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Outside magazine, November 1998

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Thinking About Machine-Man (cont.)

MAIER TRAINS WITH THE CHAMPION'S FEAR, the constant awareness that everyone, including the other Austrian skiers, will be after him this year, that it's all his to lose. Six days a week, he speeds up the narrow serpentine roads from Flachau in his cherry-red BMW Z3 to Obertauern. Working like an automaton, he is intent on proving that he isn't just a single-season phenomenon.

Fame, to Maier, is an annoyance. Shortly after the Olympics, Austrian President Thomas Klestil presented Maier with the Gold Cross, the country's highest honor. Upon Maier's return from the World Cup circuit, the country held a welcoming ceremony in Flachau that was broadcast live to more than a million Austrians. At sunset, the heavens fluoresced with beams of laser light, and Maier wriggled down the slopes on his skis past a crowd of 10,000 villagers, a hero dropping out of the alpenglow like some Wagnerian god.

Maier hated all of it. If it were left up to him, there'd be no media and no fans, no endorsement obligations, no extraneous demands of any kind, only an empty room in which to train and an empty slope on which to prove he's the best skier in the world.

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He resents the necessity of being surrounded by so many retainers and attendants — his "baby-sitters," he calls them. "Believe me," he confides to me when we have a moment to ourselves out in the Olympiastützpunkt lobby, "being famous hasn't made my life any easier. Every minute I'm dealing with the baby-sitters is one more minute I'm not training."

Sixteen seconds into the downhill, Maier hits the "mystery mogul" and is pitched a few feet into the air. He lands on his skis, but he's slightly out of kilter now and moving far too fast to make the steep left turn. He attempts a final, desperate correction, but it's too late. Maier sails over a little lip and plunges into a pockmark in the snow, his left ski snagging in the crust. And then, as if he has struck some invisible trip wire on a trebuchet buried in the mountain, Maier is catapulted into the blue skies of Japan.

Ski racing is a sport that knows few genuine surprises or upstarts, and this is especially true in Austria, where the best skiers are singled out at the age of 10 or 12 and given all the cosseting and technical support that the planet's most advanced skiing nation can lavish upon them.

Only two years ago, Hermann Maier was a relative nobody, an unpedigreed skier embarking on his first full season on the World Cup tour. He was an outcast throughout his teens and early 20s, a dark horse working in obscurity while his peers got the thoroughbred treatment. "He didn't do it the Austrian way, that's for sure," says Fritz Vallant, a coach for the Austrian national team. "He is the only one I know of who did it all on his own."

Flachau, a 750-year-old town of steep-roofed wood-and-stucco chalets and hexed barns and onion-domed churches, lacks the glamour of vaunted Tirolean resorts like St. Anton or Kitzbühel. Locals ski, or teach skiing, whenever they're not cleaning out stables or milking the Pinzgauer cows. The only industry of note is the headquarters of the Atomic ski company.

Hermann Maier Sr. and his wife, Gertraud, still operate the ski school they've run for 35 years, the same one where Hermann Jr. learned to schuss at the age of three. By the age of six he was already winning races. "He never liked to lose," says Frau Maier. "If he did, you had to leave him alone. You couldn't cheer him up."

But there was always one serious problem: He was way too small. At 16 he still weighed only 110 pounds. When he was 17, he shot up nine inches in a single year, but the spurt left him gawky, and the national coaches remained unimpressed.

Maier took a job as a bricklayer in Flachau and, after undergoing the rigorous certification process required before one can teach skiing in Austria, became an instructor at his parents' school during the winter. He'd rise at dawn, before the tourists took over the steeps, and bound up the mountain for a few quick runs on a giant slalom course he'd set himself. When he was 18, Maier did his compulsory military service, a six-month stint during which he lifted a lot of weights and endlessly ran through the Alps with a grenade launcher strapped to his back. Along the way, he'd been steadily bulking up, hitting 180 pounds by the age of 20. He never gave up his determination to compete at the top level, and in October 1995, vowing to make his mark as a professional ski racer, he laid his last brick.

In January 1996, a World Cup giant slalom race was held in Flachau. All the elite athletes from the international ski world had landed on Maier's doorstep, and Hermann was asked to be a "forerunner," which simply meant he would ski the giant slalom course before the race in order to help the officials work out the bugs. His first run out of the gate, Maier clocked a time of 2:20:19, which proved to be just one second behind Alberto Tomba, who was then the best skier on the World Cup circuit.

In a matter of weeks he won the EuropaCup title, and at last gained a spot on the Austrian team. A year later, in his first World Cup downhill race, at Chamonix, he crashed and broke his left arm. He was still wearing a cast the following month when he won his first World Cup victory, in the Super G at Garmisch, Germany, and at the advanced age of 24 he was named skiing's Rookie of the Year.

"He's old," says Vallant, "but his head is fresh."

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