Thrill-Seekers, Sign Up Here

Up here in the Alps, in lustrous snow, sparkling in a Sunday sun, they gave no thought to the danger. They were thinking of speed. They were thinking of time. They were thinking of round medals, dangling from a strand of ribbon, and the corners that needed cutting on a wild downhill run.

I wasn’t.

I was obsessed with the peril. Ski news from America kept coming, all of it bad. Sonny Bono, popular pop singer, congenial congressman, was killed Jan. 5, face-first against a tree. One of the Kennedy kin, Michael, lost his life New Year’s Eve in a hill mishap. Doak Walker, 71, who won a Heisman Trophy in his football days, lies paralyzed in Colorado, having fallen along a trail. Doug Betters, 41, who played in two Super Bowls, snagged the tip of a ski, struck his head and underwent neurosurgery late last week in Montana.

These ski incidents were publicized more than most, because of the celebrity nature of those involved. And yet, they nagged at me, as examples of just how dangerous this sport can be. I got curious. I wondered what the experts thought, the people who do this sort of thing for a living.

“Am I wrong,” I asked Bill Egan, the U.S. Olympic coach, as we walked together in Nagano a couple of days ago, “or is skiing having a run of bad luck lately?”

“Oh, man,” he said. “Did you hear what happened today?”

“No.”

“An American military jet in Italy cut a cable-car line, and 20 people got killed. European skiers.”

“My God,” I said.

“This just isn’t skiing’s year,” Egan said.

He couldn’t be bothered with such things, of course, being far too busy training our Olympians. As for the U.S. women’s team coach, Herwig Demschar, he still can’t forget what happened two weeks before the 1994 Winter Olympics, when an Austrian champion, Ulrike “Ulli” Maier, 26, crashed at 60 mph at a World Cup race in Germany and broke her neck. Maier died. Demschar was the coach of Austria’s Olympic team.

Demschar says, “I still have a problem in my job with serious crashes. I talked a lot with the U.S. team psychologist, and he helped me. But there is still hardly a day that goes by that I don’t think about it. There are still things I carry with me. I have to live with them.”

For a pro, the glory is worth the risk, as when Tommy Moe won the 1994 downhill and turned overnight from an anonymous Alaskan to an authentic hero. Picabo Street, star of our women’s team, had a ski accident of her own a week or two ago, resulting in a concussion. She will ski in the Olympics, regardless. It is not her hobby; it’s her job.

I cornered two of the downhill elders from the men’s team, Kyle Rasmussen and AJ Kitt, before they had to race. Don’t do it, somebody warned me. Don’t ask them about accidents. It’s amateurish. It’s trivial. This stuff has nothing to do with Olympic competition, I was told.

“Hell, yes!” Rasmussen said.

His whole face illuminated.

“I wish more people understood what it’s like. TV doesn’t do it justice.”

“What’s that?” Kitt asked, overhearing.

“The danger,” Rasmussen said.

“Oh, man. This is one of the most dangerous sports in the world. People talk about auto racing, about football, about other sports where people get hurt or even killed? They should pay more attention to what goes on in our sport,” Kitt said.

“The way TV depicts it, it looks real slow,” Rasmussen jumped in. “I think you have to stand up there at the start, in person, just look down, and you’ll walk away saying, ‘No way, no way.’ ”

I did, I said.

“What?” Kitt asked.

“I took a lift to the top in Sarajevo, a few hours before Bill Johnson went down it, in ’84.”

“And?”

“And I said, ‘No way.’ ”

The two expert skiers grinned. Rasmussen and Kitt are each 29. They are near the end of their runs. A Californian who has been at this a long time, Rasmussen is ready for retirement but says he doesn’t want to use the Olympics to announce anything. Kitt is a New Yorker who is tiring of being away from home all the time.

Rasmussen leaned forward, as if speaking confidentially. He asked me, “You know what kind of people this sport attracts?”

“What kind?”

“Thrill-seekers.”

The danger is as compelling as the beauty, in other words.

Rasmussen said, “Hey, why else do you think people go bungee-jumping? So they can win a bungee-jumping gold medal?”

But do even professionals feel the terror, fear a catastrophe?

“Yeah, now I do,” Rasmussen said. “As a kid, you feel indestructible. When I was 20, nothing was going to hurt me. It was like football. Trying to be careful doesn’t work. In football, it’s ‘Do you want to hit, or do you want to be hit?’ The entire sport is about being aggressive. It’s the same with us. You don’t ski and worry about too much speed. The whole profession is about speed.”

Kitt kept nodding his head.

And finally he said, “Why do you think they call it ‘breakneck speed?’ ”

The two Olympians frowned, but then, discreetly, for luck, they slapped hands.