Skiing

One by one, year by year, Lindsey Vonn is ticking off items on a career redefining the standard of greatness for all future U.S. Alpine skiers. Olympic team? She did that at age 17. World Cup podium for the first of 40 times? Did that at 19. First of 18 World Cup victories? At 20. World championship medal? At 22. World Cup overall title? At 23. World championship gold? At 24.

Two-time Olympic champion Hermann Maier retired Tuesday, ending a career in which he became one of Alpine skiing's most prolific racers and almost lost a leg in a motorcycle accident in 2001. The 36-year-old Maier cited surgery on his right knee in the off-season as the main reason for his retirement. The Austrian speed specialist won two golds at the 1998 Nagano Olympics, and earned three world championship titles. He won 54 World Cup races and four overall titles, putting him second only to Sweden's Ingemar Stenmark , who captured 86 race victories.

Five days after slicing the flexor tendon in her right thumb, four days after surgery to repair the injury, Lindsey Vonn was racing the event that could cause her the most pain. But what hurt the most was the result. After finishing second in the first run of the world championship slalom Saturday in Val d'Isere, France, the 24-year-old Minnesotan lost an edge and fell early in the second run. She still leaves the worlds as the sport's speed queen, having won the downhill and Super-G, which will make her one of the most publicized athletes in the months leading up to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Austrian Mario Reiter won the men's combined event Friday and Norway's Lasse Kjus became the first skier in Olympic Alpine history to win two medals on the same day by taking the silver. Reiter, who held a lead of 1.81 seconds over Kjus after the two slalom runs in the combined event, lost much of that margin in Friday's combined downhill but held on for the title. Reiter's aggregate time for the three runs was 3 minutes, 8.06 seconds.

Americans Eric Bergoust, who pulled a Hermann Maier in practice, and Nikki Stone, a broken has-been 18 months ago, made remarkable comebacks here Wednesday, and jumped to gold medals in Olympic freestyle aerial skiing. And both did it mostly by landing eye-popping first jumps, Bergoust getting a world-record score on his quadruple twist. His high-flying, twisting somersaults were worth 133.

The dark storm cloud that hovered over the Olympic Alpine speed events in Hakuba followed the world's best ski racers to the slalom courses, forcing the postponement of Wednesday's scheduled men's giant slalom. The men's race was rescheduled for Thursday at Mount Higashidate. The women's slalom will run as scheduled Thursday at Mount Yakebitai, nine miles away. Wednesday marked the sixth day that Alpine racing has been postponed because of weather.

A last-minute snowstorm swept across the Happo'one course Sunday morning, postponing the Olympic men's downhill and the seemingly inevitable coronation of a new snow king. Austrian Hermann Maier's quest to join Toni Sailer and Jean-Claude Killy as the only Alpine skiers to win three gold medals in the same Olympics was put on hold--officials will try to run the downhill Monday--but Maier has grown accustomed to waiting for his precious moments in the snow.

For five years, they squabbled and haggled, threatened and counter-threatened, risked international incident and finally settled on a compromise that ensured the Hakuba men's downhill ski run would be environmentally correct. Then, with the world's finest skiers finally bibbed up and queued up and ready to thrash the slope, the environment decided to weigh in.

Up here in the Alps, in lustrous snow, sparkling in a Sunday sun, they gave no thought to the danger. They were thinking of speed. They were thinking of time. They were thinking of round medals, dangling from a strand of ribbon, and the corners that needed cutting on a wild downhill run. I wasn't. I was obsessed with the peril. Ski news from America kept coming, all of it bad. Sonny Bono, popular pop singer, congenial congressman, was killed Jan. 5, face-first against a tree.