From crashing out to skiing downhill gold

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/13/sports/OLYSKI.php

From crashing out to skiing downhill gold
Christopher Clarey International Herald Tribune
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2006
SESTRIERE, Italy On Jan. 7 last year, the French downhiller Antoine Deneriaz was lying on a stretcher on the side of the course in Chamonix. The anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee had just exploded after he had misjudged the infamous Goulet jump and landed off-balance.

His season was over, but while some skiers might have been in no mood to make jokes or predictions, Deneriaz remembers turning to the French coach, Gilles Brenier, as he was about to be loaded into a helicopter.

"I told Gilles that I wasn't going to be world champion, but I was going to be Olympic champion," Deneriaz said. "It was a way of de-dramatizing the situation a bit, a way to keep my morale up."

On Sunday, it also turned out to be the truth, as the strapping, goateed, 29-year-old Deneriaz ripped down the icy Kandahar course in a time of 1 minute 48.8 seconds to win the gold medal and continue the Olympic tradition of downhill surprises.

His emotional victory, which left several French coaches and ski technicians in tears in the finish area, came at the expense of Michael Walchhofer, the imposing Austrian who leads the World Cup standings and looked like the likely winner here until Deneriaz put together his thoroughly convincing run from the No.30 start position.

The large final margin of victory of 0.72 seconds brooked no argument. Walchhofer took the silver medal. Another veteran, Bruno Kernen of Switzerland, took the bronze medal, which was surprising, but not as surprising as the fact that Americans Bode Miller and Daron Rahlves finished in fifth and 10th place, respectively.

"Obviously it would have taken a hurricane wind to get to first," said Miller, the reigning world champion in the downhill.

Rahlves, who had won three downhill World Cup races this season, said, "Antoine crushed us today. That's impressive. I want to see a standout performance. I want to be the one doing it. But it was a good race for him.

"That's the way it happens, man. It's not always the same guys on top."

Miller, the willfully iconoclastic American, has rarely been on top of late. Though he won the most prestigious trophy in alpine skiing last season by taking the overall World Cup title, he has been unable to replicate that form - he has struggled with his consistency and has been forced to spend some of his energy dealing with the fallout from his own self-contradictory statements.

But Miller has long made a habit of thriving when he senses that the wider world is conspiring against him, and when he pushed out of the starting gate in the 18th position, there was a palpable buzz at the base of the mountain from the crowd, which had seemed quite subdued until then.

At the first interval, shortly after the first big jump that caused plenty of trouble Sunday, Miller was ahead of Walchhofer's pace, but when the next split time flashed on the screen, he was already a tenth of a second behind. And though there would be no major gaffes on his part, he gradually gave away time the rest of the way.

Using new skis from his supplier Atomic, he had looked to be in tremendous form in the final training run, easing up at the finish and then feeling confident enough to skip the final course inspection Sunday morning. But the reigning world champion in downhill could still not find enough speed to win his first Olympic downhill medal.

Instead, the gold medal went to Deneriaz, who was on Atomic skis that he first used in 2003.

"I don't think he did anything that much better," Miller said. "The variables that go into ski racing are so many it's not even worth getting into. His skis were working great today.

"There's clouds, there's wind, there's a million different things going on," Miller added.

"He came out of the gate with his pedal to the floor and skied that way the whole way. He's one of the guys who has the right skills for this course, and if he doesn't make mistakes that cost time, he's a threat to win on this hill every time. He didn't make those little mistakes I did."

Hermann Maier, the Austrian star, failed to add the one major medal missing from his trophy case at home in Flachau.

At the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Maier was the world's dominant skier, but he carried too much speed into a big left-hand turn at the top of the downhill course and shot into the air and eventually crashed through two rows of safety nets.

The year before the Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002, Maier was involved in a serious motorcycle accident that crushed his left leg and forced him to miss the Olympics.

This time, he was still not at his healthiest because of the flu and he finished sixth, more than a second behind Deneriaz. But Maier, of all skiers, must certainly have appreciated the beauty of another fine comeback tale.

Deneriaz, with the gold medal around his neck, said: "As soon as I had the operation, and I was in the clinic, I told myself, 'I'm going to fight and not drop my guard, because the Olympics come only once every four years.'

"I had some tough days. The first month of rehabilitation was particularly difficult. There were some days when my knee was really hurting, and when I took up skiing again, there were some days when it still hurt.

"But I told myself that the Games were coming, and I couldn't stop giving it all I had."

After undergoing surgery in January 2005, he returned to the circuit for the first speed events in November, but he still finished no better than seventh in any downhill race until arriving in Sestriere.

But pre-Olympic success is no prerequisite for Olympic downhill success. In 1994, the winner was American Tommy Moe, who had never won a downhill on the World Cup circuit. In 1998, the winner was Frenchman Jean-Luc Crétier, who had never won any kind of race on the World Cup.

Yet neither one of those unlikely champions had been lying on a stretcher just 13 months earlier. "I forced myself to believe," Deneriaz said, "and I kept believing."