Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(46)

Austria is a small country, much of it mountainous. Kitzbühel, which is one in a necklace of snowy Alpine towns such as St. Anton, Gstaad, and St. Moritz, rose to the list of fashionable places after a visit by the Prince of Wales in 1928. But it is famous, too, for its great skiers—the wonder team of the 1950s: Pravda, Hinterseer, Molterer, and Sailer. Their photographs can still be seen displayed in shops: young men, the sun in their faces, leaning on their ski poles with the insouciance of champions. It was Toni Sailer who went through the roof, sweeping all three golds at Cortina, Italy, in 1956 (a feat that only Jean-Claude Killy has duplicated) and winning two more at the world championships two years later. He lost the slalom. In gratitude, Kitzbühel gave him and Molterer plots of land. Sailer built a small hotel on his.

“There used to be a lot of champions, but now it’s too chichi,” the press chief for the Hahnenkamm, Michael von Horn, says of the town. “The hard element is gone. There are too many other things; they go into business. Nowadays the champions come from backwoods places like Mooswald.”

There are stunning faces from Munich and Vienna in the Landh?usl every night, or up at the Romerhof; insolent faces without problems or cares. St. Moritz is classier but also more formal and far more expensive. Here there is a hint of scandal, new money, of reputations that aren’t quite right. The town is crowded. The casino is filled. People even come by taxi from Munich, about $120, not much when split several ways; the hotel will send one for you. The various bars and dance halls are either jammed because they are in vogue or mysteriously empty, with orchestras playing to nearly vacant floors.

The bar of the Goldener Greif is a gathering place. Late in the day everyone comes by, coaches, racers, journalists. Originally a gasthaus where farmers stopped for a drink on the way home from market, the hotel belongs to three brothers named Harisch and is extremely well run. The Harisches have been innkeepers for generations. Their mother cooked English dishes for Edward VIII when he was prince. The duke of Kent stayed here, and the Kennedys. Chaliapin sang in the bar.

At another of their hotels, the Munichau, a fortress-like outpost several miles from town, the American team is housed. In a small dining room they sit looking at videotape of their practice runs. Courage, technique, finesse, strength, and stamina—these are the qualities Killy mentioned when asked what was demanded by the course. On the tape are mistakes, bad runs, crashes. “Oh, daddyo,” someone murmurs as a racer goes out of control. Another splatters. “ABC’ll put you on TV for that one.” The upper part of the course is extremely steep. The speed gained in the first thirty seconds carries the racer through the slower middle section.

Andreas Rauch, the U.S. downhill coach, is twenty-nine, quiet, and well-spoken. He is Austrian, with the prestige of having coached for four years on the Austrian team. Now he is trying to build a racing squad almost from scratch. He is very meticulous. He attends to every detail himself except for the video pictures; his girlfriend does that. Rauch knows the litany of disasters—he has been to Kitzbühel before. “Erwin Strickler, he was Italian, finished his career here in the Hausberg compression,” he recalls. “Antonioli crashed in the same spot—also out for his career. Hans Enn crashed in the final compression, where you have the fastest speed. Last year Farny was out for three races after falling here. In 1979, eight of the first fifteen racers fell.”

The falls are brutal. Instantaneously, what amounts to a racer’s existence explodes. It takes time to regain confidence and get over that, sometimes two or three races. And this year the course is incredibly fast. It’s difficult to compare years; in the 1930s, the record was around three minutes. The length of the course, however, has changed slightly over the years; sections have been widened, bumps removed, there are fewer or more gates. The weather is always different, the snow, the light. More important, equipment has changed. There is no absolute standard, but by the 1950s the time was down to two and a half minutes, and in the 1960s, less. At the start of the season, the record belongs to Franz Klammer, who streaked down in 2:03.22 in 1975.

Now something else is happening. In training runs they are breaking two minutes. Fantastic, everyone is saying.

“The top was fast,” Beattie explains. “Usually it has ripples, but today it was absolutely smooth.” It is so fast that if you touch the snow to keep from falling, as one U.S. team member did, you will burn a hole in your glove.

It’s hard to figure the race from the training runs, although the early finishing order is always watched carefully, and certain racers are singled out. “Guys that are in front in training are almost always in front in the race,” in Rauch’s opinion. “They have to go full speed in training because there are so few runs—the maximum you can get before the race is four, and usually you get only three or less.” Most of the time they go all-out and then slow down at the end of the course so as not to give themselves away. The best ones do this, Rauch says. To circumvent it, rival coaches end their timing a hundred meters from the finish.

The evening before the race, starting positions are decided. The racers are ranked according to their past performance in seeds of fifteen, but the order within the seed is determined by a draw. Position is important. In the downhill it’s usually better to go in the second half of the first seed, when the snow has iced a bit and is faster. But weather can change this. It might be snowing, making the course slower.