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The Austrian ski team was considerably grimmer than the Americans, and for a good but unusual reason: it had too much talent. In fact, so strong were the Austrians that Franz Klammer did not even make the team. In 1976, Klammer's run in Innsbruck had instantly become a classic of sport—a headlong, fanatical plunge of almost mystical recklessness and desire. But the following year, Klammer's younger brother Klaus, also a racer, fell so badly that he will probably be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. After that, some critical edge of aggressiveness departed from Franz Klammer's racing style, and he was unable to make the Austrian team for the 1980 Olympics.
Originally, the Austrians had planned to race a four-man downhill team of Peter Wirnsberger, Werner Grissmann, Haiti Weirather and Josef Walcher, the 1978 downhill world champion. The team's alternate, Leonhard Stock, a long-nosed and wiry clerk from Austria's lovely Ziller Valley, had severely injured his shoulder in December while training for the World Cup, and went to Lake Placid as a substitute. But in practice runs at Whiteface, Stock clocked the best time for all racers on the first day, then repeated the feat the second day. Team officials met and settled upon a fratricidal little rite of natural selection. Stock and Weirather had made the team, but the three other racers would have to fight for the remaining two slots by making one more training run down Whiteface. Officials turned down a proposal by the five skiers that they all be made to qualify on the final day.
There is little camaraderie in ski racing, an individual's sport, and the three who were thus not assured of starting were grumblingly bitter. "We didn't want to do it that way," Grissmann said later. "We eventually agreed with the team leadership, but that was the day we lost confidence in it." Said Walcher: "I went along because I did not want to ruin the rest of my racing career, but I did not like it." In the end, Walcher was the odd man out, and Stock boomed down Whiteface on the last training run with a better time than any of his teammates.
Something about Whiteface, hulking and picturesque seemed to agree with Stock. The course that plunges down its side is not one of the ski circuit's most difficult runs. To accommodate lesser skiers, Olympic courses generally are not as demanding as most in World Cup events. With a length of 3,028 meters, the Whiteface downhill is a little too short and, in its final third, a little too flat to test the world's best skiers. But the run has its challenges, especially in the upper third, a steep (up to 55° grade), twisting course that runs through such expert skier's delights as "Hurricane Alley" and "Dynamite Corner." It is there the skier must show the technical virtuosity to survive the turns while building the momentum to swing down through the steep, screamingly fast (nearly 90 m.p.h.) middle section that eventually soothes to a long, final flat. "The secret," said Canada's Ken Read, "is to ski the top well. That's where the time is lost—and won."