Word: skying
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...wildest and most dramatic ride of Olympic ski racing on Mount Allan was Pirmin Zurbriggen's blazing downhill victory on the first day of competition, but that was then. For the next two weeks the Swiss superskier, a likely bet to win a hatful of medals, was most noticeable as he smiled bashfully at cameras and gave gentlemanly praise to racers who were beating him. The expectations game was at least as delusive among the women. Wasn't Michela Figini, the fiery Italian-Swiss who is the sport's best woman downhiller, supposed to repeat her Sarajevo victory? And then...
Wind-lashed Mount Allan itself upstaged the world's best skiers during the men's super-G. Flat light blurred visibility, and the man-made snow had been licked to unpredictable slickness by overnight freezing. Five of the first 15 racers fell or wobbled off course. Zurbriggen skied so cautiously that he was out of contention. The only racer who looked comfortable was France's Franck Piccard, who had never won a World Cup race although he had looked good earlier in the Games, taking a bronze in the downhill. His expression as the other racers failed seemed...
Bright sun warmed some of the best ski competition of the 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...
...From the ski slopes of Calgary to the polling booths of New Hampshire, TV had a busy week of hyping the human drama...
Happiness at the Olympics has always been a relative matter of little feelers. Eddie ("the Eagle") Edwards, the ski-jumping plasterer from England, spoke for all the Games' odd fellows when he declared, "To have jumped and still be alive -- it's a thrill." As if Edwards were the grand Finn Matti Nykanen himself, the Brit writers have claimed Eddie as their new knight of the woeful countenance (not to mention feeble eyesight and flapping elbows). What choice did they have? Out at Calgary's quaint hall for curling, the Scots were finishing last in another game they invented...