Mostly I wrote about my first winter in Kitzbühel, but this is from my second. Having been an undistinguished ski-rentals employee that first year, I was now an undistinguished ski instructor, earning less money and living in worse digs. Ski Racing took the piece in 2011; I’m re-publishing it tonight on the occasion of the biggest weekend in the Kitzbühel calendar, the annual Hahnenkamm races whose start was, is, just steps away from the piece’s opening scene.
Even a backpacker from the United States can teach skiing in Austria. In 1991 I was training with the members of Ernst Hinterseer’s ski school “Total” in Kitzbühel, hoping to impress and take my place among them. It was the first Saturday in December, and new snow had fallen for two days, with the promise of still more. I was unsure as to how I would perform in a class which but for me, and one German, was exclusively Austrian, with nearly all from Kitzbühel. My concerns were shrugged off by my group leader, the leathery-faced Franz Prömer, or Prömer Franz as he was called, Austrians like Hungarians preferring to reverse names. “Come out with us,” he said, “and we’ll see how you do.”
We were supposed to leave at nine, but didn’t get to the cable car until ten; at the top, when I thought we would put on our skis and begin immediately a breathless warm-up run, the group trudged through the snow to a small café below the racecourse starting shack, stacked skis and went inside. I found our group sitting at tables with gear spread everywhere, and the serving-girl bearing the first trays of hot chocolate, beer and schnapps – or obstler, as it is here. A TV was on, beaming a still picture of a sunny mountainside clearly far away, and I squeezed into a space underneath.
“Aren’t we going to ski?” I asked my seatmate.
“Ja, maybe later,” he said. “First we watch the race.”
This was the first downhill of the year, at Val d’Isère in France. “Who do you think will win?” I asked my neighbor.
“An Austrian,” he said. “Or Heinzer of Switzerland.” “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think perhaps an American.”
“If an American wins, I will have to kill you, and then myself.”
The first racers had gone, as we craned for a view of these stick figures flashing by on the tiny screen. In a bottom corner the stopwatch ran, but my seasoned colleagues could easily make out who was skiing well, and who was not: who was sliding in his turns, or losing time on the flats. The Austrian Leonhard Stock, champion at Lake Placid, was on the course, and doing well; and I heard the murmurs at each turn taken strongly, now rising to the occasional cry, then shouts and finally screaming as he blazed across the finish, the numeral “1” flashing on the screen. Fists smashed the table, glasses were raised, and men slapped each other on the shoulders in celebration.
Next was the American A.J. Kitt. “Watch Kitt,” I said. Kitt was skiing fast, barely off the leader’s time. By the second split, Kitt was ahead, and now the room was silent. Watching him bear down the final third of the course, it seemed inevitable he should win, and he did, crossing the line a fraction of a second faster than Stock. Silently the group finished drinks, stamped out cigarettes, and stumbled out into the blizzard. Rammed as I was into a corner of the room, I was the last outside. I found my group already in skis, pushing off with their poles, and Prömer Franz glaring at me from behind pink goggles. “Schnell!” he barked. “Let’s go!” That afternoon he worked me very hard.
But I stayed with the ski school through the winter. Prömer Franz proved my greatest champion, insisting they keep me even when the director, Ernst Hinterseer Jr., son of the 1960 Olympic slalom champion, had his doubts. I lived with instructors in an old building on Kirchgasse, where during the Christmas high season up to fourteen of us crowded in, driving our elderly landlady, Ernst’s grandmother, to nervous exhaustion. For some reason I was the only one home whenever she came to the door. “Such noise!” she would cry. Looking at the red glühwein stains on the carpet, the discarded bottles everywhere and unwashed pots and kettles stacked high, she fell into a chair in dismay. For a short time that winter she was in the hospital, and her daughter came in to scream at us one day. I woke up to find her in my bedroom, with her husband, the Olympic Champion, bent down over the broken bedstead in which Trummer Peter slept: wordlessly he began to fix it. The old lady came back a few days later, and somehow we all managed to stay.
When the racers came to Kitzbühel for the big downhill in January I waited after training for A.J. Kitt. I walked with him as he carried his skis, and told him my story of December.
“I’d like to do it to them again,” he said. “Here, on their mountain.”
He did, in a way, finishing second to Heinzer but ahead of Austria’s Patrick Ortlieb. By now I too had become a fool for racing, or race-training, and was coming out at eight to run gates on the Ganslern. “It’s the best thing for your skiing,” I was assured, and indeed it proved so. While Ernst our boss never came, his father, Ernst Sr., the Olympic Champion, arrived before everyone. Drill in hand, a clutch of poles in his other arm, he set a difficult, sometimes dangerous course, looking for ice always where it was narrowest, and with trees around. We rode up the T-bar, ran the gates, and managed to get in maybe six runs before skiing off to work at nine.
Of the dozen I was the only novice running gates, many of my colleagues having raced in provincial or junior championships. I watched them all in amazement, and asked, “Why isn’t Klaus on the national team? Or Axel?” I was told that in every Austrian village there are a dozen racers who by a quarter-second weren’t good enough to continue. Meanwhile I worked to establish a rhythm, learning timing and concentration, and looked always for advice. The one person I never asked was the Olympic Champion, Ernst Hinterseer Sr., who once he had finished setting up the course almost as quickly began taking it down. But once he came over to me, recognizing me perhaps from that debacle in the apartment.
“What is your name? Eric, ja? Well, Eric, listen to me.”
Rubbing his chin, he looked me up and down, and I waited for the Olympic champion to give me his advice.
“Ski closer to the gates,” he said.
I waited for more, but that was it.
“That’s all,” he said. “Just ski closer to the gates. You’ll do much better.”
(Published in Ski Racing, January 2011)
Photo credit: here