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Miracle on Snow

Klammer’s downhill on Patscherkofel lives on

(SPP Sport Press Photo/Alamy Stock Photo)

It’s focal to describe what it was like to witness a downhill ski race in 1976. There’s a video screen at the bottom of the mountain next to the finish line, but only a few hundred privileged spectators are situated close enough to benefit from it. For most of those who have shown up to drink in the communion of the experience, watching the downhill is comprised of catching momentary glimpses of each skier slicing by at searing, explosive velocity, then waiting to hear the character of the crowd response at the finish area, where a mounted clock provides the only narrative evidence material to the drama.

As a spectator on the hill in 1976 you didn’t watch a ski race, you felt it.

This is a story about the greatest downhill in ski racing history and the feelings it engenders, even to this day. And the story is told by the ultimate uninitiated observer, a rookie broadcaster covering his first ski race, at his first of what would become 14 Olympic Games, amid his first trip to Europe just a couple of weeks after his first ill-fated attempts to ski. Seldom have the sublime and the ridiculous collided more propitiously.

In 1974 I experienced a work opportunity that amounted to the functional equivalent of winning a lottery, long before lotteries were coin of the realm in the United States. After an aimless and near-terminally indifferent undergraduate career at the University of North Carolina, and a following year spent writing nondescript publicity releases for an upstart repertory theater company and a doomed-from-the-beginning US Senate campaign, I had stumbled into a series of sports radio niches in Chapel Hill.

Through the luck of meeting some of the right people at the right time, and the willingness to work for $25 a show, I spent a lot of 1972 and 1973 doing pregame and postgame shows for the UNC football and basketball radio networks, interviewing Bill Dooley and Dean Smith constantly and repeatedly, and driving off to little towns I had never seen to describe Chapel Hill High School football to a tiny handful of listeners. My face was still anonymous, but my name became known and, stuck for an answer as to any meaningful career ambition, I used my newfound notoriety to talk my way into a master’s degree program in UNC’s Department of Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures. I had no real goal yet, but I had a platform of sorts, and after a near-total failure in undergraduate school, I was beginning to get the impression luck was on my side.

It was. In 1974, capitalizing on technological advances that had emerged from improvised coverage of the kidnapping of nine and the murder of two Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, ABC Sports developed a plan to put a college-age reporter on the sidelines of its college football telecasts with a camera and a microphone.

Throughout its history, sports television has been determined to breach frontiers and get viewers closer to the athletes and the action. This was something new, and after a lengthy public selection process, the network was impressed enough by two candidates to put them on the air, the brilliant Stanford undergraduate Don Tollefson, and the other, a more difficult choice because I was 25 and not technically college age. At the end of the 1974 season Don went off to local television in Philadelphia, and I was invited to stay with the network. To do another season on the sidelines. To begin getting my feet wet on esoteric Wide World of Sports shows like the World Lumberjack Championships and the Oriental World of Self-Defense. And in February 1976, in what I saw as the greatest privilege of my life to that date, to be a feature reporter at the Winter Olympic Games in Innsbruck, Austria.

I had never been to Europe. I didn’t realize until I landed in Munich that Innsbruck was less than a hundred miles down the road from the scene of the crime that had disrupted the last Olympics three and a half years before. And I arrived in one of the world’s most international cities, where, as the games got underway, fans rolled in waving flags, by carloads and buses from nearby countries with winter sports traditions: West Germany, Italy, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Austria’s more glamorous next-door neighbor, Switzerland.

There are some American sports rivalries whose easily identifiable cultural roots will always sing to any sports fan: Alabama vs. Auburn, Michigan vs. Ohio State, the Packers and the Bears, the Celtics and the Lakers. In the world of alpine skiing, that’s Austria and Switzerland. Children grow up skiing to school and dreaming of wearing their national colors in Olympic and World Cup competitions. And even in the ’70s, when such heroes were ostensibly governed by the archaic code of amateurism the Olympics were still pretending to enforce, they dreamed of the almost limitless money and privilege accrued by the most talented among them.

In the middle of that decade, there were few professional athletes in the world whose bank accounts were more richly stocked than those of so-called amateur ski stars from Austria and Switzerland. Their names and faces were attached to a constant stream of income from ski manufacturers, boot makers, high-end ski clothiers, and expensive accessories like goggles and poles and sunscreens and gloves. Their successes sold resort packages and lift tickets and airfares and the world’s best cars and watches. Their nations were constantly locked in economic warfare, and the skiers were the soldiers and the weaponry in those wars.

The 1976 Olympic downhill race, on a slippery mountain in Innsbruck named Patscherkofel, promised the ultimate confrontation between the two global superpowers of skiing. All logic dictated that only two men had a chance to win that gold medal; one was the elegant Swiss World Cup overall champion, and the other was the ultimate Austrian downhiller. As dawn broke over Innsbruck on February 5, 1976, their names were already being shouted through the streets of town. Bernhard Russi. Franz Klammer. Russi. Klammer. But with Austrians outnumbering the opposition, through the morning the chant became louder, ultimately deafening, as nearly 70,000 people gathered on the snowy mountainside, mostly to shout themselves hoarse repeating one word over and over. Klammer, Klammer, Klammer, at once a mantra and a demand, an expression of Austrian birthright and a sacred ritual. Klammer. No other thought mattered.

To say the Austrian farm boy was at that moment the world’s best downhiller was a massive understatement. In a sport where winning two or three races a year is a rare success, Klammer had at one point in 1975 won eight of nine World Cup downhills, and in 1976 he had won three in a row coming to the Olympics. Bernhard Russi, from Switzerland, was a stylist, capable of being dominant in slalom and giant slalom, and clearly Klammer’s primary competition in the downhill. But Klammer was Mike Tyson or Tiger Woods or Roger Federer at his peak. It would take some unusual stroke of bad luck to seriously compromise his chance of winning. And on the day before the race, that stroke of bad luck arrived.

The order of competition for the Olympic downhill is somewhat based on World Cup rankings. The 15 highest-ranking downhillers on the World Cup circuit see their names tossed into a basket and then drawn out one by one. Everyone else in the field follows in the order of their rank, but logic dictates the winner would emerge from the top 15. And because every run affects the course, softening the snow on the preferred line, the earlier you hit the starter shack the better your chance to ski fast. You want a low number in the draw, and that good fortune fell to Russi, who drew number three. With a whole nation obsessing about him, Klammer drew snake eyes: number 15. And when he awoke to see bright sunlight and unusually warm weather, he saw it was even worse than he had thought. If Russi skied well, the gold medal would likely be out of reach, no matter how many voices thundered Klammer’s name.

The race was an instant legend. Russi indeed skied well, and as the snow along the preferred line melted, his time looked more and more impregnable. A helpless Klammer waited in the warming shack and watched as the competition slipped further and further off Russi’s temporal mark. Finally, as Klammer walked to the starting shack in a gleaming yellow one-piece, listening to his countrymen pleading for a miracle, he made a fateful decision: On a mountain he knew better than any other World Cup skier, the only chance to win would be to ski the wrong line. He would go where he knew he wasn’t supposed to go and hope that if he could somehow hang on for a minute 45 seconds, he might find enough fresh snow to build speed. It might get him killed, but it would be the only way to win. The starting gate opened, and he planted his poles and pushed.

If you’ve seen the ABC Sports coverage, you’re not likely to ever forget it. I had the privilege of watching it all inside the ABC production truck. Announcers Frank Gifford and Bob Beattie are shouting all over each other, desperately trying to portray something that is at once insanely dangerous and spectacularly held together. At one point, Klammer is so far offline he has to swerve to avoid the hay bales lining the edge of the course. At another his left leg is so wildly akimbo that his ski appears to touch his shoulder. And at the first two intermediate timing points he is well behind Russi’s marks, but at the third and last one he is only two-hundredths of a second off.

Then the glide to the finish, with his incomparably powerful thighs and buttock muscles deepening into the world’s best aerodynamic crouch. The whip turn, the cold stare to the clock, and victory. Ecstasy. A roar you can imagine shaking all of Central Europe. There was never another ski run like it, before or since. And few events, if any, have ever shaken the economies of two neighboring nations the way Franz Klammer did in 105 seconds. A victory for Fischer skis, not Kneissl; for Nordica boots, not Salomon; and for the vacation package at Kitzbuhel, not St. Moritz. No athlete up to that moment had ever so effectively stared down economic pressure as Franz Klammer did on Patscherkofel. The fact he did it as a so-called amateur was a mark of how necessary it had become for the Olympics to transfer into the real world, and in the decades that followed, they did.

Downhillers don’t last long at their peaks. Their sport is extremely demanding, and their bodies break down. Klammer had a few more good years, but he was never again as dominant as he was in 1975 and 1976. He was touched by the dark side of the downhill’s flirtation with danger when a younger brother suffered a debilitating spinal cord injury while training with the national team. But more than any other competitive skier, Klammer is immortal, and YouTube will surely keep him that way. With an entire nation on his back, he faced up to an impossible task by improvising an impossible plan, and against all odds made it work. As much as any Olympian ever, Franz Klammer is the stuff that dreams are made of. And sometimes in my own dreams, I can still hear 70,000 people rhythmically chanting his name: Klammer. Klammer. Klammer.