SKI RACING HITS BUMP : World Cup Moguls Differ on Direction the Sport Should Take

CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland —  For most Americans, ski racing is a somewhat bewildering exercise that comes and goes every four years with the Winter Olympics.

Oh, in between, it pops up on the tube now and then in the winter months, on “Wide World of Sports” or ESPN. Everyone is familiar with “the agony of defeat,” but that’s a ski jumper , and not everyone knows the difference.

It all looks more than a bit dangerous, which causes ABC commentator Bob Beattie to call skiing “a great TV sport.” He goes on: “Even some guy with a beer belly who will never come close to putting on skis and sliding down a mountainside is fascinated to see a racer busting himself--or trying to keep from busting himself--in the downhill at 80 m.p.h.”

The downhill, of course, is simple. It’s raw speed. The fastest skier wins. But then there are the slalom and the giant slalom and the super-G, and the combined, and the World Cup with its ever-changing but always complicated scoring system.

“Hit the zapper, Maude. Maybe there’s some bowling on another channel.”

Some of the more enlightened people who run ski racing are aware of the problem. They’ve watched interest gradually decline in both Europe and North America, and they’re trying to come up with ways of reversing the trend.

Essentially, the complaints are threefold:

--Too many races.

--The format is too confusing.

--Events are not being properly presented to the public.

So, ski racing, in its middle age, is definitely in transition. With the 1988 Olympic Winter Games scheduled for Calgary, Canada, and the 1989 World Alpine Championships set for Vail, Colo., these changes are especially significant to American ski aficionados .

First, a little background.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, as well as in the immediate post-World War II era, through the early ‘60s, there were three or four major races each winter in Europe and several other events of lesser importance in the United States.

American racers who thought they might stand a chance against the Austrians and the other Alpine powers paid their own ways overseas, with or without coaches, borrowing equipment, maybe spending a few weeks training with the European skiers.

In Olympic years, there was a U.S. ski team of sorts, but frequently, the members met for the first time on the dock or at the airport just before departing for Europe.

Still, Americans had their moments, first with Gretchen Fraser and Andrea Mead Lawrence, later with Buddy Werner.

But the big breakthrough occurred in 1960, when the Winter Games were held at Squaw Valley, and Penny Pitou became America’s sweetheart. Television, for the first time, was there on a grand scale.

By 1964, the U.S. ski team had become a full-time operation with a full-time coach named Beattie, and he proceeded to shake up the European ski Establishment, demanding better seedings for his racers and generally raising hell.

The immediate result was a string of Olympic medals for Billy Kidd, Jimmy Heuga and Jean Saubert at Innsbruck, Austria, and several other impressive American showings in the classic European races.

With ABC-TV’s Roone Arledge and Sports Illustrated’s Dan Jenkins leading interference, ski racing became the glamorous darling of the media, ripe for consolidation into a cohesive international sport

Enter Serge Lang. A journalist who wrote for both French and Swiss publications, Lang was also the chief of press relations for the 1968 Winter Olympics at Grenoble, France, which had Jean-Claude Killy as their star.

The previous winter, he took a look at the collection of loosely organized ski races scattered around Europe and North America, and decided to tie them all together as a circuit, awarding points for the first 15 placings in each event and trophies to the winners of the season-long competition. The World Cup was born.

The underlying concept was brilliantly simple. Keeping track of who was winning, however, hasn’t always been so easy. And the politicking for races has frequently bordered on the Machiavellian.

All sorts of formulas have been used over the years since 1967 to try to weight the scoring system in favor of all-around skiers, as opposed to specialists in either downhill or the more technical slalom events.

Sometimes, it worked. When it didn’t, the easy solution was to come up with a new formula. The net result was constant confusion.

Lang, 67, who is currently involved with marketing the so-called Big Five ski resorts of Kitzbuhel in Austria, Wengen in Switzerland, Val Gardena-Groden in Italy, Garmisch-Partenkirchen in West Germany and Morzine in France, does not believe that interest in ski racing has declined in recent years.

“It has remained the same,” he said. “The attendance at Kitzbuhel for the Hahnenkamm races two weeks ago was overwhelming.

“There is no question, though, that there are too many races, especially in the middle of the week. Those should be eliminated, and racing should be conducted only on the weekends, when spectators can come and when there is a large television audience. I proposed such a drastic cutback last year, along with limiting the number of racers in each event.

Beattie, who has also been involved in the administration of the World Cup, agrees with Lang that there are too many races--32 for the men and 30 for the women this season--but in the next breath says that there should be more of them in the United States.

“I’m not worried about what they do over here (in Europe),” he said. “We should just keep repeating over and over, ‘We need more races in America,’ until we get them.”

Beattie concedes that it is more difficult to interest Americans in ski racing right now “because our men’s team is in a slump,” but he has a ready solution in the interim, until some fresh U.S. male talent comes along.

“We should hold some international team races,” he said. Americans can really identify when you pit nation against nation.

“Overall, we have to come up with creative new concepts. Ski racing needs a major marketing effort. The U.S. ski team is doing the right thing, getting sponsors involved. The sport needs more parallel (head-to-head) races, even though (FIS President) Marc Hodler doesn’t like them, because they started with the pros.”

ABC, according to Beattie, “is committed to ski racing.” The network televised both the men’s and women’s downhills here last weekend and will provide same-day coverage of the women’s slalom this Saturday and the men’s slalom Sunday. It also was at Kitzbuhel, and will show the Calgary pre-Olympic men’s downhill in mid-March.

Additionally, ESPN, with Beattie as commentator, is covering several other World Cup races this season, and GGP Sports is syndicating 12 hours of major ski events, which Channel 7 carries in Los Angeles.

Beattie’s high regard for television’s coverage of ski racing is not shared by John Fry, a member of the original World Cup Commission.

“It’s a difficult sport to televise because the viewer doesn’t always know who is leading,” Fry said. “It’s like auto racing in that regard. There should be more analysis and more creative use of the latest technology.

“Swiss television showed (Peter) Mueller and (Pirmin) Zurbriggen making their downhill runs on a split screen the other day. They’re also using a John Madden-type chalkboard to show where races are being won and lost.

“With American television, it’s another case of underestimating the intelligence of the viewer. ABC just tells Beattie to sound excited and forget about being technical. But you can’t stimulate interest in a sport that nobody understands.”

Beattie, of course, denies that he’s merely another pretty face--and screaming voice.

“I’m allowed to do whatever I want,” he said. “I try to point out mistakes, but within the framework of the race. If I were to get overly technical, even skiers wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”

While debate continues over how to stimulate more interest in ski racing between Olympic years, Demetz, the new president of the World Cup committee, last week unwrapped a package of proposals that would:

--Reduce the number of races to 26 each for men and women.

--End the “regular season” in February, then add “playoffs” for the top placers in each discipline to determine the overall winners.

--Limit the number of competitors in each race to 60, except possibly in the downhill.

The playoff concept is designed to maintain interest in the World Cup late in the season, a feat that may be impossible this winter under the current format, since the overall leaders are so far ahead.

According to Lang, however, the World Cup schedules are set for the next two seasons, with 28 races apiece for men and women each year, and no major changes can be made until the FIS Congress at Istanbul, Turkey, in May of 1988.

“It’s just an old Italian idea, anyway,” Lang sniffed. “We voted it down four times when I was president.”