Austria. The standings: Stenmark in fifth, Mahre up to sixth, only two points behind. And while a few early races do not make a season, the results served to quash predictions that Stenmark will ski away with the cup this year.

"I'm hanging in," says Mahre. "Nobody has gotten too far ahead of me yet."

The duel between champ and challenger has been coming on since the end of last season at Aspen when Mahre finished behind Stenmark in the slalom in which Stenmark clinched the World Cup title. "Next year I will have to watch out for him," Stenmark allowed at the time. Now it seems next year has arrived.

Last October, when the U.S. and Swedish teams were training in Val Senales, Italy, Mahre and Stenmark resumed their competition in timed practice runs. "In the GS I was way off pace," says Mahre. "I was two seconds out against Stenny. But in the slalom there were runs when I tied him or was just two-tenths slower."

"I knew from Phil's training runs that he was getting very good," says Stenmark. "I watched him, all right." Mahre also used the Val Senales camp to study the Swede's flawless technique and to compare it with his own. "In the slalom," he says, "Stenmark is ahead of everything. The gate doesn't come to him; he goes to the gate. When there is a rhythm change, he has a feel for the line where he should be. His style is letter perfect."

Hank Tauber, the director of the U.S. team, says, "Phil is very spontaneous. He makes errors. But he is so talented that he can correct a mistake at top speed in the middle of a turn. He has not skied his perfect race yet, but when he does, the rest of the world won't be able to touch him. Including Stenmark. When Phil won the first race, the Europeans thought it was a fluke. But when he got that third place and was leading in the cup standings, they said, 'Hey, he's for real!' "

Mahre's win was reason to celebrate, a relatively rare occasion for the U.S. team, and Colmar, the company that turns out racing suits for the team, presented him with two cases of champagne. "We only let him have a few sips," says Tauber. "But he doesn't really like the stuff, anyway. He likes milk."

Both Mahre and Stenmark are country boys who have no taste for champagne or adulation. While Mahre is a bit more outgoing and an easy talker, Stenmark is so reserved and shy that he is usually referred to as "the silent Swede." At times he opens his mouth as if he wants to say something, then, apparently thinking better of it, closes it again. Otherwise, they are quite a bit alike: both come from a rugged life-style and a home mountain that is not big enough for downhill training. Consequently, both concentrated on the slalom events and developed their techniques on their own. Says Stenmark's coach, Torgny Svensson, "Talents are born, not made. We coaches can do nothing but organize the training facilities."