Word: zurbriggen
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...slalom is an acrobat's race of quick, subtle turns (less subtle, however, since the introduction five years ago of spring-loaded plastic gate poles that allow aggressive skiers to charge gates directly and club them aside with armored forearms). Zurbriggen is competitive in the discipline but has not won a World Cup slalom since 1986. His real strength is in the faster, wilder races. Last season he took five World Cup downhills. The race is a mad descent of at least 800 meters, with few control gates, at speeds that can reach 80 or 85 m.p.h. The giant slalom...
...figure-skating pair. On to the hard part: he is quiet, sensible, mannerly, respectful to his parents and, as the Boy Scouts say, "brave, clean and reverent." Clearly there is an image problem here. It 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...
...Zurbriggen's cool psyche has a large, invisible eggshell around it. Everything he needs is inside. His ties are very strong to his parents and the small 30-bed sport hotel, called the Larchenhof, that his father Alois built and now runs. A ski racer himself, Alois quit when a younger brother died after a ski fall, but it was he who first encouraged Pirmin to race. Pirmin's girlfriend Moni Julen, a pretty, dark-haired ski instructor from Zermatt, is a cousin of his friend Max and is accepted as part of this tight, protective mountain clan, which includes...
...above all else "a man of his village," notes Karl Frehsner, head coach of the Swiss men's team. And the village oompah band, for which Zurbriggen once played trumpet, quite rightly keeps him on its list of musicians. "That's what I really enjoy," he says. "Any music, except this modern rock stuff because there's no melody to it." He has a quick, shrewd intelligence -- "the mind of a businessman," states Frehsner approvingly -- and he is not at all fearful of the world. But he is rooted so solidly in Saas-Almagell that he is not thrown...
...habit of concentration is not a ski technique, it is a rock of Zurbriggen's character. In a hotel lobby or a team bus, when his eyes pass coolly over skiers with whom he has raced for ten years, it can be taken for the self-absorption of an egotist. So can remarks like his joking explanation to U.S. Ski Broadcaster Greg Lewis that "the name Pirmin means 'success.' " This sort of clunker is probably nothing more than the slight awkwardness of a 25-year-old athlete who is pursued by middle-aged foreigners all intent on asking...