Super-Z Zips and Zaps Them All

By John Skow/Val Gardena

Let's say there is an office pool on that ultimate test of valor and gristle, the Olympic men's downhill ski race at Mount Allan, near Calgary. You throw in your dollar, reach into the hat, and pull out the name of Switzerland's Peter Muller, say, or Canada's Rob Boyd. Congratulations! These are hairy-eared mountain men, eaters of nails, sleepers on plank floors, and you are looking fairly good to win a hatful of dollars. Muller, at 30 still the toughest downhill specialist since Austria's Franz Klammer, won the pre-Olympic downhill trial at Mount Allan last season. In downhill he was World Cup champion in '79 and '80, second at the Sarajevo Olympics four years ago and gold medalist at Crans-Montana in Switzerland last year in the biennial world championships. Boyd, 21, is a young phenom on a tear, leading an inspired team that will be playing to the home folks. In mid-December he won the ferocious downhill at Val Gardena, Italy, for the second year in a row. Grrrr! Another helping of your 20-penny galvanized, waiter, with a quart of jalapeno sauce.

Right. But don't count your money just yet. Big, cheerful Michael Mair of Italy, who won at Leukerbad last month, could get his bear-shaped 220 lbs. behind a thundering run. A slightly smaller Swiss bear, burly Daniel Mahrer, has won two downhills so far this season. No U.S. skier will place in the downhill without supernatural intervention, but any one of several Austrians could reverse that team's unaccountable recent blahs and win out of sheer embarrassment. And then, of course, there is Pirmin Zurbriggen, 25, the people's choice from Zurich to Zug, from Zell to Saas-Almagell, his tiny hometown in the Swiss canton of Valais.

Last year, for the second time, Zurbriggen won skiing's overall World Cup, the measure of season-long excellence in the Alpine disciplines (slalom; giant slalom; super-G, for super giant slalom; and downhill). He dominated the world championship at Crans-Montana with two gold medals and two silvers. He leads the current World Cup, and this Olympic year could establish him as the best all-event male Alpine skier since Jean-Claude Killy. Not the best male Alpine skier, without qualification, over this period; that would be Sweden's astonishing Ingemar Stenmark, still campaigning at 31, a self-invented slalom and giant slalom wizard who has won more World Cup races (85) than any other man. But Stenmark does not like downhills, and he won't run these down-in- flames plunges. He won golds in slalom and giant slalom at the Lake Placid Olympics in 1980, then was banned from Sarajevo because he did not meet the tortured Olympic definition of eligibility. He'll be on hand at Calgary, still rich from fees and endorsements but once more eligible. Stenmark is the archetype of an age of skiing specialists, and Zurbriggen is the best of the handful of world-class racers versatile enough to beat the specialists in any event.

The slalom is an acrobat's race of quick, subtle turns (less subtle, however, since the introduction five years ago of spring-loaded plastic gate poles that allow aggressive skiers to charge gates directly and club them aside with armored forearms). Zurbriggen is competitive in the discipline but has not won a World Cup slalom since 1986. His real strength is in the faster, wilder races. Last season he took five World Cup downhills. The race is a mad descent of at least 800 meters, with few control gates, at speeds that can reach 80 or 85 m.p.h. The giant slalom, or GS, bridges downhill and slalom extremes in a beautiful, treacherous dance of large-radius turns. The super-G has not quite taken on its own character; it is either a slow, curvy downhill or a fast, stretched-out GS. Zurbriggen, going through high-speed gates in GS or super-G, is unmistakable: a big, rangy cat springing from turn to turn, from coiled crouch to full-body extension, from one outside, carving ski to the other. He looks fast and is. Last season he won four World Cup races in the GS, as well as one in the super-G, and earned gold medals at Crans-Montana in each discipline. This season, pacing himself to peak at Calgary, he has taken two firsts and three seconds in downhill, plus seconds in GS and super- G.

It is only in the matter of cherished stereotype that this serious-minded innkeeper's son comes up lacking. In public fancy, ski racers, and especially downhillers, are barbarians, berserkers, wearers of iron hats with cow horns sticking out of them. Pirmin, from a minor resort town near Saas-Fee (which is a minor resort near Zermatt), is the sort of nice young man your mother wants your sister to meet. He does not look as if he eats nails. He has curly, reddish-blond hair, an elf's pointy nose and a shy, boyish grin, behind which is real shyness, behind which is . . .

Estimates vary. Start with what is easy: he is tall and athletic looking, but not especially rugged. His body has the long-muscled grace you see in the male half of a figure-skating pair. On to the hard part: he is quiet, sensible, mannerly, respectful to his parents and, as the Boy Scouts say, "brave, clean and reverent." Clearly there is an image problem here. It does not help, in the iron hat and cow horns department, that Zurbriggen is an exceptionally pious Roman Catholic, who confounds the European sporting press by praying at least twice a day. He is a loner, a man who, in a perfectly pleasant way, keeps his distance. World-class ski racers are traveling performers who migrate together from resort to resort for something like eleven months a year, and who eat, share cable cars, log lobby time and wait out bad weather with the same few dozen people. In such a one-ring circus, Zurbriggen has had only one close friend, the Swiss GS star Max Julen, who retired last year. Asked if he is friendly with any of the other skiers, he mentions the West German ace Markus Wasmeier, like himself a generalist who is a threat in any event. Wasmeier, a likable fellow with lank blond hair and a lean, fined-down body, is obviously startled to hear this; he thinks Zurbriggen is a magnificent skier, he says, and a fine sportsman. But it is clear that he doesn't know him very well. "He lives to himself," says Wasmeier.

Zurbriggen's cool psyche has a large, invisible eggshell around it. Everything he needs is inside. His ties are very strong to his parents and the small 30-bed sport hotel, called the Larchenhof, that his father Alois built and now runs. A ski racer himself, Alois quit when a younger brother died after a ski fall, but it was he who first encouraged Pirmin to race. Pirmin's girlfriend Moni Julen, a pretty, dark-haired ski instructor from Zermatt, is a cousin of his friend Max and is accepted as part of this tight, protective mountain clan, which includes Heidi, 20, his younger sister and a downhiller on the national team. As a teenager, Pirmin spent a year cooking in the hotel kitchen, and now, during a short Christmas break, Mama Ida joshes contentedly that bookings are full, so it is good that Pirmin is there to give them a hand. The ski hero, whose income approaches $1 million a year, does, in fact, take a turn behind the bar in a lounge filled with ski trophies, though more photos are taken than drinks poured. Gravely, he tells TIME's Robert Kroon that yes, after his racing days, "I will take over the hotel here. That has been decided long ago. This is where I grew up, and this is where I will stay."

He is above all else "a man of his village," notes Karl Frehsner, head coach of the Swiss men's team. And the village oompah band, for which Zurbriggen once played trumpet, quite rightly keeps him on its list of musicians. "That's what I really enjoy," he says. "Any music, except this modern rock stuff because there's no melody to it." He has a quick, shrewd intelligence -- "the mind of a businessman," states Frehsner approvingly -- and he is not at all fearful of the world. But he is rooted so solidly in Saas-Almagell that he is not thrown off-balance by adulation and press clamor or an occasional run of poor results. This unbudgeable nature is the grounding, as the coach sees it, for Zurbriggen's most valuable quality, an eerie ability to concentrate at a level that shuts out everything except snow and gates and the fall of the mountain. He seems unaware of his competition until it is time to accept congratulations or grin and say, in a way that always seems genuine, that it really isn't so bad to be beaten by Muller or by the one-man Luxembourg team, Marc Girardelli.

But the habit of concentration is not a ski technique, it is a rock of Zurbriggen's character. In a hotel lobby or a team bus, when his eyes pass coolly over skiers with whom he has raced for ten years, it can be taken for the self-absorption of an egotist. So can remarks like his joking explanation to U.S. Ski Broadcaster Greg Lewis that "the name Pirmin means 'success.' " This sort of clunker is probably nothing more than the slight awkwardness of a 25-year-old athlete who is pursued by middle-aged foreigners all intent on asking why he drives a Mercedes instead of a Porsche, and whether Killy was an early hero. (Answers: "Mercedes is an excellent car, and they give me one free." And no, Pirmi, as he was called to his dismay, was only five when Killy retired; his heroes were the Italian Gustavo Thoni, the flashy Swiss star Bernhard Russi and Stenmark.)

Zurbriggen's personality -- "if any," one frustrated journalist mutters unjustly -- does not always sit well with his teammates, and Muller, normally an easygoing fellow, has grumbled that the all-event marvel gets too much attention. Now he merely grunts when asked about Zurbriggen. Coach Frehsner, in turn, grunts when asked about relations between the two racers. "Muller," he says, making the name a complete sentence. But he is smiling, and why not? A grouchy Muller may ski faster. Zurbriggen, of course, will be unaffected.

There is much talk among racers that downhill courses have become too easy, with lumps smoothed by bulldozers and snow sprayed on flawlessly by machines. Thus you don't really have to ski anymore, this line of argument goes, and anyone with a magical pair of skis has a huge advantage. It is true that ski manufacture is as much black art as high tech, and no factory seems able to produce two pairs of skis that are identical. It is also true that the stars to whom the ski firms pay huge sums, over the table and under, get the best skis and the cleverest ski preparers.

Yes. But no. You still have to ski. Here we are at Val Gardena, on the last day of downhill practice. Our perch is a snowbank in chill shadow, with a view of the Camel Bumps. These are three rolling hillocks that will loosen your fillings. A racer sights the first at about 70 m.p.h., then improvises. The wrong way is to hit the top of each, arms and legs splayed, losing speed from wind drag, perhaps crashing. The bold way is to jump before the first, absorbing it without catching air, then -- no time to correct -- launch a mighty jump from the uphill side of the second bump a full 130 ft. to the backside of the third. Several skiers among the world's best try this and simply cannot spring far enough. They hit the top of the third bump and splatter. Here comes Canada's Boyd: he heaves off bump two, going so fast that his body makes the air hum, rising two feet higher than the rest, landing perfectly. Then Zurbriggen: his jump is low, but his tuck is exact. He just makes the downslope of bump three. But he was in the air for less time than Boyd; through this stretch he was faster.

Now -- what's this -- comes a trickster who does not jump at all; he slithers around the bumps to the far side. If this were not Girardelli, onlookers would laugh. But in yesterday's practice, following his own eccentric line, Girardelli was first. He is burly, midsize, quick of mind and movement, impassive. He has always gone his own way; when he was a teenager, and an Austrian, he and his father decided that the Austrian ski hierarchy was slighting him. He became a Luxembourger. With his father as his coach, setting up his own slalom poles because he had no team support, he went on to win the World Cup in 1985 and '86. Zurbriggen was second. Last year, with a shoulder dislocated in the year's first race, he was second, Zurbriggen first. And Wasmeier third, as he had been the year before. These three, really, are the only world-class all-event men on the tour. Usually an all-eventer wins the overall World Cup with solid points in each discipline. This season, though, a 21-year-old Italian fireball named Alberto Tomba has emerged in a blare of angelic trumpets to win four slalom and three GS races. For most of the season, he led in Cup points on the strength of his specialties.

And the Olympics? One of the all-event skiers should win the combined, which counts the results of a shortened downhill and a separate slalom. On form, specialists should win the rest. Never mind form. At Crans-Montana last year, specialists should have dominated. But Zurbriggen won two golds and two silvers, and Girardelli, hurt, won two silvers, and a gold in the combined.

At Calgary the combined and the super-G have been added for the first time to the downhill, slalom and GS. Will Zurbriggen sweep five golds? No. That is so much more unlikely than when Killy, in '68, or Toni Sailer, in '56, swept all three events that it does not bear talking about. Tomba, a big, laughing fellow whose name is a drumbeat as his countrymen cheer him on, should take the slalom.

Pirmin, after his two World Cup downhill wins, looks good in the downhill, with Teammate Muller or Canada's Boyd as second choice. That leaves the GS, super-G and combined. Give Pirmin one gold and a silver and Girardelli, if he recovers from a bruising fall in late January, at least one medal. Give them all fat endorsements, glossy cars and TV contracts. Give the Larchenhof a try in 30 years; the tall fellow with the leather knickers, the pipe and the pointy nose, they say, still skis fairly well.