He showed promising signs as a junior but was dismissed by the Austrian national team for not having the physical strength necessary for top level skiing. But the young Austrian stuck with his dream and built himself up to become the racing machine of the late nineties.
He eventually attracted the attention of the Austrian coaches in after clocking excellent unofficial times as a forerunner in a World Cup GS held on his home-run at Flachau. He participated in the Europa Cup and was crowned overall Champion that very same year.
It wasn't long before he made his coaches regret their earlier short-sightedness and showed what a true champion he really was. Hermann Maier's dedication and more importantly his determination took him to the top of the world. He won his first World Cup race in in the superG of Garmisch Partenkirchen and his first titles arrived in the season when he wiped away the competition winning three out of a possible five globes.
He notched up an incredible 10 wins in four different disciplines, adding a further 9 podium finishes and managing 5 victories in a row in the month of January.
Not enough snow. Too much snow. Too much fog. There was even an earthquake, a 5. 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. Dan Osman. Pipin Ferreras Rodriguez. Lance Armstrong 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. The Americans only want to know about the crash. It's all they care about. Violence makes all the headlines in your country.
He didn't say, 'Hey, you all right? 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.
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. 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 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. Besides, the sturtz has been good to Maier. It helped to carry him across a certain invisible line of demarcation into skiing superstardom.
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. 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. Racers share a perverse and largely inexpressible addiction to the crapshoot of speed.
Maier is no exception. 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.
But Maier was not content with being a spectacular footnote, and he wasn't satisfied with simply surviving. Fellow Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger dubbed him "The Herminator," but other skiers on tour called Maier "The Monster" because he attacked the hill as ferociously as anyone they'd ever seen, always pushing the envelope of safety, always ready for the next challenge.
His will to win seemed otherworldly. Wherever he was from, Maier knew where he was going: back down the hill in the Olympic super-G competition. Just 72 hours after the sturtz, he obliterated the field by more than half a second to win the gold medal.
Three days later, he went out and recorded the fastest times in each run of the giant slalom, winning gold again. After his Olympic triumph, Maier continued to push the horrific crash further behind him with win after win on the World Cup tour.
During the season, he won 13 races, tying the single-season men's record set by Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark 22 years before. In his book, he recounts how he braced himself for the impact to the extent that he dented his gas tank squeezing his legs together.
The following season, he soared back to win his fourth World Cup overall title. The Games this February in Turin, Italy, hold additional value to Maier, who has established and re-established himself. And each turn means something. There are some turns that are really good.
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