Miller, Maier and Matt

By Marina Knight
January has been an exciting month. There’s Bode Miller’s streak of success that propelled him into history as the winningest American skier ever, Lindsey Vonn’s sheer domination in downhill (she won this weekend at Cortina), Herman Maier’s comeback at Kitzbuehel, Jean Babtiste Grange winning three slaloms in a row, and Mario Matt’s win Tuesday at Schladming, a hill he’s struggled to finish on in the past.
Also exciting: All the races this month have been broadcast live on WCSN.com. Watching the races in real time has been a treat.
The Night Race at Schladming was perhaps the best viewing because the time difference had the second run being streamed at about 3 p.m. Eastern time. The other races have been tougher to be awake for; the first run of the Kitzbuehel slalom was on at 4 a.m.

Schladming frenzy
Schladming is normally a sleepy place in the Dachstein mountains of Austria. But when the World Cup rolls into town, thousands line the steep, floodlit hill and the village is packed with frenzied fans.
For the Austrian team, it’s become arguably a bigger deal to win there than at Kitzbuehel. It’s by far the biggest show in tech races. The hill is unrelenting, normally icy beyond imagination, and perfectly situated for fans and a big party. The course literally ends in the town itself.
This year, warm temperatures made the snow much softer than normal. Big ruts developed in the first run, which made it virtually impossible for guys in the back to score in the top 30. The highest bib number to make it into the flip was No. 41, and the time spread from the first-run leader to racer 30 was a whopping 4.6 seconds.
Temperatures dropped and conditions firmed for run two, but a course breakdown was inevitable, as it could only harden so much before the skiers’ aggressive moves cut away at the surface.
The conditions gave the first starters a major advantage, and U.S. coaches hoped the course would start to fall apart just after Jimmy Cochran and Ted Ligety went down. They were 13th and 11th after the first run.
Cochran had a chance to capitalize in a big way and his skiing was great — in between two large, time-costly errors. He ended up 12th overall, but had he skied mistake-free, he would have been in the top five. Ligety skied a risky line without any major mistakes, which rocketed him to fourth overall.
But the most impressive performance came from Mario Matt, the Austrian who won the race there in 2000, then had a four-year streak of DNFs on the hill, followed by two years of near misses. The Austrian press was relentless on Matt, labeling him as a choker when a lot is on the line. He just can’t do it at Schladming, they said. His coaches were beginning to believe it, too. When Matt crossed the finish line Tuesday night in the lead, then held it as first-run leader Manfred Moelgg slipped back to third, you could literally see all the extra weight shed away. Elated, Matt hoisted his skis into the air and looked up into the night sky. It looked as if he hadn’t breathed that easily in months.

Hermanator returns
The other story worth telling is that of Herman Maier.
Before Kitzbuehel, Maier’s best result on the season was eighth at Val Gardena’s super-G. At Kitzbuehel, he was second in super-G and fifth in downhill.
There are good skiers, there are great skiers, there are champions and then there is Herman Maier. The guy is in a class all his own. He captivated fans with a streak of wins circa 1998, he’s won over 50 World Cup races, and he has four Olympic medals, two of them gold. He’s had two major career comebacks hen any other racer would have been out for good. Remember his famous crash at the Nagano Olympics? He was, in a sense, immortalized on the cover of Sports Illustrated, when photographers captured him upside down in a downhill crash. It’s one of the most memorable crashes in ski history. Two days later, he won two gold medals.
Then, a terrible motorcycle accident nearly cost him his life and his leg. If you saw the leg now, you wouldn’t believe he can ski on it the way he does.
The guy is a true champion. He didn’t win any Kitzbuehel races this year, but he came very close. Before the weekend, his skiing had been mediocre at best. But when it really counts, Maier — at nearly 36 — will mix it up with best of them.
Check out his Nagano crash below.