This is a mathematical problem that anyone who has completed an eighth-grade math class should be able to easily solve: a ski racer in a downhill race on today’s Olympic team will average 70 miles an hour from top to bottom.
Question: How far will he travel in 1/1,600,000ths of a second?
This is how precise the electronic timing machines of Tag Heuer can be for today’s ski racing.
This timing system is, of course, far different than what was available during the one year I was a ski racer with Ward Baker. We traveled from ski resort to ski resort and lived in the parking lots at the base of the many ski mountains.
In those days, various methods of timing were evolving or being discarded. The best way was on a hill that had wires strung from bottom to top that were buried during the summer so there could be voice communication from the bottom to the top. Someone at the bottom would call “Five, four, three, two, one, go!” The starter at the top would release his hand from the shoulder of the racer, and the racer could then start down the racecourse. At the same time, the people at the bottom with stopwatches would push the button on the word “go.” It was simple, but it somehow worked.
If there was no telephone hook-up available at the top, a flag on a long pole was used instead. There was always some question among the timers as to whether they started their watches when the flag started moving, when it was part way down, when the pole hit the ground, when the flag began to fold up on the ground, or when the flag finished folding up. As a result, most races had three timers, and the two times that were the closest together were averaged, and that was the winning or losing time for the races.
For one race, the sponsors had built a snow wall, and when the flag disappeared behind it, that was when the timers at the bottom started their watches. Supposedly.
Within a few years, more accurate timing was a requirement for any race. Starting gates had been invented, and as we lunged out of the gate, a wand would be moved by our legs, and the timing would begin.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Jean-Claude Killy perfected lunging out of the gate that led to him winning 17 World Cup races in a single season, including three Olympic gold medals. It was not until a year or so later that someone figured out that Killy was able to have his upper body lunging almost out in front of his ski tips before his boots tripped the starting wand signaling the very precise timing clocks at the time. Karl Schranz was about a ski length behind Killy at the finish of a lot of the races and never discovered Killy’s secret until after the Olympics in 1968.
In the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, Pepi Stiegler beat Billy Kidd from America by four one-hundredths of a second. Pepi Stiegler, in a speech at The Yellowstone Club in Montana, said one night, “That four one-hundredths of a second total time difference in two runs of the slalom was the difference between my getting a job as the ski school director in Nubs Knob, Michigan, or Jackson Hole, Wyoming.”
Yet that amount of time in almost four minutes of slalom racing was less than six inches in actual distance. With the incredible amount of variables in a ski race such as skis, wax, boots, fifteen or more years of ski racing training, and competition, how well the racers slept the night before the race, what they had for breakfast, how many details were handled by a ski technician, etc., all went into the victory. To miss that job as a ski school or winter sports director by four one-hundredths of a second is what drives all young skiers to aim for the top. And why not? They have not experienced enough of the agony of defeat to realistically assess their chances of being the best in the world.