12/15/2023 0 Comments 1976 olympics franz klammerOdd, because I know for a fact that the television I watched it on was black-and-white.Klammer started racing very late in comparison to his contemporaries, entering his first race at 14. Thinking about it now I realise something: I remember the whole of Klammer's run at Innsbruck in vivid colour. Of all the sport I watched in the 1970s nothing – not Gordon Banks's save in Mexico, the Rumble in the Jungle or Emlyn Hughes hugging Princess Anne on a Question of Sport – made such an impression on me. Behind at the split, he recovered to win by 0.33 seconds. It was a performance of such reckless bravado and wild freedom it's hard to imagine that anyone watching – including Bernard Russi – wasn't urging the Austrian to succeed. At times he seemed to be falling more than skiing. He teetered perpetually on the edge of disaster. Klammer dressed in the lurid colours of a DC comic superhero – bright yellow bodysuit, red boots and helmet – careened down the mountainside with such blatant disregard for his own safety it was like he was a teenage hoodlum joyriding in a stolen body. If he messed it up then, frankly, he was buggered. The man who might have been his biggest rival, Switzerland's Roland Collombin had broken his back 18 months before. There were 66,000 spectators lining the course and surrounding the finish line, most of them Austrian. He'd won eight out of nine World Cup downhills the year before, all three races in 1976. Looking back, I can see that the pressure on the 22-year-old was immense. Jungle Jim back in ninth.įranz Klammer was the last of the big names to go. He took half-a-second off the next best time, set by the Italian Herbert Plank ("What kind of name is that for an Italian?" my grandmother asked, as she shuffled into my bedroom with emergency rations of chocolate snowballs "He sounds more like a joiner from Boosbeck"). Switzerland's Bernhard Russi, the reigning Olympic champion, went down the 1.88 mile course at in a blur of red and a clarion of cowbells. ![]() The Canadians raced well at Patscherkofel, but not well enough. Jungle Jim wore a sort of camo-pattern ski suit and his nickname suggested a character from a Victor comic who might have schussed down a hillside in Burma to surprise the Japanese: "Looks like we've caught the enemy with his pants down!" "Aiieeeeee!" ![]() He had improved his balance by tucking himself inside the wheel rims of the family tractor as it rumbled around the fields. Jungle Jim had learned to ski despite coming from the plains of Saskatchewan, perfecting his aerodynamic stance by riding, in full ski gear, strapped to the roof of his dad's pickup truck. Ken Read was probably the best skier, but I had a particular fondness for Jungle Jim Hunter. There had been a big Canadian airbase near our village during the war. The Canadians were nicknamed "The Crazy Canucks" and had the sort of self-deprecating, plucky, it's-a-crazy-madcap-scheme-Ginger-but-it-just-might-work attitude the English could identify with. My patriotic allegiance was therefore switched to the Canadian team. Our best man, Konrad Bartelski was raised in that hotbed of mountain sports, Holland our top woman, Valentina Iliffe, came from snowy Australia. We had no ski jumpers, and our skiers were strictly non-League. The other two events were a write-off, though. After all, Robin Dixon and Tony Nash had taken the gold just 12 years before, and there'd been a silver as recently as 1924 (the year Belgium got the bronze). We were the generation rallycross was invented for.īritain had, we were constantly assured, "a great tradition in the bobsleigh". I was a normal 1970s boy – my attention was arrested by anything that involved speed, goggles and the prospect of crashes, preferably into hay bales. In truth I wasn't interested in much of the games, just the ski-jumping, the bobsleigh and the Alpine skiing.
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