It’s the spring of 1976, mogul qualifications for the Chicken of the Sea Freestyle Classic at Keystone, Colo. But many of us have experienced wipeouts that are every bit as extraordinary.
Just another day at the office.įew of us can even imagine skiing as fast-or as courageously-as Hermann Maier. Then Maier got up-and won a gold medal on almost the same course a couple of days later. When things started to unravel, several dozen yards off course, veteran race officials on the sidelines thought they were about to host an emergency helicopter evac. He was in flight for so long, arctic terns envied his endurance. For sheer volume of viewership, it would be hard to top Austrian superstud Hermann Maier’s sideways somersault in the Olympic downhill at Nagano, Japan, in 1998. As different as fingerprints in their details, really great crashes all share several powerful attributes: terror and helplessness on the part of the victims, awe and amazement among witnesses, and enduring intrigue for the rest of us, who are reduced to hearing about them third-hand over beers in the lodge. It’s this inherent, brush-with-death aspect that puts great wipeouts into the permanently-etched-in-memory file. Or you might merely slump to one side, like a stack of books falling over, an insignificant loss of balance that doesn’t deserve to be at the same party with a true, epic wipeout-the kind where you wake up much later with bright lights in your eyes and IV tubes taped to your arm. You might slide a thousand feet over hill and dale and then bounce up, a bit woozy but more or less ready to have another go. In that silent, elongated moment before impact, you can’t predict how it’ll turn out. That’s the fragile beauty of the wipeout. There’s plenty of time to realize that you’re at the epicenter of an uncontrolled event, the outcome of which is very much in doubt. Coyote, you’ll notice, always hovers motionless for a beat before disappearing into a dot on the canyon floor.) What hangs for a moment, hovering in midair, will very shortly and quite inexorably plummet back to earth. It’s only for the merest fraction of a heartbeat, some minor multiple of a nanosecond, but there comes a moment in every monster wipeout when it seems as if time and natural law have been suspended.
Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members!
0 kommentar(er)
