It’s best to start with the photograph, published on the cover of the Feb. 23, 1998 issue of Sports Illustrated. It is by definition action sports photography, but that does not do justice to the picture, or the moment. A ski racer is frozen against a blue sky, aligned as if heaved into the air from the side of a swimming pool. His gloved hands are pointed at twelve and six on the face of a clock, clutching poles that were vital to his task only seconds earlier but which are now useless. His skis are above his head, also not only useless, but dangerous. He is wearing a speed suit in the red, white and black colors of Austria, his powerful thighs stretching the fabric. Again, useless. A helmet covers his head. Not useless.
The man in the picture is Hermann Maier, one of the best ski racers in the sport’s history. Twenty years ago, as the overwhelming favorite in the Olympic downhill, a 25-year-old former bricklayer who had seized the sport and shoved it forward on the evolutionary timeline with his strength, intensity and go-for-broke, borderline reckless tactics, Maier flew off a mountainside overlooking the Japanese alpine village of Hakuba, 30 miles from the Olympic city of Nagano. There have been many worse crashes in the long and harrowing history of downhill racing; men and women have been killed. But there has never been a more memorable wipeout on a bigger stage by a better racer, an operatic flight across a crystalline sky that ended only after a hard landing and then a tumble through three primitive and ineffective safety nets.
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