Word: swiss
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...Karen ("No Mercy") Percy -- or so one Calgary sportswriter insisted -- a blond 21-year- old who stands a solid eleventh in World Cup rankings. She ran early and fast through stiff, changeable wind in the downhill. Among the stars who failed to touch her time were the glamorous Swiss rivals Maria Walliser, who finished fourth, and Michela Figini, Sarajevo's downhill winner, an ignominious ninth...
...cheeked super giant slalom specialist who had never won a World Cup downhill. She steamed across the finish line .75 sec. in the lead. "I was out of control up there, so I just took it faster and faster," said Kiehl, 23. A bit later, lanky Brigitte Oertli, the Swiss star no one hears about, edged Percy by .01 sec. for the silver medal. Two inexperienced U.S. women, Edith Thys, 21, and Kristen Krone, 19, swallowed their Olympic jitters, held their tucks and made their turns, and though the cameras did not show their courage, finished a creditable 18th...
...touchstones, the Swiss downhiller and the Wisconsin speed skater could have been a little tidier: Zurbriggen, 25, triumphed and fell; Jansen, 22, fell and . . . fell again. The death of his sister on the first morning of competition, following a long siege of cancer, made Jansen's 500-meter and 1,000-meter events seem both less and more significant. "Maybe," he admitted at the last, "there is a slight sense of relief that I can go home now and be with my family." And yet he planned to return after the funeral to cheer Eric Flaim and the other Americans...
...Olympics in general seemed a little spread out and stretched out, every venue and event had its delights, like the wooden shoes of the little Dutch girls echoing their clomps in the speed skaters' Oval. On Mount Allan, where Zurbriggen and Swiss Teammate Peter Muller drew most of the early glare, a softer scene involved the sport's former custodians, the Austrians. Leonhard Stock, 29, the fifth-stringer who replaced fabled Franz Klammer in 1980, then made it worse by winning the downhill gold, finished an unexpected fourth last week and was finally embraced. Two days later, when Zurbriggen found...