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The slalom is an acrobat's race of quick, subtle turns (less subtle, however, since the introduction five years ago of spring-loaded plastic gate poles that allow aggressive skiers to charge gates directly and club them aside with armored forearms). Zurbriggen is competitive in the discipline but has not won a World Cup slalom since 1986. His real strength is in the faster, wilder races. Last season he took five World Cup downhills. The race is a mad descent of at least 800 meters, with few control gates, at speeds that can reach 80 or 85 m.p.h. The giant slalom, or GS, bridges downhill and slalom extremes in a beautiful, treacherous dance of large-radius turns. The super-G has not quite taken on its own character; it is either a slow, curvy downhill or a fast, stretched-out GS. Zurbriggen, going through high-speed gates in GS or super-G, is unmistakable: a big, rangy cat springing from turn to turn, from coiled crouch to full-body extension, from one outside, carving ski to the other. He looks fast and is. Last season he won four World Cup races in the GS, as well as one in the super-G, and earned gold medals at Crans-Montana in each discipline. This season, pacing himself to peak at Calgary, he has taken two firsts and three seconds in downhill, plus seconds in GS and super- G.
It is only in the matter of cherished stereotype that this serious-minded innkeeper's son comes up lacking. In public fancy, ski racers, and especially downhillers, are barbarians, berserkers, wearers of iron hats with cow horns sticking out of them. Pirmin, from a minor resort town near Saas-Fee (which is a minor resort near Zermatt), is the sort of nice young man your mother wants your sister to meet. He does not look as if he eats nails. He has curly, reddish-blond hair, an elf's pointy nose and a shy, boyish grin, behind which is real shyness, behind which is . . .
Estimates vary. Start with what is easy: he is tall and athletic looking, but not especially rugged. His body has the long-muscled grace you see in the male half of a figure-skating pair. On to the hard part: he is quiet, sensible, mannerly, respectful to his parents and, as the Boy Scouts say, "brave, clean and reverent." Clearly there is an image problem here. It does not help, in the iron hat and cow horns department, that Zurbriggen is an exceptionally pious Roman Catholic, who confounds the European sporting press by praying at least twice a day. He is a loner, a man who, in a perfectly pleasant way, keeps his distance. World-class ski racers are traveling performers who migrate together from resort to resort for something like eleven months a year, and who eat, share cable cars, log lobby time and wait out bad weather with the same few dozen people. In such a one-ring circus, Zurbriggen has had only one close friend, the Swiss GS star Max Julen, who retired last year. Asked if he is friendly with any of the other skiers, he mentions the West German ace Markus Wasmeier, like himself a generalist who is a threat in any event. Wasmeier, a likable fellow with lank blond hair and a lean, fined-down body, is obviously startled to hear this; he thinks Zurbriggen is a magnificent skier, he says, and a fine sportsman. But it is clear that he doesn't know him very well. "He lives to himself," says Wasmeier.