Not until the men's downhill on the next to last day of the championships did their fortunes turn. Even performing in their own mountains before whooping partisan crowds, the Austrians went day after day without a victory. Not so long ago one could say the same about the fabled Austrian ski team. Coach Tom Kelly says, "Hess is technically the best skier who has ever come along. I am Erika and I pay no attention to who was skiing two, four or six years ago." With the recent retirements of Annemarie Moser-Pr√∂ll and Marie-Theres Nadig, plus injuries to Hanni Wenzel, Hess seems ready to be fitted for the queen's crown. She's saucy and proud, and when someone suggested that she might want to emulate West Germany's Rosi Mittermaier, who won two golds and a silver in the 1976 Olympics, Hess said sharply, "Don't compare me with Rosi. At 17 she won a bronze medal in the slalom at Lake Placid and this year has won four of the seven World Cup slaloms for women. With seeming effortlessness, she flowed down whatever kind of surface the fickle weather produced-including chemically created ersatz ice on a rain-drenched slope of slush-to win three gold medals, in the women's slalom, giant slalom and combined events.Īs sweet-looking as a daisy but as sturdy as an oak, Hess was a ski-racing wunderkind who grew up on a farm with 15 cows and five brothers and sisters and quit school to ski full time when she was 15. ![]() Stirring though the Americans' performances were, the individual who dominated the 1982 championships was Erika Hess, 19, of Switzerland. ![]() And how about Cindy Nelson, 26, known as Grandma because she's in her 11th and perhaps best ever season? Nelson won a silver medal in the downhill and was done out of another medal by the scoring system that's used in the FIS's weird new combination event. Then there was the dark-eyed beauty from Sun Valley, Idaho, Christin Cooper, 22, who won an unmatched (for an American) three medals-none gold, alas-and underwent an instant nickname change from Coop to Super Coop. ![]() For while this 1982 Fédération Internationale de Ski championship produced its quota of heroes and heroines and its usual share of high drama, there was one turn of events that no one had even remotely forecast: This event was, above all, an American triumph. Yet, after the troupe pulled up its slalom stakes and moved on, there remained a sense of surprise-even amazement-over what had taken place in that beautiful back valley of the Alps. It took 12 long, sometimes tedious, days to finish the whole program, and they were filled with the most extreme weather the Alps can produce-deep fog and deep snow followed by a deluge of rain, followed by a glorious siege of bright skies and bitter cold that turned racecourses as hard and abrasive as stone. ![]() Ski racing's white circus completed its 26th biennial world-championship show last week on the steeps above Schladming and Haus, a pair of rustic villages tucked together in the Dachstein-Tauern region of Austria where the fragrance of street-side cow barns mixes interestingly with the exhaust of tourist buses.
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