The High and Mighty

By John Skow

The Olympics got a jolt when three U.S. skiers came flying home

If there was anyone in Sarajevo who did not know beforehand that Bill Johnson of the U.S. was the best downhiller Mount Bjelasnica ever saw, it was not because Johnson had failed to spread the word. He said it repeatedly during the long week of delays and training runs before the race, and he said it afterward. Is not consistency the mark of a great athlete? "Top three? I think I'll finish in the top one," he confided amiably. Outrageous, muttered the sport's moguls. World-class cockiness.

He looked a little like a young Paul Newman, this West Coast kid with the blue eyes, thin nose and mobile mouth. Ah, that mouth... But he stopped talking for at least 1 min. 45:59 sec. last week. Starting sixth, wearing tasteful white-and-peach candy stripes, he took a great gulp of air, lunged out on his poles and launched himself on arm power down the 51DEG chute that plunges through the restaurant built atop Bjelasnica to give the downhill run the required 800-meter drop. He dropped into a textbook aerodynamic tuck, fists together in front of his face, helmet down, back parallel to the ground. "I've been winning most of the top sections," he said later, referring to unofficial split times, "so I was real smooth the first three or four turns. Then I came to the fallaway right-hander that's been giving me trouble all week. I came through at real good speed, and I just put my head down and said, 'It's a motorway from here on down ...' " That evening Bill Johnson received the first gold medal ever awarded to an American for an Olympic downhill. He was still talking about his run, and so was everyone else.

By comparison, the women's giant-slalom race could not have been more different. Did Debbie ("Who?") Armstrong boast that she was going to win the women's G.S.? Not likely. This chunky, round-faced and unknown young woman with the great grin didn't dare to think about winning even after the race was over. But she ran second behind the fine U.S. racer Christin Cooper in the first run, and after the second, fizzing with joy and unburnt energy, she had taken the gold .4 sec. ahead of Cooper, who finished with a silver. "I was so high and happy, and it was so much fun," Armstrong raved. "There I was, a few weeks ago, still worrying whether I would make the Olympic team, and here I am with a gold medal."

As if these two eye-popping wins were not enough, the final day of the Games brought the U.S. the most satisfying result of all, a gallant 1-2 slalom finish by Phil and Steve Mahre in the final Olympic performances of their careers. It had been a wild week of ski racing, and maybe it was those crazy ski suits that gave the first hint. Nobody had ever seen anything like them: weird spirals of glowing pink and black, or yellow and orange, snaking up each leg and across the bottom--astonishing, even in hindsight--and then up the trunk and down the arms. Even as the Mahres did their twin-brother act one more time, they seemed to symbolize a passing of the old order, in a mixed-up, wonderful two weeks of blizzards, postponements and splendid achievements.

Europeans may find it hard to swallow, but an American newcomer whose name kept slipping out of the mind as the season began (Jim Johnson? Bill Jones?) won the most dramatic event of the Winter gambols, and all three women's race winners were known only to journalists who traveled the World Cup circuit. Armstrong was obscure, but so was Paoletta Magoni, 19, an Italian who won the slalom when half the women entered fell or missed gates in a thick fog. And Ursula Konzett, a 24-year-old Liechtensteiner, took the bronze. The only known quantity here was France's Perrine Pelen, who won the silver and, earlier, a bronze behind Armstrong and Cooper in the G.S. Four years ago, Pelen took a bronze in the G.S. at Lake Placid. But talking about 1980 only emphasizes that four years ago, Michela Figini of Switzerland, who won the gold in the downhill last week, was 13 years old. For Americans, nothing showed the passage of time more than the news that the stalwart Cindy Nelson, 28, competing in her third Olympics with a brace on her damaged right leg, had not even entered the punishing downhill. In the G.S. she had scraped to 18th place, and it seemed likely that her career was over.

With the men, the break between old and new was not quite so sharp. Max Julen, 22, the Swiss technician who won the G.S., was not unheard of, if one followed skiing closely. And Bronze Medalist Andreas Wenzel, Hanni's brother, was a star. The big roar of applause was not for Julen or Wenzel, however. It was for Yugoslav Jure Franko, the tall, good-looking G.S. specialist who won the silver, the first medal of any kind the Yugoslavs had ever won in a Winter Olympics. The 21-year-old Franko is less well known than Yugoslav Slalom Stars Bojan Krizaj and Boris Strel, who finished ninth and fifth, but Franko's performance was no real surprise. He ranked fifth in G.S. World Cup points coming into Sarajevo. A silver won by an ordinary Yugoslav would have been a good present for the Games' hospitable hosts, but Franko is a universal favorite who helps out journalists with intelligent interviews in several languages, serenades his friends and gracefully shrugs off compliments.

In the commotion welcoming all the talented newcomers, the ski world seemed almost to forget about the 26-year-old twins from Yakima, Wash., whose careers had proved that U.S. men skiers could beat the world. Phil had won the World Cup three years in a row, and he had taken a silver in slalom at Lake Placid. Steve had won the G.S. world championship in 1982. But in the Sarajevo G.S., these anchors of the U.S. team could do no better than eighth and 17th. They were quitting after this season, they said, and they seemed tired of skiing. Poor old men. But there was one last Olympic race, and a magnificent last hurrah it was. Steve won the first round, and Phil overtook his brother in the second. Afterward he gave one of his country-boy smiles and said, "It feels great, especially since it was the two of us."

Old heroes are unforgettable, but the young are irresistible. Bubbly, round-faced Debbie Armstrong broke into a big, can't-hold-it-back grin as the gold medal was hung around her neck. After her second run in the G.S., she had stood waiting for Christin Cooper's time to confirm her gold or push her into second. As she realized that Cooper had just failed to beat her, she turned her head away, and her marvelously readable face registered sublime relief and joy for herself, and pain and sorrow for Cooper. The two stood together, hugging and exclaiming and making faces, until last year's overall World Cup winner, Tamara McKinney, turned in a brilliant second run that was the fastest of the heat, but narrowly failed to win a bronze. Then the three of them stood together, hugging.

No observer could doubt that the emotions they showed were real and strong, but the gurgling obscured the toughness of these athletes. Cooper's recovery from complicated leg surgery was well enough known, and Armstrong too, it turned out, had come back after harrowing crackups. She had broken her leg in practice at Schladming, Austria, two years ago, recovered fast enough to get onto the World Cup circuit the same season, and then broke the same leg again.

For part of the next season she competed wearing a specially built high ski boot to support the bad leg. Both her father, a psychologist, and her mother teach skiing part time, and she has always skied, but at Garfield High School in Seattle she was also an M.V.P. for two years in soccer and basketball. Her bubbly nature is infectious; Cooper said later, "I was behind her in the starting area, and I heard her saying to herself, 'O.K., Deb, just have a good time, have a good time, have the run of your life.' And then she turned to me and said, 'You too, Coop. Have the run of your life.' She was so hyped up it was really funny."

If everyone was delighted for Armstrong, Johnson kicked up as much frosty disdain as admiration. It began a month ago, during the running of the Lauberhorn race at Wengen, Switzerland, over a shortened course and in conditions so poor that the grand old Austrian avalanche Franz Klammer tried unsuccessfully to get the race canceled. There Johnson became the first American to win a World Cup downhill. After the race, the popular and easygoing Klammer called Johnson "a little Nasenbohrer"--nose picker--who had sneaked into first place by a fluke. At Sarajevo, while Johnson skied superb training runs during the week of delays caused by weather, Klammer fell and pulled a groin muscle. Johnson began calling him a nose picker.

The dialogue was less than brilliant, but by now, because he repeatedly said so and then proved it, Johnson was known as a good glider, excellent on straightaway courses like Sarajevo's and good on soft snow. The Austrians prefer hard-packed, twisty plunges that test turning ability. Fair enough, except that whenever Johnson met them in the Olympic village he would grin and say, "Hi, guys, it's still snowing up there."

Nor did Johnson produce the bashful, foot-scuffling "I'll go out there and do my best, but the competition's tough" kind of answer that skiers are supposed to give to reporters' endless inquiries. Johnson said flatly that there was "no doubt" that he would win. The race was for second place.

They may as well mail the gold medal to his house, he went on, and on. Phil Mahre, a man of great modesty and foot scuffling, was clearly on Klammer's side.

He called Johnson "the John McEnroe of skiing." Johnson was scarcely this bad; he didn't scream at officials, and was never anything but cheerful, even to the Austrians. In his self-delight, he gave the impression, walking quite alone, of a pair of young lovers strolling hand in hand.

After his run, he had no trouble keeping everyone's attention. At 17, he admitted, he had been in trouble for car theft, until a compassionate judge let him off to attend the Mission Ridge Ski Academy in Washington. He concentrated on downhill when he began to tour in Europe and saw how downhillers were revered there. Off the road he divided his time between the houses of his father Wally, a computer systems analyst and sometime house-builder who lives in Van Nuys, Calif., and his mother D.B., who raced stock cars in high school and is now a contract administrator for an electronics firm near Portland, Ore. The portrait his parents give is of a bright boy who skipped two grades in school, was shy and defensive and, says his mother, got "straight A's in the classroom, but straight F's in the playground. I thought he was going to punch his way all the way through life." The now celebrated episode in which he was kicked off the U.S. ski team in 1981 for being out of condition still seems to rankle Johnson (his relations with Alpine Director Bill Marolt are clearly touchy), but his mother thinks "it was the best thing they did for him. At the time, Bill thought that he didn't have to do all the necessary training to get there."

Shortly before his own gold-medal effort, Phil Mahre said that Johnson's win "could be a good thing or it could be a disaster, it's all up to Billy." Like other top practitioners who have watched Johnson, Mahre says that technically he is not that good a skier, especially on hard snow.

There is also the matter of his singular personality. Mahre went on: "I don't know an athlete in this village who actually likes the guy." Canadian Downhiller Todd Brooker said he did not like Johnson either, and that with his present style he could never win a demanding race like the Hahnenkamm. But he added, "You've got to give the guy credit. It's one thing to be so goddam sure of yourself and another to be absolutely right. He was definitely the best skier on the course today."

That he was, and for him the World Cup circuit stretched out far ahead. As he left Sarajevo for Copper Mountain, Colo., to train for a downhill next week, he had nothing unkind to say about anyone, not even Klammer. But, of course, he did have a breezy last word. "I could be in this game a long time now." --By John Skow.

Reported by Gertraud Lessing and William Rademaekers/Sarajevo

With reporting by Gertraud Lessing, William Rademaekers/Sarajevo