Word: skier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Games in the women's and men's giant slaloms. The leader after the women's first run was Blanca Fernandez-Ochoa, a Spaniard (and, reporters told each other happily, a sometime bullfighter) whose brother Paco won the slalom at the '72 Games in Sapporo. Blanca, a powerful, driving skier, looked so strong that Spanish fans phoned to Calgary for champagne as they waited for the second...
Next day came the men, or to put things accurately, the man. There seemed to be only one skier on the hill. Austrian Hubert Strolz, the combined gold medalist, skied superbly, and Zurbriggen only a little less so. They finished second and third. After the commanding first run by Alberto Tomba, the 21- year-old Italian now universally known as La Bomba, it never seemed possible that he would lose. He did not. Tomba is a big, curly-haired, laughing fellow, winner of seven World Cup races already this season, who seems too tall and bulky to be the world...
...misty moments next day it seemed that the lead of Sweden's 31- year-old Ingemar Stenmark, greatest male skier of his time, would hold up in the snow-blurred second run of the men's slalom. Then the astonishing Tomba, third after the first run, swiveled down the course to first place and his second gold, ahead of West Germany's Frank Woerndl and another elderly gent, Liechtenstein's 30-year-old Paul Frommelt. Stenmark slipped to fifth. What now for La Bomba, two Ferraris? How do you say vroom-vroom in Italian...
...fans in other countries had cause to rejoice in some non-prime- time, though historic, performances. East German Frank-Peter Roetsch was the first ever to capture both the 10-km and 20-km biathlons, a daunting standard for future ski shooters. Even more notably, Soviet Cross-Country Skier Raisa Smetanina tied for the most decorated competitor in the history of the Winter Games as she took a bronze in the 20 km, the record ninth medal of her four- Olympiad career. Even Britons, whose team failed to win a single medal, could take pride in a new national achievement...
...taking pictures blundered into his path during a ski test a few weeks ago, creaked to 32nd place in the downhill. A.J. Kitt and Jeff Olson, a couple of youngsters still getting used to the World Cup circuit, did respectably to finish 26th and 28th. No U.S. male skier survived the combined. Among the women, early-season injuries knocked out Star Tamara McKinney, '84 Gold Medalist Armstrong, Downhillers Eva Twardokens, Tori Pillinger, Adel Allender and Diann Roffe. (McKinney and Armstrong, on the mend, are at Calgary and ready to race.) Then only an hour before she was to race...