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SPECIAL SECTION/CANADA'S TEAM/ALPINE SKIING | FEBRUARY 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 4 |
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No Fear Edi Podivinsky has taken his hits, but is raring to go to the limit again By MARGARET FELDSTEIN
As a promising 17-year-old, Podivinsky was selected as a forerunner--one of the young skiers who blaze the downhill course to carve a trail for the racers who follow--for the 1988 Calgary Games. The following year, Podivinsky, who began competing at the tender age of six, joined Canada's national team and won the downhill at the world junior Alpine championship. His Olympic debut at the Albertville Games in 1992 ended in a crash on his final training run. X rays detected torn ligaments in his right knee, which meant watching the competition from the sidelines. After surgery, he sat out the rest of the World Cup season. Two years later, in Chile, Podivinsky had a more serious crash while training. "I lost consciousness, had some nerve damage and ripped some muscles in my neck," he says. "I lost the feeling in my hand. I couldn't do anything. I had to sleep on the floor for six weeks." Those kinds of injuries might cause a normal civilian skier to have some second thoughts, but Alpine skiers are not exactly normal. "Everyone's scared about crashing," Podivinsky allows, but adds, "The people who are the best in skiing know their limits and ski within them. The ones who crash are the ones who ski above their limits." Podivinsky may be facing limits of another kind soon. "I realize this is my last Olympics. I'm only in the sport for a few more years," he admits. Even Alpine skiers--or perhaps those skiers most of all--have intimations of mortality. But as Podivinsky puts it, "I've been around long enough to know that I'm not going to be happy if I'm not on that podium again." --Reported by Mary Jollimore /Toronto |
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hree weeks before the 1994 winter Olympics, Edi Podivinsky
startled everyone when he won his first--and only--World Cup
downhill on a difficult course in Austria. He further bolstered
his soaring confidence when he placed third in the training run
at Lillehammer the day before the official downhill race. "I
told the press I'd be disappointed if I wasn't on the podium,"
he says. "I believed it. But now that I think back on it, it was
a pretty bold thing to say." This time Podivinsky, a veteran of
two Olympics at 27, isn't making predictions, though after
landing in ninth place--the top Canadian result of the
season--at a Jan. 17 World Cup race in Wengen, Switzerland,
Podivinsky looks set to make a bold impression at Nagano.
(Canada's other top medal contender is Thomas Grandi, 25, the
Italian-born giant-slalom racer, whose third-place finish at a
Park City, Utah, race made him the first Canadian male ever to
win a medal in a World Cup technical event.)