(6 of 10)
Three days later, Stenmark skied the shorter slalom course with such artistry that he won his second gold medal, plucking it away from Phil Mahre, 22, probably the finest male skier the U.S. has ever produced. After his ankle injury on the same Whiteface course a year ago, Mahre began skiing toward a surprising comeback. In his first race in Europe this winter, he did well enough to earn World Cup points. Said Team Director Bill Marolt: "Who could have believed he could do it in his first race? God, what an athlete!"
Mahre is a strong and bold competitor. His first run down Whiteface last week was a brilliant attack—nothing held back, no ghosts, no fear, just a great technical skier slicing through the gates on a line as pure and fast as the mountain would allow. Leading after that first run, he was hardly out of the start house on the second when a bouncing gate pole dropped across his skis, slowing him for an instant, upsetting his concentration, almost making him fall. The damage was done; the imperturbable Stenmark overtook Mahre in the second run and snared the gold by half a second. Still, Mahre's silver made him only the third American man ever to win an Olympic alpine skiing medal of any kind. (Billy Kidd took a silver and Jimmy Heuga a bronze in the slalom at Innsbruck in 1964, the only other medalists.) Mahre went over and congratulated Stenmark, and then the two super skiers, who used to train together, sat side by side in the sun like old friends and watched the rest of the competition.
While Stenmark was being Stenmark, Europe's top women racers were putting on a spectacular show of their own on Whiteface Mountain. Austria's Annemarie Moser-Pröll had also come to Lake Placid with a point to prove. Like Stenmark, she held the record for World Cup career victories (61 for her, 46 for him) and, like Stenmark, she had never won an Olympic gold medal. At Sapporo in 1972, when she was 18, she had been forced to settle for two silvers, and she missed Innsbruck in 1976 because she was at home in Kleinarl, Austria, nursing her father, a Tyrolean farmer, in his terminal illness. She came to Lake Placid, at age 26, knowing it was her last chance for gold.
"Moser-Pröll," says former U.S. Ski Team Director Hank Tauber, "is the toughest woman athlete I have ever met." She is a calm, concentrated woman with fiercely appraising ice-blue eyes who carries a solidly efficient 147 lbs. on a 5-ft. 7-in. frame. At the downtown Lake Placid house rented for the women's team by the Austrian Ski Federation, all talk about gold medals was banned. Moser-Pröll spent the evening before the women's downhill crocheting a red tablecloth—possibly something for the Café Annemarie that she runs with her husband Herbert in the off-season at Kleinarl.
At Whiteface next morning, the temperature was zero and the wind-chill factor made it feel like —50°. Team assistants used a hair dryer to keep Annemarie's boots warm and flexible in the small start house atop the 2,698-meter downhill run. Her face was coated with an anti-frostbite cream. Sewn inside her uniform was a photograph of her father.