Three, Two, One . . . Airborne!

By John Skow

Wind blew so cold and hard at the rocky summit of Mount Allan Sunday morning, when Alpine ski racing was supposed to blast off with the men's downhill, that the question was not whether the event would be canceled for the day but whether gatekeepers and photographers not protected by the start house could survive until officials admitted that the mountain gods were in no mood for a ski race. Back at ABC's hype central, talkers with dead air to fill turned to -- who else? -- Dr. Ruth, TV's advice giver to the sexlorn. Bearing in mind that the downhill demands superb reflexes and great stamina, did she counsel sex for the athletes in the 24 hours before the race? "Vell," said this ever reasonable sage in her schlagobers accent, making love all night wasn't a good idea, "but a qvickie is O.K."

That settled, to everyone's relief, athletes and onlookers conserved stamina for another 24 hours and tried again. Next morning the weather was benign. Only the racecourse was horrific: at the top an icy centrifuge of steep, high- speed turns, and past the midpoint, where racers still on their skis carried speeds of 80 m.p.h., a snaky, relatively flat descent over jarring, artificially created bumps and depressions. Luxembourg's two-time World Cup champion Marc Girardelli said that Mount Allan's downhill was the "most difficult in the world," worse than Kitzbuhel's thunderous Hahnenkamm.

Worse is better, of course, for the very best racers. No trifler with a magical pair of skis was about to steal a gold medal from Switzerland's hard man, big Peter Muller. This gristly 30-year-old downhiller, last year's world champion in his specialty, had finished second at Sarajevo four years ago. Now, starting from the unfavorable No. 1 position, which meant having to carve tracks through the remains of a light overnight snowfall, he showed the world a run -- 2 min. .14 sec. -- that none of the next dozen racers could touch. Italy's 6-ft. 4-in. Michael Mair, a downhill winner earlier in the season, skidded off the course. Girardelli and West Germany's Markus Wasmeier, two superb all-event men, skied with insufficient fury and finished sixth and ninth.

Then the split times for the 14th skier began flashing. Pirmin Zurbriggen, Muller's teammate, rival and mirror image -- a cool, reserved fellow who skis with a risk taker's wild flair -- was .05 sec. ahead, then .23 sec. A big outdoor TV screen showed Zurbriggen so close to disaster on one free-falling left turn that his hand scraped the snow. Muller watched, motionless, as Zurbriggen flashed past the finish .51 sec. in the lead. He did not react as Pirmin, exulting, raised a ski and kissed it. Muller was just one of skiing's centurions. Zurbriggen was fortune's newest darling.

He stayed that way for another day and a half, winning the downhill part of a misbegotten event called the combined, not seen in the Olympics for 40 years. This oddity celebrates mediocrity by parlaying a shortened downhill, started below the regular downhill's two fierce initial bends, and two runs of an easier version of the slalom, a fast-turning dash through flagged gates. On the first slalom run Zurbriggen, an all-event virtuoso in whom there is a fine gate skier crying for practice time, tied for sixth behind several slalom slitherers. He led the combined on points. Then, needing only a safe second run to win, he charged too hard, hooked a gate and fell within sight of the finish.

"I was totally surprised when I found the gate between my skis. It made me real mad," he said afterward. But an hour later, hunched over a buffet lunch in a hotel restaurant with his teammates, he pulled his long face up from the table to do just one interview, with a TIME correspondent. "O.K., action!" this shyest and most decent of ski heroes yelled out, trying to cheer the others with him. He declined to blame the weather. "Sure it was windy, but it had no effect on my racing." Or the course. "It was an easy slope, not too hard for me. I was going so fast, and you never know on slalom." Soon the rare mistake was behind him, and he was talking of his admiration for the great Swedish skier Ingemar Stenmark, against whom he expects to race in the slalom and giant slalom this week. From Stenmark, he said, "I learned that when you want to make power, you must be quiet. Then you explode." But, he added ruefully, "you cannot go over your limit."

Hubert Strolz, a good Austrian slalomist who has never been a star, took the gold in the combined with a respectable fifth in downhill and a so-so seventh in slalom. As golds go, it was a lowly medal, but the Austrians, humbled lately by the mighty Swiss teams, were grateful for it.

And the U.S. skiers? Looking at so-so from the underside, as expected. Buried chin-deep in drifts of analysis. There was little need for brooding after the glorious Sarajevo Games, when Debbie Armstrong and Christin Cooper won their gold and silver in the giant slalom, Phil and Steve Mahre a gold and a silver in slalom, and Bill Johnson, to expert eyes more scamster than skier, pulled his lovely downhill win. Now in the small traveling circus of ski racing it was being said that young skiers in the U.S. were too regimented, ran too many drills and never learned to free-ski, then were packed off to ski academies where obscure bad things were done to them. Ski resorts in the U.S., unlike those in Europe, fear lawsuits and kick you off the slopes if you ski fast. Maybe so -- yes, another round of mulled wine, please -- but where did the Mahre twins come from? The fact is that no one knows how once-in-a- generati on skiers or tennis players or milers are hatched. One of them makes a team dominant; two constitute a golden age. None at all makes this year dreary but normal.

To be normal and also snakebit, however, is a bit much. Injuries hit the U.S. men hard, and all but wiped out the women's team. Veteran Doug Lewis, who cracked a collarbone when a Soviet coach who was taking pictures blundered into his path during a ski test a few weeks ago, creaked to 32nd place in the downhill. A.J. Kitt and Jeff Olson, a couple of youngsters still getting used to the World Cup circuit, did respectably to finish 26th and 28th. No U.S. male skier survived the combined. Among the women, early-season injuries knocked out Star Tamara McKinney, '84 Gold Medalist Armstrong, Downhillers Eva Twardokens, Tori Pillinger, Adel Allender and Diann Roffe. (McKinney and Armstrong, on the mend, are at Calgary and ready to race.) Then only an hour before she was to race in the downhill, Team Veteran Pam Fletcher, the last realistic hope for a top-15 showing, collided with a course worker on a practice run and broke her leg.

As usual in dire times, U.S. fans adopted a Canadian. She was Karen ("No Mercy") Percy -- or so one Calgary sportswriter insisted -- a blond 21-year- old who stands a solid eleventh in World Cup rankings. She ran early and fast through stiff, changeable wind in the downhill. Among the stars who failed to touch her time were the glamorous Swiss rivals Maria Walliser, who finished fourth, and Michela Figini, Sarajevo's downhill winner, an ignominious ninth.

But when it seemed that a North American gold medal was likely, along came West Germany's Marina Kiehl, a pint-size, rosy-cheeked super giant slalom specialist who had never won a World Cup downhill. She steamed across the finish line .75 sec. in the lead. "I was out of control up there, so I just took it faster and faster," said Kiehl, 23. A bit later, lanky Brigitte Oertli, the Swiss star no one hears about, edged Percy by .01 sec. for the silver medal. Two inexperienced U.S. women, Edith Thys, 21, and Kristen Krone, 19, swallowed their Olympic jitters, held their tucks and made their turns, and though the cameras did not show their courage, finished a creditable 18th and 20th. A cheer or two, please, for the merely excellent.

With reporting by Laura Lopez/Nakiska