Hot, Cold and Gold : Olympic Medals, a World Cup Championship and Its Best Performance in 20 Years. So Why No Parades for the U.S. Ski Team?

“I suck! I’m quitting!” Picabo Street fumes, hurling her ski racer’s helmet in disgust. The impact of the missile sprays spring snow onto a nearby jumble of day packs, water bottles and assorted gear at the foot of the ski lift. Street’s ponytail flashes angrily in the mile-high sunlight of central Oregon’s Mt. Bachelor. Street is not skiing very well today and she’s pissed.

The 24-year-old stomps out of her skis and throws a jacket over the crazy spider-web pattern of her U.S. Ski Team uniform. An assistant coach grins knowingly. The angrier Street gets, the harder she works.

It is the middle of May. Most of the nation’s 10 million recreational skiers have packed away their skis long ago, but the U.S. Ski Team is just getting back to work, barely six weeks after the final races of a spectacular 1994-’95 season. For the U.S. women’s downhill team, this is just one of the first training runs leading to the 1995-’96 international ski-racing season. There will be plenty more before the first race in November. The intensity of the training will pick up at subsequent camps through the summer, at Mt. Hood in Oregon and later in Chile.

The men have finished their spring camp at California’s Mammoth Mountain, in winter-like conditions, but they would return to Mammoth in mid-July and also planned a training camp in New Zealand for August.

Each year, from November through March, a dozen or so of America’s top skiers travel the World Cup ski-racing circuit, competing against the best of the world in four alpine racing disciplines: downhill, super G, slalom and giant slalom. As many as 50 racers are on the U.S. ski team’s men’s and women’s A and B squads, but a relative handful race regularly on the World Cup circuit. Nevertheless, everyone is either training or racing year round.

“I think the general perception is that when winter rolls around, you go skiing. And when the Olympics roll around, you go racing. We train 11 months a year, the way most of these pro ball athletes train,” says downhiller AJ Kitt.

In Europe, the ski season opens with as much fanfare as baseball season in the United States and is just as avidly followed, figuratively and literally, from race site to race site throughout the major resorts in Europe, North America and Japan. In all, roughly 150 men and 100 women representing about 20 countries will run in more than 70 World Cup races in a season; athletes who, for the most part, are as celebrated in their homelands as the best pro basketball and football players are here.

“With the Austrians, their summer training runs are printed in the paper,” says U.S. slalom racer Heidi Voelker. “Just training runs.”

Things are a little different in the States. At Mt. Bachelor this May, the training goes without media mention. The skiers are on the snow by 7 each morning. In the afternoons, back in Bend, 20 miles away, there is dry-land training--weightlifting, volleyball, mountain biking.

At a team meeting that evening, Picabo Street, who is from Sun Valley, Ida., laughs about her bad day. Quitting is, of course, the last thing on her mind. Right now, she’s at the top of the world. She has come off a season in which she dominated the premier event of international ski racing as no American ever has. Street won six of nine downhill races on the World Cup circuit, including her last five.

After the finale at Bormio, Italy, in March, she became the first American--male or female--to be awarded the crystal cup signifying a world downhill championship. (World Cup points are awarded on a sliding scale to the top finishers in each race: 100 for first, 80 for second and so on. The top point-getter in each discipline at the end of the year wins the individual world cup. The grand prize goes to the overall winner.)

Even more remarkable, the woman standing next to Street on the podium, the No. 2 downhiller of the year, also was an American. Hilary Lindh, then 25, out of Juneau, Alaska, was a veteran of nearly 10 years on the World Cup circuit before Street burst on the scene with her silver medal finish in downhill at the 1994 Olympics in Norway. Of the three races Street didn’t win, Lindh won two. Lindh, who has her own Olympic silver medal in downhill from 1992, placed sixth or better in seven of her races.

The fact that the Americans had scored eight victories in nine races was stunning--galling--to the Europeans, who are not accustomed to upstart Americans walking off with trophies they have always considered their own. There is a reason they call it alpine ski racing.

Near the end of the season, Lindh rode up a chair lift with one of the Austrian coaches. He said, “You know, we could handle maybe one American on top. But two is unbearable.”

Meanwhile, the American men were not exactly resting in their bindings. They weren’t yet a consistent power, but they were on the threshold.

Kitt has been knocking at the door of stardom since 1991, when he won his first World Cup race at Val d’Isere, France. Tommy Moe became an instant star by winning the Olympic gold in downhill in Norway, but he has yet to win a World Cup race. Kyle Rasmussen’s coaches long thought he had great potential, but he never came up to expectations, partly because of a nagging back problem. He was almost dumped from the team after the 1993 season, but Coach Bill Egan fought to keep him on.

Good thing. Last year, Rasmussen won two World Cup races, making him one of the most successful American downhillers ever.

In one season, the Yank men and women won 11 downhill races, surpassing the total won by all Americans in the previous 20 years. And they did it virtually unnoticed by the American public.

*

In the 1969 film “Downhill Racer,” Robert Redford gripes to his coach, played by Gene Hackman, that he could have won the downhill at Kitzbuhel, Austria, one of the World Cup’s toughest courses, if only he had been among the first racers to start. The skis of the 22 racers before him rutted the course, causing him to crash, the brash loner complained.

“No,” the coach says. “You just weren’t good enough. That’s all. You lost your strength and the bumps took you out. You’ve got to have your strength right up to the end.”

Of his opponents, the coach adds, “They’re national heroes. You’re trying to beat them out of their way of life.”

*

On a sunny Saturday morning in the alps last January, Rasmussen of Angels Camp, Calif., stood spring-loaded at the start gate, challenging the national heroes of the alpine countries. His ski poles were clamped in gloved hands, ready to launch his 6-foot, 200-pound frame down a Swiss mountainside at speeds of up to 80 m.p.h.

The last American to win a men’s World Cup downhill was AJ Kitt in 1991. The only other was Bill Johnson, in 1984. Johnson was a one-year comet on the circuit, winning the Lauberhorn, two other cup races and the Olympic downhill until injuries forced him to quit.

The Lauberhorn is the longest course on the World Cup circuit, about half a mile longer than the two-mile average, and arguably the most grueling. This and the fearsome Hahnenkamm run on the Streif course at Kitzbuhel are the two prestige events in international skiing. On the U.S. men’s ski team, a downhiller remains a rookie, no matter how long he has been on the team, until he has conquered the gnarly Streif. Not won it, mind you, just finished it.

Downhill and super G--short for super-giant slalom--are speed events. They have the longest, straightest and often the steepest courses and a minimum number of gates set down the hill. Each skier runs the course just once.

The slalom and giant slalom are technical events, emphasizing skill and agility in negotiating the gates, which are much closer together on shorter courses. Each racer skis two runs. The skier with the fastest combined times wins.

On this day, the 26-year-old the Europeans call Cowboy Kyle was wearing bib No. 1, meaning he was first to race--no favor to Rasmussen. No racer had ever been the first down the Lauberhorn and won.

Following an overnight snowfall, the course was soft. Downhillers don’t like soft. They want their skis to run, and they run fastest on snow that approaches the consistency of glacial ice. Because he’d be the first to slough the mushy top layer off the Lauberhorn, Rasmussen’s skis would feel as if they were going through sand.

The day before, Rasmussen had finished 10th of about 60 in another race at Wengen. It was his best finish ever in the downhill. He had skied miserably at Kitzbuhel the previous week, running off the course in one race and popping out of his ski the following day. Fed up, he was ready to quit. Without the big money that winning brings--potentially more than $1 million annually in race purses and product endorsements--it was a struggle to support his wife and two children back on the ranch in California.

That night, he called his wife, Linda, to tell her about his finish. “Just make sure you beat AJ and Tommy,” she told him.

Going into Saturday’s race, sports commentators touted AJ Kitt and Tommy Moe as the Americans most likely to win--first, second or third--because of their success in recent years. But Rasmussen shot from the starting gate and raced the 15,158-foot-long course flawlessly in 2 minutes, 28.11 seconds.

At the bottom, Rasmussen had to stand around and fret, waiting to see if the top-seeded skiers from a dozen other countries--including Friday’s winner, Kristian Ghedina--would beat his time.

As the shadows lengthened, so did the times of the following skiers. It finally became clear that Rasmussen’s time could not be beaten. He had defied the odds of winning with bib No. 1. Werner Franz of Austria placed second, losing by just eight-hundredths of a second, virtually the blink of an eye.

After the race, Rasmussen called Linda from the finish area in front of the cameras. “I won! Can you believe it? I started first and won the damn thing.” Then quietly, but firmly, he said, as much to the commentators as to his wife, “I don’t want them to leave me out anymore. I want the same credit as everybody else.”

Kitt and Moe finished 29th and 11th. Rasmussen is not likely to be left out anymore.

The Lauberhorn was unique this year for another reason: It happened to be carried on network television back home. CBS aired the tape the following day between a college basketball game and exhibition figure skating.

Except for the Olympics and the occasional race at Aspen or Vail, World Cup races are rarely seen in the United States. Televising races, particularly from Europe, says Bob Beattie, a TV commentator and former U.S. Ski Team coach, is logistically difficult and expensive. A last-minute snowstorm can force a cancellation or postponement, or even shut it down in mid-race.

Therefore, there was no broadcast of Picabo Street’s dramatic victory in the downhill at Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy--on Street’s favorite course--that same weekend.

The following week’s edition of Ski Racing International, a tabloid published in Vermont that boasts a readership of 76,000--exclaimed over the unprecedented U.S. double win: “What a Weekend!”

Sports Illustrated ran an article. Some metropolitan U.S. newspapers ran short stories. Others mentioned the victories in “sports briefs” columns. But that was about it. No magazine covers. No TV profiles. Street continued to be a celebrity in Europe, and Rasmussen suddenly found himself on the sports pages in places such as Zurich, Munich and Vienna. Fans called out to them in airports and offered congratulations in hotel lobbies.

Curiously, the United States is one of the more ski-crazy countries in the world. An estimated 10 million Americans ski every year. Street is a heroine to U.S. girls. But otherwise, few Americans know of the team’s successes. Do Americans not pay much attention to ski racing because of irregular media coverage, or is it that Americans are not particularly interested?

One argument is that it is difficult to attract attention and fans because so many of the races are run in Europe. But American golfers follow their favorites in the British Open, tennis players are glued to their TVs during Wimbledon and ice skaters cheer American competitors at international events.

Whatever the answer is, there’s no question that the U.S. ski program fails to reap the donations from fans and corporate sponsorships that fund other teams. In Europe, ski racing has a natural audience, with most spectators within a few hours of big ski resorts. Villages and regions field ski teams that produce the stars of the future. Their training is supported by corporate contributions and, in some cases, the governments. In Italy, the ski team gets major backing from a sports lottery.

Televising the races makes stars of the winners. The best skiers often stay on the race circuit into their 30s--Austria’s Assinger is 31 and Marc Girardelli, a native Austrian skiing under the flag of Luxembourg, is 32. And when the stars retire, they are almost certain to be wooed with lucrative offers from big ski resorts and equipment makers.

Beattie says the United States needs a network of ski competitions to help develop young skiers, a network that would generate broader interest and financial support. “California should have a California ski team,” he says. “Now they call it the Far West. I don’t know where that is. But I do know where California is.”

Despite the difficulties and cost inherent in televising races, Bill Egan, the men’s downhill coach, believes that it’s an investment worth making. “I think a lot of the TV people sell us short and sell the public short on what they’ll appreciate. It’s so exciting, so beautiful, so well done. It’s a heck of a sporting event.”

Especially now. Aldo Radamus, the men’s slalom coach, says that, in the past, Americans simply didn’t want to watch their kids consistently losing to Europeans. “Americans like to see Americans kicking ass,” he says.

Well, last season, the American downhillers started kicking ass, big time.

*

[Going into the Olympics] the sports journalists wrote articles saying the U.S. ski team was a Big Disappointment because it didn’t have as many great skiers as dinky foreign countries like Switzerland and Austria. Every publication ran a Big Disappointment story because it was so easy to write.

--Mike Wilson, “Right on the Edge of Crazy”

*

The biggest Big Disappointment story about the U.S. Ski Team appeared in the Feb. 7, 1994, pre-Olympics issue of Sports Illustrated. “Woeful,” it said. That was the entire first sentence.

It was bad enough, the article went on, that Americans were getting drubbed by traditional powers such as Austria and Switzerland. But they were losing to “countries that weren’t even countries the last time U.S. alpinists were a force, in 1984.”

The United States has more recreational skiers than Austria has people, it continued. “Why, then, do all 7 million Austrians and half of the cows in Switzerland ski faster than the entire U.S. ski team?”

The ski team was furious. Still is.

The Olympics opened on Feb. 13 with the men’s downhill, and Tommy Moe nailed the Kvitfjell course to win the gold. No Swiss cows among the finishers. An Austrian finished fourth, but there is no medal for fourth.

It was just the start of a winning streak. Moe grabbed the silver in the super G. Diann Roffe-Steinrotter of Williamson, N.Y., won the women’s super G and Street took silver in the women’s downhill. Seven days, four U.S. medals. Austria finished sixth in the medal count, just ahead of Slovenia, one of those countries that didn’t exist in 1984.

It wasn’t just an Olympian streak. American downhill skiers roared into the 1994-’95 World Cup season, shocking the alpine world by winning more races than ever before.

They did it against odds that the Euro skiers seldom face: perennial budget cuts and constant turnover in managers and coaches. But the current coaches, particularly Egan and Herwig Demschar, are praised by members as the catalysts for victory.

Egan joined the team in 1989 as the men’s downhill conditioning coach. He became head men’s downhill and super G coach the following year. Demschar joined the U.S. team last year as women’s coach after directing the women of his native Austria. Now Demschar is doubling as the women’s technical coach in hopes of molding the slalom skiers into a winning force.

Demschar, a soft-spoken man with a lilting accent, says he brought no magic that made the women downhillers winners this past year. “I think they were ready to win,” he says.

The veteran downhiller of the team, Hilary Lindh, says that consistency and stability have been critical. During her early years, racers and coaches came and went, she says. “It was always something new. Let’s try this. Let’s try that. Different coaching methods, different philosophies of how to get things done,” she says. Now, except for Demschar, the same basic group has been together for four years.

The same goes for the men. Rasmussen, Kitt and Moe have skied together, and under the same coach, for more than five years. “We’ve stuck with a system and made it work,” Rasmussen says.

Egan, 46, is a stocky former football player with a slight swagger. He came to the team after coaching football at Orange County’s Saddleback Community College and training ski racers at Mammoth Mountain for 18 years. Egan is a big believer in strength and weight training.

“Skiing is a pretty simple sport,” he says. “You stand on one foot and then the other one.” But, he adds, “it takes a very dynamic balance to do that. The more power and quickness you can put in that leg, in that body, the faster you are going to be.”

After a morning of skiing at Mammoth, dry-land training includes an intense basketball game and weight training. The payoff? Strength in the last, crucial segment of a race. Take, for example, the last 30 seconds of Rasmussen’s run in the Lauberhorn, where the final turns and bumps are critical. By then, after two minutes of utter punishment, the skier’s legs are turning to gelatin. Rasmussen was strong enough to ski the bottom of the Lauberhorn cleanly and decisively, and to win.

At Bend, Ore., Coach Demschar watches as his women’s team plays volleyball. As Picabo Street leaps to spike the ball, he says she is in better condition than a year ago. “Look at the legs,” he says in awe.

Street attributes her condition to not having suffered serious injury last year, but she has become, reluctantly, a believer in dry-land training. “I hated dry-land so much--going out running intervals on the track until you puke.”

Experience, strength and skill do not guarantee championships. You hear a lot about “the line” from ski racers, like some mystical force that only they can tap. One thing the line is not is a straight line.

Essentially, the line is the art of skiing as fast as possible while maintaining the control needed to flow around the gates marking the course. Inexperienced racers tend to dive into turns, like a motorist cutting across a sharp curve on a mountain road, Egan says.

“They take a little bit of risk figuring they can gain a little speed in one section or another. Taking an unnecessary risk--it’s not brave. It’s foolhardy,” he says.

Also vital in skiing is mental discipline. “It takes very uninterrupted focus,” Street says. “You have to train to get it. You have to train at high speeds.”

Street says she won last year in part because she could force distractions--a breakup, personal frictions with teammates--from her mind.

“All it is is a minute and a half, man. I can focus for that, no matter what’s going on in my life,” she says.

When things are going well, Street says, racing provides the euphoria of “being in complete control, going that fast and staying in contact with the snow and moving with the terrain and hugging the snow with your skis and anticipating everything that’s coming up, adjusting your line for a little more speed. All those thoughts go through your brain as you’re going 75 miles an hour, and you’d be surprised how much time you actually feel like you have.”

Racers can debate for hours the fine points of racing, of what goes into a winning run. Rasmussen says the difference between finishing first and 15th is minuscule (in the Lauberhorn, the 15th-place racer was less than two seconds slower than Rasmussen). But he has no problem differentiating between winning and not winning. Winning is a whole lot better.

“There’s a million autograph seekers,” Rasmussen says. “You win a race, you’re going to get recognized everywhere you go. I think it’s pretty neat to be that way, because when you come back home, it’s not.”

Moreover, winning makes it easier to win again, Egan says. “[Rasmussen] is extremely confident now. He knew he could ski well prior to that, but he wasn’t really sure he could win. And now he knows. Every time he goes out of the start gate, he can win.” It took Rasmussen years to win his first World Cup downhill. He won his second just two months later in Norway.

But what about Street? What do you do when you’ve won six of nine races last season, a record that may be impossible to improve?

She’s not worried. “It’s not like I’m cocky or anything like that. But I know that I have what it takes to win and I know that I haven’t even given it my best yet.”

Street plans to ski in more slalom or giant slalom races to compete for the overall World Cup.

Why not? Alberto Tomba, the flamboyant Italian slalom skier, won 11 races last year, making him a hero comparable to a Michael Jordan and a Joe Montana combined.

“Look at Tomba,” Steet says. “Why am I different than him? He loves the attention. He loves the fans. He loves pleasing people. And I do, too. And I don’t see why I can’t be the next Tomba.”

*

This is probably a harder life than any.

--Heidi Voelker

*

Heidi Voelker, of Park City, Utah, is America’s top female giant slalom racer and the only married woman on the U.S. team. At 25, after a decade of racing, she is constantly asked when she is going to retire.

“I’m sure it’s probably because I don’t have a medal or a World Cup win, you know. And [people say], ‘Well, you’re 25. Don’t you think you should be doing something else? ‘ “

She has competed in three Olympics and raced in three world championships, which are held during off-Olympic years. Her last big shot will come at the world games in Spain in February. “If it hasn’t happened this coming year, I think I can honestly say it’s not going to happen,” she says.

Like Voelker, Hilary Lindh is pondering retirement, even though she is racing better than she ever has.

“It’s more a matter of how long can you put up with everything that goes with it, you know--the traveling, the politics and the soap opera that goes with the ski team every year. It’s those things that drain you. It’s not the actual sport,” Lindh says.

She was a key actress in the soap opera last season. Just as the U.S. media began noticing an unprecedented succession of World Cup downhill victories by Lindh and Street at the beginning of 1995, reports of a feud between the two escalated into headlines.

Street and Lindh say that the conflict arose over a perceived slight--Street mistook a reaction by Lindh as insensitivity and a Cold War developed between the two until they worked out their differences.

“I respect her a lot,” Street says now of Lindh. “I always have respected her, and that’s the thing that bummed me out, because I don’t think she ever knew that because I was like a little punk to her.”

“Regardless of your profession,” Lindh says, “you always come up against people who are different. And you have to make things work. And we’re making things work.”

Superficially, American ski racers live a glamorous life. They visit all the storied ski resorts of the world, from St. Moritz to Lake Louise and Vail. Their expenses are paid. The better skiers are under contract to the manufacturers of skis, boots, bindings, poles, sunglasses, apparel. (U.S. racers wear those crazy spider-web suits because they are provided by Spyder, a ski-apparel maker.) The best racers can earn six figures and up.

Even so, life on the World Cup circuit is, well, a grind, bouncing from one European ski resort to another for months at a time, living out of duffel bags and praying that there’s a Laundromat at the next hotel. A good racer--one who consistently places within the top 20--may earn from $5,000 to $15,000 a year, Kitt says. There is no time to attend college on a regular basis or to pursue another occupation.

“You quit when you’re 30 years old, you go to college, you’re a 30-year-old freshman,” says Kitt, 26. “Where does that leave you?”

In fact, many American skiers leave the circuit well before they are 30, partly because they figure that they never will make it big on the international scene. With a scarcity of good ski-industry jobs for former racers, they start charting other career courses while there is time.

Voelker notes, “I’m 25. I mean, who in their right mind is called a veteran at 25 if you’re out in a normal office working?”

Constant budget-cutting also has plagued the U.S. racing program. Just as the American downhillers were completing a stunning season, according to Ski Racing journal, U.S. Skiing was slashing a $3.7-million alpine racing budget to barely $2 million for the coming year, the consequence of a fund-raising program that went bust.

Whether American skiers can build on the success of 1994-’95, or even maintain it, is arguable. Without adequate financial support, it is difficult to get many of the best young skiers to risk trying for the racing team.

Demschar said that when he coached the Austrian women’s team, he routinely carried 45 racers on his roster. As the U.S. coach, he has 21. With a strong development program, he says, Demschar would have at least 30 athletes, including a crop of youngsters to be groomed for future Olympics and world championships. But when budgets are cut, development money is usually the first to go.

“It’s terrible,” Egan laments. “It’s a horrible problem. We could be a very big skiing power. [But] we don’t have a development program in place. We don’t really have a way to help the best kids get from high school to the national team.”

If only half of the 10 million recreational skiers in the United States donated one dollar each year to the alpine racing program, the team’s budget woes would disappear. The bottom line for the racers, though, is the racing and the skiing. A new season is ahead. Kitt will dream of winning on the fearsome Strief course at Kitzbuhel, Street of conquering Cortina again and shooting for the World Cup overall title, and Lindh of repeating victory on her favorite course at Sierra Nevada in Spain.

When Lindh arrived in Bend, Ore., for training in May, she hadn’t skied for six weeks. She had squeezed in a term of college courses and felt as if she had had no time off. The grind was beginning again, already.

Then, she got on her skis.

“And I said, ‘Yes!’ That’s why I do this. When I go down the hill, I know that I’m one of the best in the world. And I know that I’ll always be one of the best people on the hill regardless of where I am--how strong I feel on my skis, how I feel I can do anything, that I can go down anything.”