Skiing Into the Big Time

Daron Rahlves and Bode Miller enjoy the celebrity of rock stars this week as they stroll through St. Moritz, the glittery Swiss resort. Doors open. Autograph seekers follow. Visitors paying $500 a night for a hotel room pursue them for a chance snapshot. Wait a minute -- Daron and Bode who?

Rahlves, 29, of Truckee, Calif., and Miller, 25, of Franconia, N.H., are American ski racers. Right now they are red-hot as they lead the 17 men and women of the U.S. team into the world alpine ski racing championships on the ice-packed courses of the Engadine Valley in eastern Switzerland.

Rahlves and Miller are barely a blip on the celebrity radar at home, where ski racing draws some attention during the Olympic Games every four years and yawns the rest of the time. “What’s a rahlves?” asked a California skier who cruised the run named for Rahlves at Sugar Bowl, his home ski area in the Sierra Nevada.

But in Europe, ski racing is big-time and big money. The world championships, which opened Sunday and run through Feb. 16, are the Super Bowl of the sport.

Americans compete along with the Swiss, Austrians and others on the longer-running World Cup circuit every year but usually rank fifth or lower among the nations in victory totals. This year is different: The U.S. men are ranked third. And Miller is neck and neck with Austria’s Stephan Eberharter for the overall World Cup title, last won by an American 20 years ago.

Rahlves has won two World Cup downhill races this year, with a surprising victory at Kitzbuehel, Austria, where the race called the Hannenkamm has been run on the feared Streif course for nearly 70 years. An American skier had won it just once, in 1959. Skiing the Steif at 80 mph or more is considered the ultimate test of downhill racing, bigger even than the Olympic downhill.

Going into the championships, there was no guarantee of medals for Americans at St. Moritz; after all, they would be racing against the best in the world. But now, they are among the best in the world.

Halfway through the contest, U.S. skiers have won four medals (compared with just one in the 2001 world championships), and even the knowledgeable Euro racing fans are shocked by the U.S. success. Miller tied Hermann Maier for second in the super-G, shorter and slightly slower than a downhill race. Jonna Mendes of South Tahoe, Calif., and Kirsten Clark of Raymond, Maine, won bronze and silver in the women’s super-G. And on Thursday, Miller won gold in the downhill-slalom combined.

It’s called alpine skiing for a reason: The Swiss, Austrians, French, German and Italians usually pick up the medals. They learn to ski about as soon as they walk and start racing shortly after that.

Finally, though, the efforts of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn. to field a strong American team are paying off. The Euros will just have to get used to sharing the victory stands with Yanks.