Ligety says, “You have a sense, based on years and years of racing and training, whether this is good skiing or bad skiing. But there are also course or weather conditions that are so horrible or exceptionally difficult that even good skiing feels like bad skiing for the best skiers in the world.”
“And the other thing that’s weird,” says Ligety, “in other sports you have rivals. But in skiing, all you can do is ski your race. You have no way of inflicting your will on their performance or their skiing.”
Even with the most refined sensory connection possible to their sport, skiers can misjudge their performances. Four years ago in PyeongChang, Vonn’s fourth and final Olympics, she felt that her run in the downhill was good enough to overtake leader Sofia Goggia of Italy. Instead, she finished .47 seconds behind Goggia. “I thought I was fast enough to win the race,” says Vonn. “It was really disappointing.” (Ragnhild Mowinckel of Norway came down later and split Goggia and Vonn, taking the silver medal and dropping Vonn to the bronze).
Likewise, Ligety recalls racing the slalom portion of the combined event at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, the event in which he had won his first gold medal, eight years earlier. His slalom time was just seventh-best, leaving him far out of the medals. “I didn’t think I had a spectacular run,” says Ligety, “But I was shocked at how bad it was.”
In the course of reporting this story, I asked skiers if they would like an interval clock on the hill, if they could adapt their racing, knowing they were ahead or behind. This is strictly a thought exercise, because such a system would be unfair to the first skier down the course, who would have no guidelines. It might also be impractical. “At those speeds, it would have to be something really simple,” says Vonn. “Somebody raising a red flag or a green flag, or a big red or green light somewhere very visible.”
Johnson says, “The coolest thing about ski racing is you are in this moment where your body and your muscles are firing 100% and you’re doing incredibly athletic things and your brain is also working 100%. You just have to keep executing. That all there is.”
Sullivan recalls a story from his Lake Tahoe friend and four-time Olympian Daron Rahlves, one of only two Americans to win the Hahnenkamm downhill in Kitzbuhel, Austria. “Daron told me when he won in Kitzbuhel, there was a place about halfway down, where there are spectators and a big speaker and the announcer is really loud and Daron knew he was having a good run because the announcer was so excited and that motivated him to keep rolling.” Sullivan laughed. “But, you know, that’s pretty rare.”
Instead, red or green await at the bottom. The finish line pause lives on. A kernel of mystery endures.
