Keeping Them Happy

In Alpine skiing, the superpowers a14 France and Austria. But the balance of) power belongs to Canada-- at leastf where the girls are concerned, and at least since 1965, when Nancy Greenfe, 24, a bubbling, button-nosed lass from Rossland, B.C., began blasting down the slopes. "We all get along very well," says Nancy. "The Austrians are happy when I beat the French, and the French are happy when I beat the Austrians."

This year both the French and the Austrians must be delirious with joy. Nancy is walloping them all. In the Winter Olympics at Grenoble, she won a gold medal in the giant slalom and a sil ver in the slalom. Next, in the Arlberg-Kandahar at Chamonix, she won the downhill, slalom and combined trophies. When the tour moved to the U.S., she won all three events at Aspen, Colo. slalom, giant slalom and downhill beating France's Marielle Goitschel by a 1.67-sec. margin in the giant slalom.

Two weeks ago at Sun Valley, she did it again, another triple, including a 2.97-sec. downhill win over another French star, Isabelle Mir.

Fooling the Experts. The astonishing string had to end some time. And last week, pressing extra hard before the home folks at Rossland, Nancy caught a ski tip on a gate and fell in the sla lom. Even so, she still held a commanding lead in the battle for the World Cup, with 176 points to 150 for Mir and 128 for Goitschel.

Nancy's record is all the more remarkable because few experts expected much from her this year. Only three weeks before the Winter Games, she severely strained the ligaments in 'her left ankle. The experts should have remembered what a gutsy competitor she is. In the 1966 World Championships at Portillo, Chile, she caught an edge in the downhill and somersaulted into a retaining wall at 60 m.p.h. "I've never seen any girl take a worse fall," said French Ski Coach Honore Bonnet. "I didn't expect her to get up again." Nancy got up all right--with a badly bruised right elbow and a broken coccyx. Three days later, her right arm shot full of Novocain, ski pole taped to her glove, she raced in the giant slalom and finished fourth.

Time to Study. That was expectable from a girl who trains on such exercises as 40 deep knee bends with a 150-lb. barbell across her shoulders. Nancy first rode on skis as an infant strapped into a pack on her father's back. By three, she could angle down a slope by herself, and at 16, she competed in her first international meet: the 1960 Olympics at Squaw Valley. Her 22nd-place finish in the downhill spurred her to train so hard that Rossland's citizens waged a door-to-door campaign for enough money to send her to the 1964 games at Innsbruck, where she moved up to seventh.

One thing that bothers Nancy is that she still has not had time to complete her freshman year at Notre Dame University in Nelson, B.C. So last week, at the peak of her career, she made an announcement: "I have to set some new goals. One of them is a college degree." Next weekend, after the season's final meet at Heavenly Valley, Calif., Nancy will retire--which ought to make the French and Austrians even happier.

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