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If the Winter Olympics turned Eric Heiden into a golden apotheosis to Americans, the Swedes had long since made a national hero of Ingemar Stenmark, an eerily perfect slalom racer who is as popular at home as Bjorn Borg, the tennis champion. At 23, Stenmark has won the World Cup three times. Before Lake Placid, he had taken 14 World Cup giant slalom races in a row while competing against the best racers in the world—a record as awesome in its own way as Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak in 1941. In some ways, Stenmark is the Alpine equivalent of DiMaggio. He has the same gift for doing the impossible in an unhurried, almost languid, offhandedly elegant manner. Declares Austria's Coach Karl Kahr: "He has that special feeling. Certainly, training is part of it, but it's also a gift—like the ability to learn a foreign language."
Stenmark only rarely competes in the downhill; its headlong plunge does not appeal to his sense of precision. He is strictly a specialist in the slalom and the giant slalom, fascinated by their intricate swoops and switchbacks. At Innsbruck four years ago, Stenmark fell in the slalom and had to content himself with a bronze in the giant slalom. He came to Lake Placid determined to take the big prize that had escaped him, a gold medal.
Thousands climbed up Whiteface Mountain to watch Stenmark in the first of two runs in the giant slalom. At the countdown, Stenmark poled powerfully out of the start house and into the first few tightly set gates. He was minutely off on the turns at first, then settled into the swoopingly rhythmic gate-to-gate dance that makes his style instantly recognizable. Just at the penultimate gate, Stenmark slid down so low on his right ski that his body was canted almost parallel to the snow. For an instant, it looked as though his try for gold would vanish in a white detonation of arms and legs and skis. Instead, Stenmark simply reached down and pushed himself up with his right hand. But the near fall slowed him just enough to leave him in third place, behind Liechtenstein's Andreas Wenzel and Austria's Hans Enn.
There is in Stenmark a certain wintry remoteness that recalls another perfectionist of Scandinavian blood, Charles Lindbergh. After that first run, Stenmark irritably fended off reporters, as he almost always does. "Questions, bloody questions," he muttered, and turned away.
Something about the second run of the giant slalom seems to evoke all of Stenmark's skills and desire. Once, he ranked 23rd after the initial round and still managed to win, since first place is decided by the combined times of the two runs. On the second run down Whiteface, Stenmark swept down the course in a style close to perfection. His timing, his anticipation of the gates, his relaxed air, gave the run a preternatural grace. A cat can slink across a dressertop dense with perfume bottles and barely brush them with its fur; Stenmark went through 55 gates like that. Near one of the final gates, his skis chattered into a left turn and slid slightly. He corrected, and shot home to a gold medal, more than a second faster than Wenzel. The bronze went to Austria's Enn.