Word: placide
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...Soviets, as usual, scooped up medals by the fistful. But thanks to Heiden and the hockey team, the U.S. did remarkably well: six golds, to nine for the East Germans and ten for the Soviets. On a per capita basis, however, the hands-down winner of the Lake Placid Games was tiny Liechtenstein (pop. 24,000); the brother-and-sister skiing act of Andreas and Hanni Wenzel whisked to two golds and two silvers...
...wake, and some said she could take four golds. The expectations were much too high and put far too much pressure on her. Although she had won the World Championship in 1979, some of her rivals were then still rounding into top form. They were ready for Lake Placid, and Beth finished seventh in the 500, fifth in the 1,000 and seventh in the 1,500 meters. It was an excellent showing, but some newsmen treated her like a failure...
...Eric Heiden into a golden apotheosis to Americans, the Swedes had long since made a national hero of Ingemar Stenmark, an eerily perfect slalom racer who is as popular at home as Bjorn Borg, the tennis champion. At 23, Stenmark has won the World Cup three times. Before Lake Placid, he had taken 14 World Cup giant slalom races in a row while competing against the best racers in the world-a record as awesome in its own way as Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak in 1941. In some ways, Stenmark is the Alpine equivalent of DiMaggio...
...sense of precision. He is strictly a specialist in the slalom and the giant slalom, fascinated by their intricate swoops and switchbacks. At Innsbruck four years ago, Stenmark fell in the slalom and had to content himself with a bronze in the giant slalom. He came to Lake Placid determined to take the big prize that had escaped him, a gold medal...
While Stenmark was being Stenmark, Europe's top women racers were putting on a spectacular show of their own on Whiteface Mountain. Austria's Annemarie Moser-Pröll had also come to Lake Placid with a point to prove. Like Stenmark, she held the record for World Cup career victories (61 for her, 46 for him) and, like Stenmark, she had never won an Olympic gold medal. At Sapporo in 1972, when she was 18, she had been forced to settle for two silvers, and she missed Innsbruck in 1976 because she was at home in Kleinarl...