Impressive statistics for greatest Cup skier

Press, 1 June 1989, Page 37

Impressive statistics for greatest Cup skier

When Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark, the greatest skier in World Cup history, retired at the end of the northern season the remarkable statistics of his career were naturally trotted out. A record 86 World Cup victories (including all 10 giant slaloms one season), three over-all World Cup titles, 15 speciality World Cups in slalom and G.S., and five gold medals in Olympic and world championship competition.

Not so well known in Europe is that Stenmark came “down under” in the southern winter of 1977 for off-season training with the Swedish team and won the first F.I.S. race, a slalom, held in New Zealand.

In between the big snowfalls which restricted the inaugural international ski-ing series at Mount Hutt to a single event, Stenmark could fit in only a couple of hours training. However, his economy of movement and ability to take the most direct line took him to a comfortable victory in a slalom field that included three Swedes, a top Italian racer, a Japanese and numerous Australians.

Then aged 21, and the World Cup holder, Stenmark did not give interviews (or at least lengthy ones) as such and he made it clear he was not a fan of the media. But he

was polite and co-opera-tive enough and showed he was a man of wellchosen words. Even so the “Silent Swede” as he was known, was popular with journalists who knew him on the World Cup circuit in Europe and North America. Altogether he had 16 seasons in the “White Circus” and in recent years his attitude to competition became more relaxed.

The ski-ing international at Mount Hutt was covered by two Swedish journalists and the team’s visit received several pages of words and pictures in the slightly salacious weekly magazine, “Se” (Look), for which they worked. They said at the time that Stenmark was the most popular sportsman in Sweden (more so than Bjorn Borg) and thousands of Swedes had taken up ski-ing because of him. Some took a while to forgive him, though, when a few years later he followed the tennis player’s example and moved to Monte Carlo for tax avoidance.

The legendary Stenmark always skied on Elans and solely because

of his brand choice the business of a small factory in Yugoslavia boomed. A man of no vices, Stenmark was a physical fitness enthusiast as a skiing reporter confirmed when going to the Swedish team’s camp at Pudding Hill, near Methven, for an interview with the coach. There was a first sight of Stenmark hanging from the beam on the porch doing chin-ups and a few minutes later, stripped to his underclothes, doing pushups and various deepbreathing exercises in the hallway.

After his slalom win at Mount Hutt, Stenmark said that he had found New Zealand “interesting and exciting” and his remark, it seemed, was genuine despite the poor weather the team had encountered. Part of that excitement was a hazardous trip down an icy Mount Hutt access road on a day the ski-field was closed to the public. After 1978 Stenmark did not again win the over-all World Cup (though he was runner-up for the next five years), mainly because he shunned the downhill dis-

cipline. And his edge in slalom disappeared with the introduction of rapid gates (springloaded poles) and the “smash and bash” technique they required. Tragically, he was excluded from the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics because of professionalism — he had taken out the so-called “B licence” after his double gold medal triumph in slalom and giant slalom at Lake Placid in 1980. But the F.I.S. (Federation Internationale de Ski) allowed him back into the fold for the Calgary Winter Games last year and he finished a worthy fifth in the slalom only a few tenths of a second out of the medals. And with retirement already announced, Stenmark won his last race in North America, the World Cup giant slalom at Aspen, Colorado, in February. It was his eighty-sixth World Cup win (comprising 40 slaloms and 46 giant slaloms) and came only a few weeks before his thirty-third birthday.