BEAVER CREEK — Tom Petty’s “American Girl” blared from the loudspeakers in the finish area while Pam Fletcher celebrated an improbable downhill victory in Vail, posing with former president Gerald Ford.
Only a week before in Aspen, I had covered my first World Cup race, dominated by a bunch of Swiss and Austrians I barely knew. But watching the celebration for Fletcher that day in March 1986, I began to think ski racing could be a pretty cool gig.
Thanks to a gift from the weather gods — the sun came out and glazed the track just before she left the starting gate wearing the No. 30 bib — Fletcher led five teammates into the top 14.
I probably didn’t appreciate then just how unusual that performance was for the U.S. Ski Team. It would be eight years before I saw another American win a ski race, that coming when Tommy Moe and Diann Roffe-Steinrotter won gold medals at the Lillehammer Olympics.
This week the Vail Valley is celebrating its 25th year as a regular stop on the World Cup, prompting more than a little reflection for me and those in the valley who love ski racing. They harken back to 1983, when Phil Mahre and Tamara McKinney won giant slalom races at Vail and claimed World Cup overall titles, the only U.S. sweep of skiing’s most coveted honor.
They recall the following season when Phil and Steve Mahre ended their brilliant careers on Vail Mountain. Vail Valley Foundation press officer John Dakin remembers Ingemar Stenmark’s reaction as his captivating rivalry with Phil Mahre concluded.
“It will never be the same,” the soft-spoken Swede said.
I was there for the 1989 world championships, which raised Vail’s international stature immeasurably. I saw Hilary Lindh’s downhill win in 1994 and Picabo Street’s crash on Pepi’s Face two years later, a turning point which set up Street’s remarkable comeback from knee surgery culminating with a super-G win at the 1998 Olympics.
The first race of the 1999 world championships gave us one of the best in history: In the men’s super-G at Beaver Creek’s Birds of Prey, Hermann Maier and Lasse Kjus tied for the gold medal, with bronze medalist Hans Knaus .01 of a second behind. Vail resident Chad Fleischer was only .28 behind — and finished sixth.
That race was the stuff of legend: two of the greatest stars in the history of the sport, competing in a major event on a course considered one of the best in the world, with a local guy doing himself proud.
In those days we used to joke that Maier ought to buy a home in Beaver Creek because he owned that mountain, winning six times from 1997-2003. But this Friday, the U.S. Ski Team will be attempting to win the Birds of Prey downhill for the fifth consecutive year, which would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago.
All of us who love ski racing owe the Vail Valley Foundation and Vail Resorts a huge debt for their ongoing commitment to World Cup and world championships racing, especially at a time when so many voices in the industry are conspiring to tell us new events like the Winter X Games and The Ski Tour are more compelling.
Sorry, but if I never see another half-pipe trick or gravity-defying snowmobile, that will be just fine with me. Give me supreme athletes like Maier or Bode Miller, carving 75-mph turns on impossibly slick World Cup ice and flying 50 meters off frightening jumps.
The VVF is bidding on the 2013 world championships with plans to add a new women’s downhill at Beaver Creek. Most of it would be built just to the left of the existing Birds of Prey track, connecting with the men’s course just above the finish jump.
The Birds of Prey is considered one of the premier downhills in the world.
“We really like the idea of trying to create something like that on the women’s side,” said Ceil Folz, Vail Valley Foundation president. “They have some great courses, but they have some struggles, also. The women are tough and we’ve got a great women’s U.S. Ski Team. We’d love to be able to give them a really challenging course as well.”
Here’s hoping they get their wish. “American Girl” would sound just as good in 2013 as it did in 1986.
