It is one of those sporting moments that, courtesy of a thousand lingering and lurid slow-motion replays, is indelibly burnt into the mind. Hermann Maier, the skiing machine they call “the Herminator”, is wearing the red and white ski suit and red helmet emblazoned with the eagle of the Austrian empire. Favoured to win gold, he sails over a steep rollover near the start of the Nagano Olympic downhill course at a speed already over 130kph.
As he vaults into the blue Japanese sky, it looks for a split second as though he’s flying gracefully, might stick the landing and continue his brutal assault on the course to victory.
But, as his trajectory continues cruelly upwards and he reaches the top of its arc, suddenly it’s clear that this is all wrong. His arms windmill wildly as he fights gravity, fights momentum and finally fights the inevitable moment when he explodes onto the icy race course and rag-dolls through the safety fences.
Then, almost more improbably, the limp and lifeless-looking figure somehow stumbles to his feet, shakes his head, waves away worried officials, clicks back into his skis and heads down the mountain.
It is the moment of the Nagano Winter Olympics and a career-defining moment for Maier. Not so much because of the crash, but because two days later, with a dislocated left shoulder, a severely bruised disk in his lower back, a badly swollen right knee and contusions everywhere, he comes back to the mountain and wins the Olympic Super G by half a second. And, as if that’s not enough, three days later he returns and wins gold in the giant slalom.
“In a way, the crash was the best thing that ever could have happened to him,” said John Garnsey, an American jury member at Nagano. “If Maier had just won two gold medals, he’d be yet another great Austrian skier known and respected by insiders, but not a household name. To succeed is boring. To fail spectacularly and then succeed – that’s really something.”
Just over five years later, the most famous ski racer in the world is sitting in the café at the South Island’s Treble Cone, nursing a cup of coffee and gazing up the hill as a norwest front rolls in. It’s 10.00am and the race training that began four hours earlier is finished for the day.
With longish, dirty-blond hair jammed under a cap, intensely pale-blue eyes and a set of orthodontic braces reminiscent of James Bond’s nemesis Jaws, the Herminator cuts a figure worthy of his nickname. Of course I ask him about that moment in Nagano and of course he gives the answer that he always does. “I’d prefer to be remembered for winning two gold medals in Nagano than for my screw-up.”
Yet, Maier seems fated to be remembered for more than the skiing. If Nagano was the racing comeback of the century, his latest return to form is nothing short of miraculous. Two years ago, Maier was riding his beloved Ducati Monster along an Austrian mountain road when a car turned in his path. His lower right leg was so horrifically smashed that it was feared he would lose his foot. But, in a seven-hour operation, surgeons screwed a 32cm titanium rod into his shin and saved the most famous limb in Austria. Even so, he was not expected to walk again.
“When the accident happened,” Maier says, “my first focus was to keep my leg and then to walk. I could not even think about skiing again at that time. The pain was so bad, I couldn’t sleep for six months.”
Now, surrounded by other Austrian ski team members using Treble Cone for vital off-season training, Maier and co are straight out of an Aryan fantasy: blond, blue-eyed Supermen with thighs like kauri trunks. These six racers, sitting virtually unnoticed at the café table, have between them cleaned up over half the Olympic and World Cup medals in the last few years.
This isn’t such big news in New Zealand, but in Europe, where skiing is an obsession and daily life grinds to a halt when people gather in the pubs and cafés to watch the World Cup races on Euro Sport each winter weekend, the racers are national heroes. They earn money that would make an All Black look hard done by. And the Austrians are currently the best in the world.
The Herminator is by far the most famous. In a sport where the difference between glory and calamity is dangerously blurred, Maier is famous for skiing the tightest, most fearless lines. He is also renowned for the unrelenting, methodical brutality of his training regime. And he is celebrated for the fact that, as a skinny kid, he never made the national ski-racing team and spent years bulking up, working as a bricklayer and a ski instructor, until he finally burst onto the international racing scene at the relatively advanced age of 24. The legend has only grown since the motorcycle accident.
AT LAST YEAR’S SALT LAKE Olympics, Maier was still unable to get his swollen leg into a ski boot. But, despite the doctor’s predictions, by the end of 2002 he was back on skis. Almost immediately, he appeared in a World Cup event, skiing gingerly before announcing that it was time to go back into training. And then, with just 10 days of training under his belt, he won one of the toughest World Cup Super G’s on the circuit – the fearsome and famous Kitzbuel course in Austria. The Herminator, as the saying goes, was back!
“It’s still tough, because I don’t have much feeling in my right foot,” he says seriously, before a smile creases his face. “But it also means I don’t feel the pain so much when I’m training.” He seems to take the accident and subsequent recovery as just another rollover in the downhill course of life. Others view it differently.
“It was a miracle,” says Guenther Bergmann, Austrian head of Treble Cone’s Race Department. “It would be like Andre Agassi nearly having his arm cut off and coming back to win Wimbledon a year later. And now, seeing him train, you would not know it had happened. He is awesome to watch. The others are like buses, then Hermann skis and he is a freight train.”
Indeed. On the mountain that morning he seemed to ski with an intensity that set him apart from even his World Cup-winning team-mates. Eyes coldly focused, powerful physique hunched in an aero-dynamic tuck, he stormed down the Super G training course like a man possessed. Little wonder that his other nicknames on the race circuit include “the Beast”, “the Monster” and even “the Alien”.
Maier is also renowned for his terse and taciturn interviews and disdain of media hype. But in the café today he appears relaxed and upbeat. “Training is going well and my leg feels a lot better than last season. And Treble Cone is a great for us, because we get to ski the same mix of natural winter snow and manmade snow we will be racing on in the northern hemisphere in three months’ time. Plus, it is very beautiful here, too. But most of all we like it here because we are not so well known. If we are not training the next day, we can go to the pub and enjoy a beer.”
Maier is mobbed in Europe and lives life under intense media scrutiny. His presence here, then, is a little like the All Blacks going to Austria for their World Cup build-up. “I am with the All Blacks, for sure. But what I really like is that dance they do … what do you call it? Ya – the haka. I want to learn this for before my races.” (As if his competitors need another reason to tremble in their boots!)
The norwester picks up and it is time for the Herminator to head back down to the Wanaka gym. Then it will be physio and massage before analysis of the video of today’s training. There will be just one hour off after dinner before sitting down to talk with the technicians who prepare the skis for the next day. Meanwhile, the coaches and groomers will be back up on Treble Cone, preparing the course for the next morning. The World Cup is just months away and Hermann Maier has a reputation and titles to defend.
Beyond that, will he keep skiing? “Ya – I still love to go fast and I still love to ski. I just take it as it comes.” What about coming back to Wanaka next year? He turns on an ironic grin and utters the line his compatriot Arnold Schwarzenegger made famous in the film that spawned his nickname: “I’ll … be … baaaack!”