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Outside magazine, November 1998

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Thinking About Machine-Man
"He is for sure not one of us," says a teammate of ski racer Hermann Maier. "He is beyond this world," says a former gold medalist. "He is a beast," they say, and finally, "He is the beast."

By Hampton Sides

On Friday the 13th of February, the skies over Hakuba, Japan, are at last sun-streaked and cloudless. Up until this morning, these Nagano Olympics seem to have been cursed by the Shinto gods. Not enough snow. Too much snow. Too much fog. Sleet. Rain. There was even an earthquake, a 5.0 temblor — not powerful enough to do any real damage, except, perhaps, to a racer's concentration. The downhill event has been delayed by nearly a week. But this morning, at dawn, the officials tell the Olympians to wax their skis. It's show time.

Hermann Maier, wearing bib number four, is standing in the chute, immersed in the ritualistic tics of the countdown: digging in his skis, planting and replanting his poles. He wears a red-and-white spandex suit and a red crash helmet adorned with the eagle of the Austrian flag. The course, having been machine-spritzed with mist through the night, is now a long neck of blue ice, fast and slick, with the hard glint of chromium.

"I suppose," Maier says to me when I meet him at his gym in the Austrian Alps, "you're going to want to know all about the sturtz."

The what?

"The sturtz — the crash. The Americans only want to know about the crash. It's all they care about. Violence makes all the headlines in your country." The 25-year-old champion curls his lip in disgust. "There was an American photographer on the mountain. He didn't say, 'Hey, you all right?' He says, 'Hey, great picture!'"

But it was a great picture. The video of Maier's downhill crash was something like the Zapruder film of the Winter Olympics, microanalyzed for the exact moment of error and the exact moment when bones should have cracked, an alarming sports reel played and replayed in the craven knowledge that all of us, everywhere, especially Americans but probably even well-mannered Austrians, are beady-eyed rubberneckers who can't help ourselves. Here was a piece of footage lurid enough to replace the stale old "agony of defeat" clip at the start of ABC's Wide World of Sports, the one in which Yugoslavian ski jumper Vinko Bogotah endlessly pinwheels down the mountain during a 1970 contest in Obersdorf, West Germany. Maier's sturtz in Nagano was more than just a spectacular wipeout. It was an anarchic burst of kinesis that refreshed our understanding of why alpine skiing is so exciting to watch in the first place: the possibility of pure, white-knuckled calamity, the chaos lurking just behind the scrim of mastery and finesse.

Maier comes from a country where skiing is less a sport than a national science project, a country that produced two of the greatest theoreticians of motion, Ernst Mach and Christian Doppler. To crash, and to crash so crazily, so wantonly, is a most un-Austrian thing to do, and Maier remains deeply unhappy that he will be forever linked to such a messy encounter with the laws of physics. "If you ask me," Maier says, "I would prefer to be famous for winning two gold medals in Nagano rather than for my screwup."

Thus chary about going down in history as skiing's Olympic crash-test dummy, Maier has dedicated himself to putting in a steady, chaos-free season on the slopes of the world this winter. He not only aims to win the World Cup overall title for the second year in a row, but also plans to beat Swede Ingemar Stenmark's 1979 record of 13 World Cup victories in a single season and to prevail in a slew of events at the World Championships in Vail next February. And he intends to do it with deliberate and measured rationality. "You better believe it," he tells me. "I'm done with the crashing." He says this with a vehemence that protests too much, as if he suspects that certain bad habits can't be extinguished, as hard as one may try.

Besides, the sturtz has been good to Maier. It helped to carry him across a certain invisible line of demarcation into skiing superstardom. "In a way, the crash was the best thing that ever could have happened to him," says John Garnsey, president of the organizing committee for the 1999 World Championships in Vail and a jury member at Nagano. "If Maier had just won two Olympic golds, he'd be yet another great Austrian skier, known and respected by insiders everywhere, but not a household word — certainly not in this country. To succeed is boring. To fail spectacularly and then succeed — that's really something."

Maier is visualizing the line he set for himself during his inspection runs, but that was three days ago. In the aftermath of the storms, the course-setters had to pull the gates and then hastily reset them this morning, with no time to allow the skiers to reinspect. The Austrian coaches tell Maier that the course is just as it was before: Proceed as planned, no changes.

Yet in fact the course has changed-in a few places, dramatically so. At the first turn, there's a little bump that didn't exist at the inspection-"the mystery mogul," it will later be called-and after that a sharp drop-off followed by a gate that will require an abrupt left turn. To make it, Maier will have to pull back a little, stand up on his skis, slow down. But the way this new feature is situated, Maier, moving at nearly 80 miles an hour, won't be able to see it coming.

At some point or another, every skier crashes. look at any expert's knees and you'll see the telltale scars, the butterfly stitches. Racers share a perverse and largely inexpressible addiction to the crapshoot of speed. Among themselves they don't need to talk about it, but when they try to communicate the sport's attraction to others not of the tribe, they have an annoying habit of talking about a thing called "the edge" as if it were a specific geographical place where they do most of their living, some impossibly remote principality tucked away behind distant mountains.

Maier is no exception. "It's true," he says in his characteristic monotone, "I'm only happy when I'm skiing on the edge. It's the only place where I can be. If you're not there, well, forget about it."

The difference is that by all accounts, Hermann Maier does push the downhiller's brinkmanship just a little farther than it's ever been pushed. He may train and prepare with cold, methodical thoroughness, but when he gets on a slope his lust for the attack seems to take over. No one skis a tighter line, no one takes it so close to the precipice of disaster. Before the Olympics, some skiers on the World Cup circuit began to suggest that Maier, by always going at such a fearless, full-throttle tilt, was merely flying on the fumes of good luck. To them, what was even more astonishing than his Nagano crash was that it didn't happen sooner.

If nerve were Hermann Maier's only attribute, however, he would not have possessed the means to become the best all-around skier in the world. During last year's World Cup circuit, he won 11 different races in three separate alpine disciplines (giant slalom, Super G, and downhill). Insiders have now begun to say that if Maier can avoid major injuries over the next few years, he could become one of the greats — a versatile champion on par with Jean-Claude Killy. Yes, he takes immense risks, but he can back it all up with such raw power and with such a commanding range of skills that the risks are worth taking.

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