Don't Save Anything by James Salter

Author:James Salter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Nonfiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

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

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