Austrian skier's come back

The Old Man and the Ski

Herman Maier's return as The World Cup Super G champion is surely one for the books of records


By CHRISTIAN CUMMINS
from Wien, AUSTRIA


As this season opened Hermann Maier, the most successful Austrian skier of his generation and an icon of skiing, makes a rather romantic figure. But only if you, like the novelist Ernest Hemingway, admire a quixotic and manly determination to defy the nature.

Like Hemingway's aging Gulf Stream fisherman Santiago, who had gone eighty-four days without catching a fish, Maier, once the ultimate perfectionist for whom second place was a travesty, was now approaching three years without a victory and was battling to mediocre placings outside the world's top 15. He was just days short of his 36th birthday and was struggling with a back injury. You wondered if it was all worth it.

Maier, whose career started late and was repeatedly disrupted by injuries, seemed to be desperately trying to make up for the months he had lost. But he was beginning to make a sorry figure. A few years ago, in his almost monstrous incarnation as the 'Herminator', the question asked was less often whether he would win, but rather by how much. It hurt to see him reduced to the status of a journeyman professional.

When Hermann Maier arrived at Lake Louise, Canada, at the end of November for the opening of the speed season, he might not have won since the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Downhill event in January 2006, but he remained a massive draw in his own country. Maier might not have the sort of open features of a super-fit Martin Cloones, but for his sponsor, the Austrian bank Raiffeissen, his is the face that has launched a thousand bank accounts. Yet like fellow marketing magnet David Beckham, you wondered whether he should just hang-up his boots gracefully and enjoy the piles of cash in peace and contemplation.

Fans were following his runs with mounting frustration: the man who used to gobble up the control-gates like the jaws of doom was now carving down the slope with the understated grace of a ski instructor. Half-way through the season's first downhill, the stop-watch showed he was miles off the pace.

"That's neither fish nor flesh," cried Maier's former race-team colleague Hans Knauss, now a commentator on Austrian national television, as the former champion attacked a gate seemingly half-heartedly. He was aggressive, but in the wrong places. It wasn't that he made terrible mistakes; he was just mediocre. In his competitive days, Knauss had been vastly inferior to Maier. Hearing him ripping into the Gran Maestro was sad. It was as if a retired Didier Deschamps were taking microphone pot-shots at Zinedine Zidane.

Yet just 24 hours later and still in Lake Louise, that tranquil Banff outpost, Maier caught the big fish that had escaped him for so long. He finished ahead of Canada's John Kucera and Switzerland's Didier Cuche and managed to win the Super-G event - downhill's curvier younger brother. It was his 54th World Cup race.

Everyone was astounded, even the coaches, who carried his considerable bulk to the podium. It was the return of the king.

But perhaps we shouldn't have been so surprised by the victory. If he is the Austrian Beckham, he trumps our David's claims to be the 'comeback kid'. Maier came to global prominence at the Nagano Winter Olympics in 1998 when he won Gold in the Super-G and Giant Slalom just days after a spectacular and brutal crash in the Downhill, including multiple air-borne somersaults, which looked as though it should have broken him in two.

Then came the biggest comeback of all: In the off season of 2001, and at the peak of his form, the defending World Cup champion Maier was hit by a car while riding his motorbike near his home village of Flachau near Salzburg. He was tossed into a ditch and suffered injuries so severe that his kidneys were on the brink of failure and it took a 7 hour long emergency operation to save his right leg from amputation. Yet he struggled back on to fitness - famously pumping upper-body weights days after the accident and while still bed-ridden in hospital. Just weeks after his comeback early in 2003, he won a silver medal at the World Championships in St Moritz.

Even better was to come the following year, his first full year back on the circuit, when he reclaimed his World Cup title in Super-G as well as the overall crown. Ski racing gets little media coverage outside the Alpine countries, but that surely ranks as one of the greatest recent achievements in any sport anywhere around the globe.

Was it a fluke or a renaissance? The signs are positive. At the beginning of this month, the weekend after Lake Louise, Maier took 2nd place at the Super-G on the ferocious Birds of Prey course in Beaver Creek, Colorado. It put him in provisional 2nd place in the overall World Cup (he has since slipped to 7th).

This time the commentators were left to admire his transformed body language. The aggression was back. The 'Herminator' is dead and buried, the skier himself says, and only Hermann Maier remains. But 'just Hermann Maier' has already made it clear that he will be hanging around until the end of next season. Maybe the last chapter is yet to be written.


(Published: 10.01.2009.)