Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(47)
At night the lights are on everywhere. The restaurants are crowded. There are five hundred newspaper, radio, and TV people in town, Corriere della Sera, Stern, Asahi Shimbun, the London Times. There are sixty-six reporters from Austria alone. The talk is entirely of racing, past champions, the poetry of names. Innsbruck, six years ago, was where the Canadians began coming on. Klammer won there.
“And in 1980?”
“Lake Placid. The winner was Leonhard Stock.”
“Of course. That’s right. Who was second?”
Silence.
“You know, that’s the thing,” someone says. “You never remember who came in second.”
On Friday there is a race to make up for one canceled at Morzine earlier in the month. First place goes to Austrian Harti Weirather, second to Podborski, third to another Canadian, Ken Read. Klammer, the veteran from Mooswald, is eleventh. In a silver suit marked USA, Phil Mahre finishes thirty-seventh. The downhill is not his scene. They are expecting 30,000 people tomorrow, especially with an Austrian win today, which usually, they say, brings 10,000 more.
Saturday morning is cold and clear. By nine o’clock, crowds are flowing toward the mountain. A band is playing. Helicopters clatter overhead. People have come for the day by car and train. Kitzbühel lies in a loop made by the railroad, and there are tunnels under the track. A friend of mine ended his skiing because of this. Elated after a magnificent day, he decided to ski through a tunnel and right into town. At the last moment, he says, he discovered he had forgotten one thing—it doesn’t snow in tunnels.
The prerace show is ending. Ski instructors are coming down in close formation, some carrying flags. Hang gliders with advertising on their wings float above the crowd. A group of Americans stand on a snow-covered rooftop waving an American flag.
The forerunners are arriving. It is impossible to see all of the race—it covers the entire side of a mountain. Nevertheless, it has begun. From the starting gate it is a steep, narrow descent to a sharp left turn. Then a plunge into an even steeper chute called the Mausfalle—the Mousetrap—down which racers go most of the way in the air. In a race, they are not trying to survive this first icy pitch. Instead they are skating, poling, accelerating down it. Every scrap of speed is important. They are on the best of their eight or ten pairs of skis, the ones with the right base, the right grind, the right wax. At the bottom is the first compression—the sudden flattening out that drives the body down on the legs with great force—and the three turns into the Steilhang.
Weirather has the number-two position; because of that, perhaps, he’s not particularly fast. The Russian who comes next crashes on the Steilhang. Now Klammer. The crowd is expecting something. A roar goes up! Best intermediate time! They are waiting for him and beginning to shout, “Hopp! Hopp! Hopp!” Suddenly, a black speck, he appears. Down he drops, crossing the finish amid cheers. 1:57.78. A roar. He’s in first! He stays there, racer after racer. Podborski is number fourteen. He never goes wide open on the training runs, he says. “In the past I did. I would have the best time, and in the race I fell because I was trying to do a little more. So I finally figured that out. Now I leave myself that little bit of room I can move into for the race.” The fact is, you must ski beyond your ability. You have to have something extraordinary motivating you. Podborski demolishes the upper section. He is doing all right in the middle. His skis are right, so is the wax.
It is a matter of hundredths. In his canary-yellow suit and black helmet, fairly flying, he hits the last pitch, the Hausberg, bottoms, turns. Hundredths are streaming off like ions. The final stretch, into the finish pen, spraying snow: 1:57.24. He has won for the second straight year. Ken Read is third; Phil Mahre finishes fourteenth, about 1.7 seconds behind Podborski. The first sixteen places are separated by only two seconds.
That night there’s a party for the racers and their guests at the Londoner, a popular bar. The phone at the hotel rings all the time for the Canadian team, but the calls are switched to the coach. “Otherwise we’d be doing nothing but answering the phone,” Podborski says. They even call in Toronto. He has a recording machine there. They call him from West Germany and say, “Oh, Steve, I love you,” and hang up.
“I’m not here to chase girls,” he says. “I’m here to ski.”
Nevertheless, on the snowy street two beautiful girls with black-rimmed eyes roll down the window of their car and ask impatiently, “Which way is the Jagerwirt?” That’s the hotel the Canadians are staying at. “Yes,” they cry, “but where is it, which street?”
Sunday is the slalom. It is a different kind of excitement, trickier, like watching a gymnastics match. One after another they shoot down, banging the poles out of the way with their shoulders, knees pumping as the crowd chants and rings cowbells.
Ingemar Stenmark, from Sweden, is the attraction here. He is a phenomenon, the sort that appears only once or twice in a generation. Tall, intelligent, aloof, like a great reddish dog, he reportedly earns well over half a million dollars a year. He has been at the top since winning the World Cup in 1976, 1977, and 1978, when they changed the rules to keep him from making it boring. He is twenty-six. He may not be back. “You can be in the top ten for ten years,” he says, “no more, and I have eight. I don’t think you get physically tired, but mentally you’re spent.”
As he competes now in these final months against Phil Mahre and his twin brother, Steve, there is really no one like him. He has that best-loved element of greatness: an unmistakable style. The possibilities in the event are limited—there is a steep hill with sixty gates the racer must flash through faster than the others; that’s all there is to it. Nevertheless, Stenmark makes himself different. Immensely smooth and powerful, he is whacking the hinged poles aside as if he were batting balls, this confident champion who disdains the downhill and the “paper” World Cup points he might win by entering it and is content to be absolute king of his domain (though Phil Mahre will surpass him in both of his specialties before the season is over). He is skiing with unforgettable authority, not sitting on the comfortable lead of his first run but risking everything anew on the second, courting disaster. Across the finish line and the time flashes on the scoreboard, almost two seconds faster than Mahre. A slight smile—less than a smile, something within—crosses his fine features as he looks up and sees it. The day is his. His long-limbed Swedish fiancée is smiling. This is probably his final season. The crowd has a last glimpse of him there in the winter sunlight. A line of Auden drifts through the head. The white Alps glittered. He was very great.