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Shock & Storm. Killy's two cardinal rules of racing are 1) keep the whole ski on the snow, and 2) always accelerate, never brake in the turn. In a downhill, instead of tucking tightly into the aerodynamic "egg position" favored by most racers, he changes position constantly to compensate for rough spots in the surface. "When you are too low and hit a bump, you have no spring," he explains. "If you are higher, you can use your legs like shock absorbers." In the slalom, Killy uses his poles as little as possible and strives for speed by skating through the gates—a technique that requires phenomenal balance. "Others try to do what he does," says Emile Allais, France's great champion of the '30s. "Most of them end up looking silly and fall."
Before the start of the Olympics downhill, Killy made an almost fatal mistake. Trying to bind the wax to his skis, he took a short preparatory run down the slope but succeeded instead rn stripping off half the wax. There was no time to rewax; the course was rapidly deteriorating; and Killy's own teammate, Guy Périllat, had taken a commanding lead. Knowing he would be unable to match Périllat's speed on the lower half of the course—by then his wax would be gone—Killy came down the upper half like an avalanche, plunging wildly through the turns, storming down the schuss on the thinnest razor-edge of control. It worked. Barely. He beat Périllat by 8/100ths of a second.
Compared with that, the giant slalom—a kind of combined downhill and special slalom—was on ice. "In the downhill, there may be something for me to learn," says Killy. "In the giant slalom, nothing." And with two swiveling, stooping runs down the mile-long course, he overpowered Runner-Up Willi Favre of Switzerland by the crushing margin of 2.22 sec.
One more victory, in the special slalom, and Killy would match the record of Austria's Toni Sailer, the only man ever to sweep the Olympics Alpine events—at Cortina in 1956. If anything, the special slalom was the toughest of the three events: there were so many competitors (102) that officials decided to hold two preliminary heats to narrow the field and establish starting positions for the finals. Annoyed ("a stupid expenditure of energy"), Killy nonetheless zipped through the first heat in 40.89 sec., more than a second faster than anybody else. Then fog forced cancellation of the second heat; Jean-Claude was seeded No. 1, and his grimace turned into a grin.
As it turned out, Killy needed the luck of his Irish ancestors to win that third $40 nugget of gold. In heavy fog that reduced visibility to 250 yds. or less, he posted a combined time of 99.73 sec. in two runs down the course —only to be beaten by both Norway's Haakon Mjoen and Austria's Karl Schranz. Then Mjoen and Schranz were disqualified—for skipping a few ail-important gates—and Jean-Claude collected his medal after all.
What now for King Killy? He probably will turn pro after the last World Cup race in April, and he has offers for endorsements, movie roles and the like that could make him a millionaire.