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Zurbriggen's cool psyche has a large, invisible eggshell around it. Everything he needs is inside. His ties are very strong to his parents and the small 30-bed sport hotel, called the Larchenhof, that his father Alois built and now runs. A ski racer himself, Alois quit when a younger brother died after a ski fall, but it was he who first encouraged Pirmin to race. Pirmin's girlfriend Moni Julen, a pretty, dark-haired ski instructor from Zermatt, is a cousin of his friend Max and is accepted as part of this tight, protective mountain clan, which includes Heidi, 20, his younger sister and a downhiller on the national team. As a teenager, Pirmin spent a year cooking in the hotel kitchen, and now, during a short Christmas break, Mama Ida joshes contentedly that bookings are full, so it is good that Pirmin is there to give them a hand. The ski hero, whose income approaches $1 million a year, does, in fact, take a turn behind the bar in a lounge filled with ski trophies, though more photos are taken than drinks poured. Gravely, he tells TIME's Robert Kroon that yes, after his racing days, "I will take over the hotel here. That has been decided long ago. This is where I grew up, and this is where I will stay."
He is above all else "a man of his village," notes Karl Frehsner, head coach of the Swiss men's team. And the village oompah band, for which Zurbriggen once played trumpet, quite rightly keeps him on its list of musicians. "That's what I really enjoy," he says. "Any music, except this modern rock stuff because there's no melody to it." He has a quick, shrewd intelligence -- "the mind of a businessman," states Frehsner approvingly -- and he is not at all fearful of the world. But he is rooted so solidly in Saas-Almagell that he is not thrown off-balance by adulation and press clamor or an occasional run of poor results. This unbudgeable nature is the grounding, as the coach sees it, for Zurbriggen's most valuable quality, an eerie ability to concentrate at a level that shuts out everything except snow and gates and the fall of the mountain. He seems unaware of his competition until it is time to accept congratulations or grin and say, in a way that always seems genuine, that it really isn't so bad to be beaten by Muller or by the one-man Luxembourg team, Marc Girardelli.
But the habit of concentration is not a ski technique, it is a rock of Zurbriggen's character. In a hotel lobby or a team bus, when his eyes pass coolly over skiers with whom he has raced for ten years, it can be taken for the self-absorption of an egotist. So can remarks like his joking explanation to U.S. Ski Broadcaster Greg Lewis that "the name Pirmin means 'success.' " This sort of clunker is probably nothing more than the slight awkwardness of a 25-year-old athlete who is pursued by middle-aged foreigners all intent on asking why he drives a Mercedes instead of a Porsche, and whether Killy was an early hero. (Answers: "Mercedes is an excellent car, and they give me one free." And no, Pirmi, as he was called to his dismay, was only five when Killy retired; his heroes were the Italian Gustavo Thoni, the flashy Swiss star Bernhard Russi and Stenmark.)