Word: skis
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Wind blew so cold and hard at the rocky summit of Mount Allan Sunday morning, when Alpine ski racing was supposed to blast off with the men's downhill, that the question was not whether the event would be canceled for the day but whether gatekeepers and photographers not protected by the start house could survive until officials admitted that the mountain gods were in no mood for a ski race. Back at ABC's hype central, talkers with dead air to fill turned to -- who else? -- Dr. Ruth, TV's advice giver to the sexlorn. Bearing in mind that...
Then the split times for the 14th skier began flashing. Pirmin Zurbriggen, Muller's teammate, rival and mirror image -- a cool, reserved fellow who skis with a risk taker's wild flair -- was .05 sec. ahead, then .23 sec. A big outdoor TV screen showed Zurbriggen so close to disaster on one free-falling left turn that his hand scraped the snow. Muller watched, motionless, as Zurbriggen flashed past the finish .51 sec. in the lead. He did not react as Pirmin, exulting, raised a ski and kissed it. Muller was just one of skiing's centurions. Zurbriggen was fortune...
...totally surprised when I found the gate between my skis. It made me real mad," he said afterward. But an hour later, hunched over a buffet lunch in a hotel restaurant with his teammates, he pulled his long face up from the table to do just one interview, with a TIME correspondent. "O.K., action!" this shyest and most decent of ski heroes yelled out, trying to cheer the others with him. He declined to blame the weather. "Sure it was windy, but it had no effect on my racing." Or the course. "It was an easy slope, not too hard...
...Games, when Debbie Armstrong and Christin Cooper won their gold and silver in the giant slalom, Phil and Steve Mahre a gold and a silver in slalom, and Bill Johnson, to expert eyes more scamster than skier, pulled his lovely downhill win. Now in the small traveling circus of ski racing it was being said that young skiers in the U.S. were too regimented, ran too many drills and never learned to free-ski, then were packed off to ski academies where obscure bad things were done to them. Ski resorts in the U.S., unlike those in Europe, fear lawsuits...
...normal and also snakebit, however, is a bit much. Injuries hit the U.S. men hard, and all but wiped out the women's team. Veteran Doug Lewis, who cracked a collarbone when a Soviet coach who was 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...