![]() You don’t get far in this line of work unless you have some control over your nerves, and so Maple calmed himself. ![]() ![]() Word reached the start, via radio, that the guy had crashed. He wasn’t the first previously undaunted young buck to doubt himself when confronted by the Streif’s proportions and demands-no other course has inspired such fear and respect among the craft’s practitioners, or likely sent as many of them into (or over) the protective fencing and then to the hospital-but none of those predecessors had been him, here, now.Ī couple of hours later, he was in the starting hut for his first training run, peering down past the first two turns toward the precipice called the Mausefalle, or mousetrap, a two-hundred-foot jump over which the previous racer had just vanished. The thought of hurling himself down the narrow, steep, snaking flume of ice and shadow made him queasy. Ski Team, Maple had side-slipped, and then skied, most of the World Cup’s other majestic, gnarly downhills, but this track-which descends an unremarkable and not particularly tall forested alp called the Hahnenkamm, in Kitzbühel, Austria-seemed to represent a whole new level of inhospitable. Before each one, they inspect the course, which entails side-slipping down while visualizing the line that will deliver them to the finish in the least amount of time. Typically, downhill racers take a couple of training runs in the days leading up to the event. The first time Wiley Maple encountered the Streif, the world’s most fearsome downhill, he was twenty-one years old.
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