Word: mountainous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Owing to a simple wisdom and a gust of wind, the Canadians stuck to human sentiments: happy children were the heart of the show. Kept to a blessed minimum were gimmicks like an inflatable mountain that wouldn't inflate and obligingly blew away. Folk dances prevailed, so much sweeter than production numbers, and the prancing horses of the Mounties outdid the screeching jets. Lassos twirled, cowboys strummed guitars, and a twelve-year-old girl lighted the candle...
...ready now to show us how far, how fast, how beautifully they can go. We so seldom drop by their world, and yet are made welcome. The opening ceremonies will feature Jamaican bobsledders still thrilling at the recent sighting of their first snow. "I am all alone with the mountain," Jean-Claude Killy used to murmur, but the golden skier of Grenoble was also known to drop his pants in midair and park his Volkswagen in the hotel lobby. This is serious stuff, but it promises...
...that ultimate test of valor and gristle, the Olympic men's downhill ski race at Mount Allan, near Calgary. You throw in your dollar, reach into the hat, and pull out the name of Switzerland's Peter Muller, say, or Canada's Rob Boyd. Congratulations! These are hairy-eared mountain men, eaters of nails, sleepers on plank floors, and you are looking fairly good to win a hatful of dollars. Muller, at 30 still the toughest downhill specialist since Austria's Franz Klammer, won the pre-Olympic downhill trial at Mount Allan last season. In downhill he was World...
...quit when a younger brother died after a ski fall, but it was he who first encouraged Pirmin to race. Pirmin's girlfriend Moni Julen, a pretty, dark-haired ski instructor from Zermatt, is a cousin of his friend Max and is accepted as part of this tight, protective mountain clan, which includes Heidi, 20, his younger sister and a downhiller on the national team. As a teenager, Pirmin spent a year cooking in the hotel kitchen, and now, during a short Christmas break, Mama Ida joshes contentedly that bookings are full, so it is good that Pirmin is there...
...adulation and press clamor or an occasional run of poor results. This unbudgeable nature is the grounding, as the coach sees it, for Zurbriggen's most valuable quality, an eerie ability to concentrate at a level that shuts out everything except snow and gates and the fall of the mountain. He seems unaware of his competition until it is time to accept congratulations or grin and say, in a way that always seems genuine, that it really isn't so bad to be beaten by Muller or by the one-man Luxembourg team, Marc Girardelli...