Word: skying
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...tall do you have to be to qualify for the giant slalom?), having just reminded themselves that luge is the French word for Flexible Flyer. At Sarajevo four years ago, intent on seeing those marvelous birdmen sail off their 90-meter sliding boards, two sportswriters hopped an unattended ski lift. Halfway up the foggy mountain, the one from Atlanta asked the handsomer one from New York, "Is this more dangerous than you thought?" The chair seemed to tilt away, leaving them hugging the frame and dangling in the sky. It wasn't until a rider passed by going the other...
...there is an office pool on 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...
...character; it is either a slow, curvy downhill or a fast, stretched-out GS. Zurbriggen, going through high-speed gates in GS or super-G, is unmistakable: a big, rangy cat springing from turn to turn, from coiled crouch to full-body extension, from one outside, carving ski to the other. He looks fast and is. Last season he won four World Cup races in the GS, as well as one in the super-G, and earned gold medals at Crans-Montana in each discipline. This season, pacing himself to peak at Calgary, he has taken two firsts and three...
...only in the matter of cherished stereotype that this serious-minded innkeeper's son comes up lacking. In public fancy, ski racers, and especially downhillers, are barbarians, berserkers, wearers of iron hats with cow horns sticking out of them. Pirmin, from a minor resort town near Saas-Fee (which is a minor resort near Zermatt), is the sort of nice young man your mother wants your sister to meet. He does not look as if he eats nails. He has curly, reddish-blond hair, an elf's pointy nose and a shy, boyish grin, behind which is real shyness, behind...
...does not help, in the iron hat and cow horns department, that Zurbriggen is an exceptionally pious Roman Catholic, who confounds the European sporting press by praying at least twice a day. He is a loner, a man who, in a perfectly pleasant way, keeps his distance. World-class ski racers are traveling performers who migrate together from resort to resort for something like eleven months a year, and who eat, share cable cars, log lobby time and wait out bad weather with the same few dozen people. In such a one-ring circus, Zurbriggen has had only one close...