World Alpine Skiing Championships : Schneider Saves Her Best for Final Race

After two near-misses, Vreni Schneider hit her stride Saturday and did what everyone expected her to do in the final women’s race of the World Alpine Skiing Championships.

Switzerland’s new skiing superwoman took a comfortable lead in the first run of the giant slalom on Vail Mountain and went on to win the gold medal as Tamara McKinney of the United States lasted just a few seconds before going down in a spray of snow and diving spectators.

Maria Walliser may provide the glamour for the Swiss female flying squadron--which won 5 of the 15 available medals here, including 2 golds--but Schneider supplies the bulk of the firepower.

Between her silver medals in the combined and the slalom, and her victory Saturday, she rode shotgun to the accompaniment of country-and-western music on her Walkman.

Well, perhaps it was more country-and-southern. “I like to listen to all kinds of tapes between races, but especially country music,” she said in German, through a translator. “They help me to relax. Today, it just happened to be a group from the South Tyrol, a part of Italy where they speak German.”

In Switzerland, apparently, as in the United States, you can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl.

Schneider, 24, daughter of a onetime cobbler who is now a shopkeeper in the village of Elm, an hour and a half east of Zurich, is uncomfortable in the limelight and prefers just being alone, or with family and friends, in the mountains.

“Whenever I am tired or lack motivation,” she said, “all I have to do is go for a long walk in the mountains for a few hours in order to regain all my energy and joy in living. Many thoughts come to me then, and once I get home, I write them in my diary.”

The latest entry in her diary, under Feb. 11, 1989, will be about two runs, rather than walks, in the mountains of Colorado.

Schneider, sturdily built with short, dark hair and a prominent nose, bulldozed her way to a lead of more than a half-second over France’s Carole Merle with a time of 1:12.84 in the first run, then also had the fastest second run despite a mistake near the end and finished with a total time of 2:29.37.

Merle, who is second to Schneider in the current World Cup overall standings, hung on for the silver medal by winding up 1.13 seconds behind the winner, and teammate Christelle Guignard, who was another 1.30 back, earned the bronze.

Merle said that after the first run she didn’t really think she could catch Schneider and added: “Vreni was skiing very good and very fast, so I concentrated on trying to keep second place away from Walliser and (Mateja) Svet.”

Walliser, the downhill gold medalist here, dropped from third to fifth in the second run, while Yugoslavia’s Svet, the new world slalom champion, was unable to improve on her fourth place--despite the arrival of her personal six-man rooting section, plus accordionist, from Ljubljana.

The Yugoslavs enlivened the proceedings, as they did at the 1987 world championships and the 1988 Winter Olympics, by parading through the stands in their animal-skin folk costumes, waving flags, wiggling their hips to ring the big cowbells around their waists, and chanting, “Ma-te-ja, Ma-te-ja.” Maybe you had to be there . . .

Anyway, Svet’s Vets were part of uncounted thousands of spectators and skiers who have jammed the Vail Valley in relatively mild, sunny weather for the closing weekend of this biennial racing extravaganza.

Today, they’ll watch Italy’s Alberto Tomba, like Schneider an Olympic double gold medalist at Calgary last February, try to pull off his own last-race heroics in the men’s slalom. He has been somewhat disappointing to his fans so far this winter and has only sixth and seventh places to show for his efforts here.

Schneider, of course, has had a completely different season to date, winning all five slaloms and all five giant slaloms on the World Cup circuit, after spending last spring recovering from torn knee ligaments suffered in a March downhill race at Aspen, Colo.

She has taken over as the leader of the Swiss women from her idol, Erika Hess, who retired on the day in ’87 that Schneider first became the world giant slalom champion at Crans-Montana, Switzerland.

That victory was a surprise, but her repeat performance wasn’t.

Despite everyone’s expectations, Schneider said: “I didn’t feel any extra pressure today. Even if I didn’t win, the earth wouldn’t stop going around.”

Asked why her first run was so fast, when she is notorious for usually being slow the first time down, Schneider said: “This time, maybe I put some pressure on myself. I didn’t want to be in the position of having to go beyond my limits in the second run, as I did in the slalom. I told myself to go for it and be aggressive.

“It was good that I was ahead, because I had a problem in my second run at the gate near the top of the last steep face. I came in too straight and almost missed it. I thought, ‘Oh, this is bad. I may have lost the race right here.’ But I fought my way and down and was elated when I saw the No. 1 by my name on the scoreboard.”

Schneider’s tendency to fall behind in the first run of a race has become “almost a game with her,” according to Swiss women’s Coach Jan Tischhauser, who added: “She finds it amusing to come from behind, but it is not so amusing for her competitors, who must always wait to see what Vreni does, before they know how they will finish.”

This ability to rise above adversity began when Schneider was a teen-ager. Her mother died of cancer, and she was left to run the family household, a responsibility that cut into her promising skiing career. She was dropped from the national squad because of her inability to get good results and even considered giving up racing during this period in the early 1980s.

“I decided to keep on trying,” Schneider said, “because I realized how important the sport was to me, and I had promised my mother that I would do everything I could to be a champion.”

Schneider’s victory Saturday was made somewhat easier when McKinney, who had won a gold medal in the combined and added a bronze in the slalom, fell before she had gone a quarter of the way down the first course and skidded into a cluster of spectators.

Asked if she was hurt in the spill, McKinney replied: “No, nothing serious. But maybe you’d better ask some of the spectators I ran into.”

Nothing serious there, either, it was reported.

With McKinney out, the top U.S. placing went to Diann Roffe, the 1985 world giant slalom gold medalist, who finished 10th, just behind the new world super-G champion, Ulrike Maier of Austria.

The Austrians, incidentally, have five medals overall, including two golds, and are second in the combined men’s and women’s medal count to the Swiss, who have 11, including three golds.