Hermann Monster

The question of whether Austrian hero Hermann Maier can go down as one of the greatest skiers in history without winning an Olympic downhill has been answered.

In German, the answer is ja.

Maier, no matter what happens in today’s race, rates as one of the best kilogram-for-kilogram racers in Alpine annals.

He has won two Olympic gold medals, four World Cup overall titles, three world championships and 53 World Cup races.

Among men, only Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark, with 86, has more World Cup victories.

Maier is the “Herminator,” part man, part myth; mortal and mortar.

Most people don’t remember how Jean-Luc Cretier won the 1998 Olympic downhill at Nagano. What people remember is how Maier lost it, flying head over heels toward certain disaster/death/disability, only to somehow survive it and, oh yeah, come back to win two gold medals.

Maier rose from that Friday the 13th spill to full-fledged hero status.

How he recovered to win gold in super-giant slalom days later is one of the amazing feats in modern sport.

Andreas Lotz, the Austrian team doctor who treated Maier after his Nagano spill, sat in Austria House this week, a glass of white wine in hand, and told the story.

“I came to the hotel room the day he crashed, and the other doctors said he had to go home and have surgery,” Lotz said.

Lotz said he examined Maier’s bruised body and banged-up knee and came to a different conclusion.

“I said, ‘Hermann, please make deep knee bends of your right knee,’ ” Lotz continued. “He did five bendings. He was in the race.”

Less than 24 hours after his horrific spill, Maier was entered in the next day’s super-G.

That morning, according to Lotz, a British ski team coach was astonished to see Maier at the start gate.

“Does it hurt?” Lotz said the coach said.

Lotz said Maier replied, “I am not so good, but I will be good enough.”

Maier might not have been good enough to win the super-G that day, but he caught a break when bad weather forced a postponement.

Two days later, when the super-G was skied, Maier’s body had healed sufficiently enough to win. A few days later he added the giant slalom gold to his medals collection.

But he didn’t win the downhill.

Still hasn’t.

Maier was primed to take it in 2002 at Salt Lake at a time when he was crushing opponents on the World Cup circuit.

A motorcycle crash in August 2001, though, nearly cost him his right leg and forced him out of the Olympics, yet provided backdrop for his next dramatic comeback.

Maier was in the Bahamas when countryman Fritz Strobl took the gold at Snowbasin, outside Salt Lake City.

Now 33, with this being his last shot to claim the one trophy in Alpine he hasn’t won, you can bet Bavaria that Maier will be itching in the start gate for today’s Olympic downhill at Sestriere Borgata.

Friday night, seated on a couch at the Tabata Discotheque in Sestriere, Maier said he had nothing to prove and insisted the results of today’s race could not define him.

“No, for sure no,” Maier said in English. “If you had the perfect career, you would win the Olympics, the World Cup, the world championships. I have won everything. [The downhill] is only a small piece.”

Maier has been fighting a cold all week that he hoped would subside by race time. He is not the favorite in the downhill, but it seems a miracle that he’s even in the running, given where he has been.

As described in his autobiography, Maier might have lost his leg on that warm Austrian night in 2001, when a 73-year-old German pensioner made an illegal left turn on Katschberg highway near Salzburg, clipping Maier’s motorcycle and hurling the ski star into a ditch.

Maier’s leg was left dangling, held together only by fibers. He could still move his toes, though, giving hope that he would walk again.

Turns out, Maier lived to win another World Cup overall title. The comeback from near death -- twice -- has only exalted Maier’s legend.

He claims, with no one arguing, that his greatest victory was returning from his accident to win a super-G at Kitzbuehel in 2003.

His right leg still isn’t right.

“It’s not the same feeling,” Maier said. “I wake up in the morning, the leg is stiff. Then I get in ski boots and it’s tough to clamp on the buckle. But I can live with it.”

So what about that downhill title?

Maier isn’t battling only himself here, he’s in an Austrian posterity race against Franz Klammer, who wrote his own legend when, in palpitating fashion, he won the 1976 Olympic downhill at Innsbruck.

There has not been a more thrilling ski race in Olympic history.

Does Maier need to win today to surpass Klammer in Austrian lore?

There are differing theories on this.

Wolfgang Winheim, chief Alpine reporter for the Vienna tabloid Kurier, says Klammer is beloved by the older generation but argues that many Austrian kids have become enamored of an American.

“Many young people in Austria prefer Bode Miller,” Winheim said.

Lotz, the Austrian team doctor, says picking between Klammer and Maier is like someone in Spain trying to choose the best matador.

“It is hard to compare,” Lotz said.

Klammer will always be Klammer, a true speed racer who won 25 World Cup downhill races and only one other -- in the combined.

In the 1974-75 World Cup season, Klammer won eight of the nine downhill races he entered.

Klammer has a special place in Austria’s heart, and that probably will not be displaced.

Maier is seen more as a menacing machine, a tenacious and fierce competitor.

“Maier is very much respected and admired, but maybe not as loved as Klammer,” said longtime ski racing observer Patrick Lang, whose father, Serge, formed the World Cup circuit in 1966.

“Klammer was very loved, the kid you wanted to marry your daughter. He was a sweetheart. Hermann is not a sweetheart. Hermann is a big monument.”

Lang has spent years chronicling the World Cup in various forms and functions and says that rating skiers is a tricky business.

He certainly rates Maier as one of the best of all time, but cautions that numbers are tough to compare over time.

In the early World Cup seasons, dominated by France’s Jean-Claude Killy, there were only 18 races. Now there are 40.

The super-G, an event that Maier has dominated, winning 23 times, was not added to the circuit until 1983.

Lang, though, remains in awe of Maier. He reasons that had Maier not lost most of two years recovering from his accident, he might have had a chance to challenge Stenmark’s record of 86 World Cup victories.

Lang says winning the Olympic downhill would be a bonus for Maier, but only “the cherry on the cake.”

Nothing Maier does -- or doesn’t do -- today can erase one of ski racing’s most sensational runs.

Flying off a mountain in Japan?

Returning from a near-fatal crash to win again?

“What he has achieved since the accident is amazing,” Lang said.

So Maier enters his final Olympic downhill today with nothing more to prove -- at least that’s his story.

“Now, it’s different,” Maier said. “My years are behind me. I feel absolutely no pressure.”

Get one thing straight, though.

Maier never entered a ski race he did not intend to win.

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Top to bottom in under two minutes

The men’s downhill will be run on Sestriere’s Kandahar Banchetta course, a mix of high-speed straight sections, technical turns and challenging jumps.

Sestriere Borgata

Men’s downhill, super-G, and combined downhill

Men’s Downhill

*--* Length of run 2.05 miles Start elevation 9,186 ft. Finish elevation 6,188 ft. Vertical drop 2,998 ft.

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Super-G

*--* Length of run 1.4 miles Start elevation 8,320 ft. Finish elevation 6,188 ft. Vertical drop 2,132 ft.

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Combined downhill

*--* Length of run 1.8 miles Start elevation 8,812 ft. Finish elevation 6,188 ft. Vertical drop 2,624 ft.

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Distances rounded to nearest foot.

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Sources: Torino 2006; Via Lattea; 3D Data courtesy of Intermap Technologies, Inc. Graphics reporting by Julie Sheer