Don't Save Anything

by James Salter

  Robbins shouted up and told them to come down anyway, it was not as bad as it looked, they would find a place to set up another rappel. “Tie a big knot in the end of the rope!” he warned.

  It was on this face, Robbins had told me, that Jim Madsen, an exceptionally strong climber, had rappelled down to check on two other climbers who were making slow progress. It was a sort of tentative rescue. His shoulders laden with extra coils of rope, Madsen had started down from the very top and somehow, no one will ever know exactly, had rappelled off the end of the rope and fallen to his death not far from where we were. The immense length of that fall and the helplessness of the climber, falling, remain in my imagination.

  After a while a blue-clad figure began to make a very cautious descent. At the end of the rope a huge knot, clearly visible through the binoculars, was tied so it would not slip through the rappel brake. In addition, he had a separate belay line in case anything went wrong. The snow had begun again. It was swirling across the granite like the snow in a glass paperweight.

  “An overhang can really spook you when it’s beneath,” Robbins commented. “These fellows were demoralized, ready to come down. Every foot you come makes you feel better,” he added. “It’s a lot better to fall from one hundred feet than seven hundred. The result is the same, but why go through all that anguish?”

  An hour later, the two had made it safely down one rope length and were preparing to do the next. They would make it, Robbins said. We left them under the supervision of the two climbers who were sitting beside us, one of whom had climbed the route.

  “Are your anchors OK?” he shouted up to them. “What are they?”

  “One bolt and two fixed pins [pitons]!” was the reply. He sat back and relaxed.

  There are young climbers, relatively inexperienced, who attempt and often do the toughest routes in Yosemite. There are climbers who flash across the scene like a comet—“three-year men,” Robbins calls them—and disappear. And there are climbers who own only shoes and a swami belt, everything else belonging to whomever they’re climbing with. This picture of a sport that can welcome its poorest adherent is an appealing one. Climbing, unlike most other things, has beneath it a great and inescapable danger, and it is this danger that purifies it and gives it its rank. Robbins has given his life to it, and what I think he objects to are those who face this danger in ignorance or afterward turn away, renounce it as if it had not really counted.

  “He always wanted to do things in a better way, a superior way, purer,” Frost says. “He was always raising the standard. When I climbed with Royal, I always had great experiences that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. He was at the frontier of the sport. It wasn’t just that he was a leader. He stood for something right. For the most incredible length of time, Royal was keeping up competitively with every climber there was. Everyone has his specialties—cracks, chimneys, whatever. But nobody could put up a harder route, nobody could do a harder boulder problem. He kept that up for a long time. If a younger climber comes along who can do something better than I can, I don’t care, but Royal had to do it better.”

  We will all die and be forgotten, but there is in climbing a mythic element that draws one on. Half Dome, El Capitan, the Dru: these are names we have given to things that will be here almost as long as the earth itself.

  Quest

  March–April 1978

  Racing for the Cup

  At seven thirty in the morning, the loudspeakers begin announcing in German. It is the dead of winter. The mountains are barely visible. Lights are just beginning to come on in hotel windows. The first lone figures trudge toward the cable car station. In a little while the racers will be going up. All morning as they free ski, or in the words of a coach, do frisky runs, the crowd is gathering, building up along the sides of the course like a kind of dark debris clinging to the edge of a stream. The racers are cruising, making graceful turns, getting in tune with their skis.

  “I always try and tell myself I’m doing great,” Steve Podborski says of this phase. He is a graceful little Canadian, a coming champion. The crowd follows him around like a star.

  About an hour before the start, in a nearby restaurant or hotel, the racers change into sleek one-piece suits that cling like silk stockings. Beneath them they wear nothing, not even an aluminum cup, just briefs. Races are won and lost in hundredths of a second. At high speeds, sixty miles per hour and up, it is wind resistance that causes most of the drag; anything that diminishes it is important. Having dressed, they enter the fenced-off area, separated from the crowd.

  A World Cup race. On screens all over Europe, the prelude begins. It is always the same: helicopter views of the course that evoke disaster coverage, discussion of the key sections, standing of the racers, clouds, steep snowy mountains, the crowd. Finally there are the participants, like toreros in their suits of lights, distant, unamiable, and at the moment of their task immensely potent. The excitement is mounting. The starting clock is running, something begins to beep. The racer is living on nerve, the starter is counting. Go!

  Down the course gathering speed, the scraping of edges, the blue of the snow, the sudden, terrifying liftoffs and plunging flight. Past trees, blurred faces, mountain huts they fly: harrowing turns, stunning recoveries from certain disaster. The crowds are thickest at the dangerous places. You can hear the racers pass; they are whistling like projectiles. And then there is the last schuss to the finish.

  Skidding to a stop with a spray of snow, they look back immediately to see their time, unhappiness crossing their faces or the joy of triumph, white teeth shining.

  There are other races, but none like this. “The giant slalom isn’t interesting,” Podborski says calmly. “A lot of big turns. The slalom isn’t interesting either. But the downhill anyone can understand.”

  The season begins in December with a men’s downhill in Laax, Switzerland, and then with the traditional opening in Val-d’Isere, France. Through March, moving from country to country, there are races, more than sixty altogether, counting toward the great crystal trophy called the World Cup. There have been years when it was so close that the winner was determined on the final day, but one of the big thrills is in January, when, as they do every year, the racers and their large retinues come to a 700-year-old town in the Tyrol. In addition to the ancient churches around which it is clustered, the expensive hotels, the snug pensions lost in the snow, the dark firs, the restaurants and gorgeous air, the town possesses one other attribute: it is home to the most famous downhill of all, one of the two so-called classics. The town is Kitzbühel. The course is the Hahnenkamm.

  “When a racer comes to Europe,” says Mike Farny, a member of the U.S. team, “all he hears about is the Hahnenkamm, how tough it is, who got wrecked on it. Some of them are so nervous the first time they can’t eat breakfast.”

  “Unquestionably the toughest downhill,” Bob Beattie agrees. He is a former U.S. coach who now does coverage for ABC. “It has dramatic changes of terrain, cross-hill traverses, and fall-away turns that are like turning on a tennis ball. Technically very difficult,” he says coolly. He is never awed. When he was a boy wonder at the 1964 Olympics, his racers, Billy Kidd and Jimmy Heuga, won the first U.S. men’s medals ever, silver and bronze. No American man has yet won an Olympic gold.

  Austria is a small country, much of it mountainous. Kitzbühel, which is one in a necklace of snowy Alpine towns such as St. Anton, Gstaad, and St. Moritz, rose to the list of fashionable places after a visit by the Prince of Wales in 1928. But it is famous, too, for its great skiers—the wonder team of the 1950s: Pravda, Hinterseer, Molterer, and Sailer. Their photographs can still be seen displayed in shops: young men, the sun in their faces, leaning on their ski poles with the insouciance of champions. It was Toni Sailer who went through the roof, sweeping all three golds at Cortina, Italy, in 1956 (a feat that only Jean-Claude Killy has duplicated) and winning two more at the world ch
ampionships two years later. He lost the slalom. In gratitude, Kitzbühel gave him and Molterer plots of land. Sailer built a small hotel on his.

  “There used to be a lot of champions, but now it’s too chichi,” the press chief for the Hahnenkamm, Michael von Horn, says of the town. “The hard element is gone. There are too many other things; they go into business. Nowadays the champions come from backwoods places like Mooswald.”

  There are stunning faces from Munich and Vienna in the Landhäusl every night, or up at the Romerhof; insolent faces without problems or cares. St. Moritz is classier but also more formal and far more expensive. Here there is a hint of scandal, new money, of reputations that aren’t quite right. The town is crowded. The casino is filled. People even come by taxi from Munich, about $120, not much when split several ways; the hotel will send one for you. The various bars and dance halls are either jammed because they are in vogue or mysteriously empty, with orchestras playing to nearly vacant floors.

  The bar of the Goldener Greif is a gathering place. Late in the day everyone comes by, coaches, racers, journalists. Originally a gasthaus where farmers stopped for a drink on the way home from market, the hotel belongs to three brothers named Harisch and is extremely well run. The Harisches have been innkeepers for generations. Their mother cooked English dishes for Edward VIII when he was prince. The duke of Kent stayed here, and the Kennedys. Chaliapin sang in the bar.

  At another of their hotels, the Munichau, a fortress-like outpost several miles from town, the American team is housed. In a small dining room they sit looking at videotape of their practice runs. Courage, technique, finesse, strength, and stamina—these are the qualities Killy mentioned when asked what was demanded by the course. On the tape are mistakes, bad runs, crashes. “Oh, daddyo,” someone murmurs as a racer goes out of control. Another splatters. “ABC’ll put you on TV for that one.” The upper part of the course is extremely steep. The speed gained in the first thirty seconds carries the racer through the slower middle section.

  Andreas Rauch, the U.S. downhill coach, is twenty-nine, quiet, and well-spoken. He is Austrian, with the prestige of having coached for four years on the Austrian team. Now he is trying to build a racing squad almost from scratch. He is very meticulous. He attends to every detail himself except for the video pictures; his girlfriend does that. Rauch knows the litany of disasters—he has been to Kitzbühel before. “Erwin Strickler, he was Italian, finished his career here in the Hausberg compression,” he recalls. “Antonioli crashed in the same spot—also out for his career. Hans Enn crashed in the final compression, where you have the fastest speed. Last year Farny was out for three races after falling here. In 1979, eight of the first fifteen racers fell.”

  The falls are brutal. Instantaneously, what amounts to a racer’s existence explodes. It takes time to regain confidence and get over that, sometimes two or three races. And this year the course is incredibly fast. It’s difficult to compare years; in the 1930s, the record was around three minutes. The length of the course, however, has changed slightly over the years; sections have been widened, bumps removed, there are fewer or more gates. The weather is always different, the snow, the light. More important, equipment has changed. There is no absolute standard, but by the 1950s the time was down to two and a half minutes, and in the 1960s, less. At the start of the season, the record belongs to Franz Klammer, who streaked down in 2:03.22 in 1975.

  Now something else is happening. In training runs they are breaking two minutes. Fantastic, everyone is saying.

  “The top was fast,” Beattie explains. “Usually it has ripples, but today it was absolutely smooth.” It is so fast that if you touch the snow to keep from falling, as one U.S. team member did, you will burn a hole in your glove.

  It’s hard to figure the race from the training runs, although the early finishing order is always watched carefully, and certain racers are singled out. “Guys that are in front in training are almost always in front in the race,” in Rauch’s opinion. “They have to go full speed in training because there are so few runs—the maximum you can get before the race is four, and usually you get only three or less.” Most of the time they go all-out and then slow down at the end of the course so as not to give themselves away. The best ones do this, Rauch says. To circumvent it, rival coaches end their timing a hundred meters from the finish.

  The evening before the race, starting positions are decided. The racers are ranked according to their past performance in seeds of fifteen, but the order within the seed is determined by a draw. Position is important. In the downhill it’s usually better to go in the second half of the first seed, when the snow has iced a bit and is faster. But weather can change this. It might be snowing, making the course slower.

  At night the lights are on everywhere. The restaurants are crowded. There are five hundred newspaper, radio, and TV people in town, Corriere della Sera, Stern, Asahi Shimbun, the London Times. There are sixty-six reporters from Austria alone. The talk is entirely of racing, past champions, the poetry of names. Innsbruck, six years ago, was where the Canadians began coming on. Klammer won there.

  “And in 1980?”

  “Lake Placid. The winner was Leonhard Stock.”

  “Of course. That’s right. Who was second?”

  Silence.

  “You know, that’s the thing,” someone says. “You never remember who came in second.”

  On Friday there is a race to make up for one canceled at Morzine earlier in the month. First place goes to Austrian Harti Weirather, second to Podborski, third to another Canadian, Ken Read. Klammer, the veteran from Mooswald, is eleventh. In a silver suit marked USA, Phil Mahre finishes thirty-seventh. The downhill is not his scene. They are expecting 30,000 people tomorrow, especially with an Austrian win today, which usually, they say, brings 10,000 more.

  Saturday morning is cold and clear. By nine o’clock, crowds are flowing toward the mountain. A band is playing. Helicopters clatter overhead. People have come for the day by car and train. Kitzbühel lies in a loop made by the railroad, and there are tunnels under the track. A friend of mine ended his skiing because of this. Elated after a magnificent day, he decided to ski through a tunnel and right into town. At the last moment, he says, he discovered he had forgotten one thing—it doesn’t snow in tunnels.

  The prerace show is ending. Ski instructors are coming down in close formation, some carrying flags. Hang gliders with advertising on their wings float above the crowd. A group of Americans stand on a snow-covered rooftop waving an American flag.

  The forerunners are arriving. It is impossible to see all of the race—it covers the entire side of a mountain. Nevertheless, it has begun. From the starting gate it is a steep, narrow descent to a sharp left turn. Then a plunge into an even steeper chute called the Mausfalle—the Mousetrap—down which racers go most of the way in the air. In a race, they are not trying to survive this first icy pitch. Instead they are skating, poling, accelerating down it. Every scrap of speed is important. They are on the best of their eight or ten pairs of skis, the ones with the right base, the right grind, the right wax. At the bottom is the first compression—the sudden flattening out that drives the body down on the legs with great force—and the three turns into the Steilhang.

  Weirather has the number-two position; because of that, perhaps, he’s not particularly fast. The Russian who comes next crashes on the Steilhang. Now Klammer. The crowd is expecting something. A roar goes up! Best intermediate time! They are waiting for him and beginning to shout, “Hopp! Hopp! Hopp!” Suddenly, a black speck, he appears. Down he drops, crossing the finish amid cheers. 1:57.78. A roar. He’s in first! He stays there, racer after racer. Podborski is number fourteen. He never goes wide open on the training runs, he says. “In the past I did. I would have the best time, and in the race I fell because I was trying to do a little more. So I finally figured that out. Now I leave myself that little bit of room I can move into for the race.�
�� The fact is, you must ski beyond your ability. You have to have something extraordinary motivating you. Podborski demolishes the upper section. He is doing all right in the middle. His skis are right, so is the wax.

  It is a matter of hundredths. In his canary-yellow suit and black helmet, fairly flying, he hits the last pitch, the Hausberg, bottoms, turns. Hundredths are streaming off like ions. The final stretch, into the finish pen, spraying snow: 1:57.24. He has won for the second straight year. Ken Read is third; Phil Mahre finishes fourteenth, about 1.7 seconds behind Podborski. The first sixteen places are separated by only two seconds.

  That night there’s a party for the racers and their guests at the Londoner, a popular bar. The phone at the hotel rings all the time for the Canadian team, but the calls are switched to the coach. “Otherwise we’d be doing nothing but answering the phone,” Podborski says. They even call in Toronto. He has a recording machine there. They call him from West Germany and say, “Oh, Steve, I love you,” and hang up.

  “I’m not here to chase girls,” he says. “I’m here to ski.”

  Nevertheless, on the snowy street two beautiful girls with black-rimmed eyes roll down the window of their car and ask impatiently, “Which way is the Jagerwirt?” That’s the hotel the Canadians are staying at. “Yes,” they cry, “but where is it, which street?”

  Sunday is the slalom. It is a different kind of excitement, trickier, like watching a gymnastics match. One after another they shoot down, banging the poles out of the way with their shoulders, knees pumping as the crowd chants and rings cowbells.