Mürren, Switzerland: Race to Hell
“You simply cannot expect to ski in complete control and win a gold or silver pin. On this course it just can't be done.”
Number 40 has been knocked unconscious and now moves like wet liver, slithering around moguls, pausing on the odd flats between them before seeking the next gutter and sliding around the next mogul.
I planned to go as fast as I could with out spending too much time in that twilight beyond experience, reactions and technique––where hooking a tip would mean the difference between dancing at the Inferno Ball and using my knee for a crude but infallible barometer.
Race tradition says you will race on the existing conditions. Ice, moguls . . .the lot.
“Bloody hell, the whole thing is getting too formalized! We’ll have a race from the top of the Schilthorn to Luterbrunnen with no bloody rules except you’ve just got to get there!”
Making the transition onto the work road I must touch sixty miles an hour. My legs take the shock of small bumps before I reach the road, holding the tuck across the long sunlit face toward the Engetal.
This year is a bit more difficult than most . . .would you consider running 1,401? It would mean you start around 3:30 in the afternoon.
The 40th skier has stopped sliding in a bad place and for the worst of reasons can't be moved. The Kanonenrohr face is too sheer to land, so the helicopter must hover as close as possible while the rescue team winches the basket onto its skid.
On the night before the Inferno, the competitors and townspeople parade an effigy of the devil through Mürren. Beating drums, chanting, waving flares, and only half in jest, they drive evil spirits and bad luck away from the course.
If you are thirty seconds late you are disqualified.
I slide in to the gate, listen to the starter count down to “einz” then push off and drive downhill into a high speed left turn.
1005 started a minute and a half behind me and now glides effortlessly past, reaches the grade above a left hand traverse and disappears.
I realized that I had raced for sixteen minutes and, when it was over, wished I could go up and do it again.
It is impossible to miss the fast line down the left side of the Inferno’s Kanonenrohr. Less than six feet wide, it drops vertically from the upper work road then clings to the icy edge of a boulder strewn avalanche chute. Because its entrance is very narrow you only get one shot at it. Hesitate and you've passed it. Commit and you take huge air. There is no other choice. At that point you're simply skiing too fast and the face drops away too quickly. The best skiers prejump it, suck their knees up and over the lip, push their hands forward and carry out and down. For the few that pull it off there's a tremendous speed rush-––an instant balanced on a delicate edge before your skis rattle down and launch you at that waiting chute.
The 40th racer into the Kanonenrohr appears as a tiny red figure. He tucks the work road, sets a hard right edge and takes the narrow entrance into the fast line. Even from 500 feet below I can see he keeps his hands low and his knees bent as he carries out and down. He is tired and suffers a loss of concentration, for he lands too far back, struggles to get forward, then loses his downhill edge. His legs straighten, his arms flail and he bounces as he goes down, taking the icy moguls first with shoulders and arms, then just taking them without resistance––shoulders, head and back. I watch him eggbeat silently down that icy face as both skis vector away from him. One bounces across the moguls, then stops. The other dives into the avalanche chute, disappears behind a rock outcrop ping, then reappears in the gutter making its way slowly downhill.
He has been knocked unconscious and now moves like wet liver, slithering around moguls, pausing on the odd flats between them before seeking the next gutter and sliding around the next mogul. Spectators around me groan as he drops off a ledge, lands heavily on a mogul, hesitates and slides into the gutter. Course workers stationed to one side of the work road start to chase him but by then he is already draped around a small mogul. Unable to move him, they cross their skis in that unsettling universal sign of an injured skier. From then until the helicopter arrives, he doesn't move.
Watching No. 40 crash doesn't do me any good. In a little more than four hours I'll have to make that same decision. Commit to the Kanonenrohr’s fast line and risk writing off the next six months or take the slow but safer way down through the bumps to an unspectacular finish. The latter carries the penalty of wondering "What if?" for the next year.
Why, all of a sudden, am I taking this so seriously? Before I arrived in Mürren, Switzerland, I planned to go as fast as I could with out spending too much time in that twilight zone beyond experience, reactions and technique––where hooking a tip would mean the difference between dancing at the Inferno Ball and using my knee for a crude but infallible barometer.
In the past four days that has changed. I blame this reordering of priorities on Andrew and Lael Nelson, Cai Palmer, Peter Lunn and the heavy psych that begins to build a week before the Inferno. Pre-race publicity says this is a citizen's downhill––a chance for expert alpine skiers to hang it all out for 7,500 vertical feet over eight-plus miles.
And to prove they can, more than 1,400 have signed up for this, the 40th running. But of those 1,400 I haven't met one who considers this fun. In fact, most of the "super experts" charge down the Kanonenrohr as if they could care less about growing old. From the way they ski this rough combination of ice, moguls and dissecting work roads, most seem to regard old age as a peculiar malady visited upon those who can't ski it at 60mph-plus.
Meeting Andrew Nelson at the entrance to the Kanonenrohr’s fast line had been an extraordinary stroke of good luck.
"Watch him ski this section, " he said to Ian Symington, describing their friend Cai Palmer 's awesome schuss through icy moguls on the lower Kanonenrohr, down a rutted cat track toward the Allmendhuble.
Cai stopped above them, looked back uphill, then said quietly, "It's a narrow line, a bit chancy, but smooth and very fast. We shouldn't try it too often, however, or others will notice and you know what that means?"
"Right," Andrew studied the entrance off the work road.
I can recognize a local secret when I see one. And as I crossed the course toward them, I expected a type of alpine nativism, a natural coolness toward me and my hale-fellow-good cheer greeting. But, in a remarkable hands-across-the-waters show of good will and common cause, they offer to show me the course.
That night in the Hotel Eiger's Taki Bar Andrew, his sister Leal, Cai and Ian give me a cram course on the Inferno, its history and the proper mental attitude.
"You have to take chances to finish decently," Andrew tells me. Andrew is the fastest member of the British Kandahar Club, and from watching him ski that day, I figured he stood an excellent chance to place within the top one hundred.
"You simply cannot expect to ski in complete control and win a gold or silver pin. On this course it just can't be done. The competitors with numbers from one hundred to three hundred are very good indeed. To finish decently, however, all will push themselves beyond their limits. Of those, a few will decide that they are going to place in the fastest hundred or crash trying. Even as they stand in the start gate they realize their chances of suffering a serious injury are very good."
"I wish you'd bathe." Lael regards her brother 's day-old stubble with a mix of disgust and amusement." Sweating all day on the slopes, then being seen socially, Andrew. . really!"
“You know the rules. Tradition says no bathing from seventy-two hours before the start. Besides, natural oils keep you taut and strong. The course setters try not to groom too much either," Andrew says. "You see, if they knock down too many of the bumps the course becomes very fast and the injury total goes up. Besides, race tradition says you will race on the existing conditions. Ice, moguls . . .the lot."
Yes, race tradition. Peter Lunn's connection goes back more than sixty years. A large scab dominates his forehead and, in contrast to his white hair, is the type of sports injury you rarely see on sixty-two-year-old men. "I took a bit of a spill," he explains, "which look s worse than it was." Along with Andrew Nelson, Ian Symington and Royston Varley, Peter will represent England's Kandahar Club in the seven-team Massenstart." I believe there is someone over 70," he answers my question, although it is obvious that age means little to him.
“It was Sir Arnold Lunn, my father, who suggested we British organize a National Championship for downhill skiing in 1920. In the old days the racers climbed to the start and the starter said, ‘One, two, three, go.' The finish was somewhere down in the valley. But by 1928 some controls were instituted in the interest of safely and fair play. A group of younger people in the Kandahar Club said, 'Bloody hell, the whole thing is getting too formalized! We'll have a race from the top of the Schilthorn to Lauterbrunnen with no bloody rules except you've just got to get there.' My father started the race and competed and one chap who had hurt his ankle and couldn't compete waited below to judge the finish... and off they went!"
The British continued the Inferno in 1929 and 1930. However, Sir Arnold was more interested in focusing international attention on the World Championships held in Mürren in 1931, then again in 1935. Lunn wanted alpine racing to be included in the Olympics, and the Inferno, with its lack of rules and go-for-broke spirit, presented the wrong image. Shortly afterward the Swiss adopted the race and, except for a brief interruption when most of the contestants fought on opposite sides of World War II, they have sponsored it ever since.
Up to the last instant I never believed I would race in the Inferno. I had never run a downhill before and if the Inferno had been little less of a challenge I might have dismissed it in December when the Swiss National Tourist Office's Urs Eberhard called to say he was having difficulty confirming my entry.
“Would it be possible to forerun the course?" he wondered in lightly accented English. "Or perhaps after the race? For time naturally, but not as a competitor per se?"
"Urs, I don't think that will work," I told him. With a month until the race it was important to hang tough.
“Yes, I understand. But, since only 1,400 are allowed to race and most of last year's contestants are returning, this year is a bit more difficult than most. Would you consider running 1,401? It would mean you start around 3:30 in the afternoon." Without Urs having to say it, I understood that by 3:30 the light would be gone, the course rutted and inconsistent.
"Urs, of those 1,400 starters, how many new openings are there?"
"Four, I believe."
"And the number of applicants for those four places?"
"Roughly 3,000."
"Fourteen hundred and one will be fine," I quickly agreed. I told him I'd keep in touch and returned to riding my bicycle in the bathroom. Until a Thanksgiving storm snowed me onto these bicycle training rollers I was in fair shape. But in the time since I have learned to hate these belt-drive bastards. The problem is that I can't coast. Stop peddling and I fall off. Also, there is no wind assist, no cooling breeze to dissipate the sweat. At least once during my 30-minute workout, boredom causes my mind to wander, the front wheel slips off one side, the rear scrambles across the drive rollers and I crash sideways into the sink.
I'm long past the age when I should be holding tucks in the living room, riding a bicycle in the bathroom or hopping up and down the stairs. If I were 21, the training would be easy or not even necessary. But at that age I hadn't researched the definition of the word fear––the high-speed motorcycle crashes were something in the future, the dislocated shoulder and stretched medial ligament were all things that happened to some other guy.
The 40th skier has stopped sliding in a bad place and for the worst of reasons can't be moved. The Kanonenrohr face is too sheer to land, so the helicopter must hover as close as possible while the rescue team winches the basket onto its skid. Fifty feet away the rotor is whipping snow into a vortex when Heinz Fringer gets air into the fast line. For an instant he is gone, then appears out of that swirling white veil as a small dark figure carrying devastating speed. It is a dramatic but fitting entrance. Fringer has won the Inferno four out of the last five times is a Swiss national hero and, in Mirren, is heralded as a major deity in the Inferno Pantheon. From Arosa, Switzerland, where he is a mountain guide and cross-country instructor, Fringer first won the Inferno in 1977 when he was nineteen. He lost the following year but has won it every year since. If that weren't enough, he also holds the Inferno record at a blistering 15:44.57.
On the night before the Inferno, the competitors and townspeople parade an effigy of the devil through Mürren. Beating drums, chanting, waving flares, and only half in jest, they drive evil spirits and bad luck away from the course. After the exorcism they burn the effigy at an awards ceremony on the ice rink. Fringer is the last to be called and he materializes out of the crowd and climbs to the top of a three-tiered dais.
The president of the Mürren Ski Club hands him the perennial trophy, then a gold pin. Someone in the crowd begins to chant, "Fringer, Fringer, Fringer ... " The volume swells and echoes off the surrounding hotels; Fringer raises his arms and lets the sound of his own name and the fire light wash across him.
The rescue of the 40th Skier has a hypnotizing effect on the crowd and most miss seeing Fringer pass two skiers on that face until a young boy peering through the safety fence shouts, " Heinz Fringer, Heinz Fringer, Fringer, Fringer . . .” and we pick up the chant, “HUP, HUP, HUP, HUP . . .”as he flashes around the Allmenhubel and drops quickly toward the woods. Mürren locals say he is absolutely fearless, he does not think about falling or injury or losing. Fringer has taken his instinct for survival and stored it in some mental safety deposit box as a type of genetic heirloom.
As soon as I reach the tram I can see I am late. A forest of 215 centimeter downhill skis towers above a brilliant, multicolored throng. Two-hundred racers are waiting to catch the cable car up to the start of the Inferno but no one is talking. Other racers crowd behind into line and push me forward into the human wedge that narrows down to a distant turn stile. As yet I still haven't heard a word––not a whisper nor cough––just the restless shuffle of racing boots, the click of ski edges rubbed one against another and the nervous metallic drumming of pole tips on the concrete floor of the loading platform. The tram arrives and for a minute there is movement in the crush of bodies around me.
Because the Inferno uses a simple but effective timing system, if you are thirty seconds late you are disqualified. Both the start and finish have synchronized clocks and each racer is given a numbered bib and a start time on a mimeographed sheet. After the seven-team Massenstart, the first sixty racers are "super experts" and they start every thirty seconds. Then, from 61 to 1,436, two are started every thirty seconds. An official at the top ensures the right bib starts at the right time.
I slide in to the gate, listen to the starter count down to “einz” then push off and drive downhill into a high speed left turn. Heinz Fringer tucked this sheer section, but if I yard sale, I’ll leave my skis and poles scattered up the slope, ruining any chance I’ll have of finishing in the top third. I link three GS turns and the speed comes up, the wind whistles into my helmet and I tuck, point the skis at the distant work road and hang on.
Making the transition onto the work road I must touch sixty miles an hour. My legs take the shock of small bumps before I reach the road, holding the tuck across the long sunlit face toward the Engetal. As I come into the Engetal I catch sight of 997, tuck harder to catch him and feel an imperceptible drag as my skis cross a sun-softened snow patch
My wax is wrong! It will grow worse below. I sink deeper in the tuck and push my hands out. The wind comes up and I get high-speed air past the second gate, feel the skis rattle in ruts before the course flattens out to the hill below the Schilthornhütte. This is the worst part.
It is only a short uphill section, but after a 1,500-foot tuck the climb is devastating. I pole until my arms cramp, then release my bindings, grab my skis and run the early section. On the way up I pass three racers who are breathing heavily. Any strength I have here I owe to high-speed bicycle sprints. I'm winded when I reach the flat but step back into my skis and pole across a long cat track. The wax grows worse; my skis drag and when 1005 passes me I take it personally. He started a minute and a half behind me and now glides effortlessly past, reaches the grade above a left hand traverse and disappears. Twenty seconds later I rattle through a hard, steep right which follows the fall line down to a high-speed left and another traverse. My lungs are aching and the afternoon heat has settled in my helmet. The traverse opens suddenly onto a short face. I pass an earlier number who is dazed, walking uphill without his skis; then take a high-speed right down between two icy walls and into the Kanonenrohr's narrow breech. I have been racing for five minutes.
My thighs are cramping and my breath is coming in ragged gasps. Hanging on, I take the shock of a bump with my back instead of my knees when I see 1005 standing at the entrance to the fast line.
"Achtung!" I shout at him, almost go down on the work road, then dive off late. As tired as I am I must ski in control. A mistake on the Kanonenrohr can mean a hundred place difference at the finish.
The Kanonenrohr’s massive bumps are tiring and I take them in sweeping GS turns, banging onto the cat tracks before a final tuck toward the Allmenhubel. When I reach the sweeping left the crowd shouts, "HUP,HUP,HUP,HUP,HUP . . ."
Between the Allmendhubel and Maulerhubel there is another long sun-softened traverse. My wax nearly stops me and soon I hear 1005, his labored breathing and edges. “Achtung!” he mocks me, almost out of breath. I let him pass and he gains fifty yards before the grade increases. I sink back into a tuck, try to catch him, but only manage to stay even.
A pain appears beneath my left kneecap. It serves in place of an idiot light. I sink lower in the tuck and ignore it. Then, the old medial ligament on the right knee starts to squeal. I grit my teeth and hang on.
By now most of my strength is gone and along with it my control. I can' t hold an edge. I slide through corners. My legs scream. My heart bangs above redline. I try to ignore my body, concentrate instead on the coming section––the icy piste down to Winteregg. I can't see the passing trees or spectators lining the course. I can't feel the wind on my face or hear it whistle past my helmet. I have tunnel vision, can only see the undulating flats, the moguls, and try to remember the good line.
1005 remains ten yards in front, mocking me! If I could rest my legs I know I could catch him. I reach the final schuss, go too wide to the right, try to recover and slow on the final whoopde-do's that climb to the finish line. Now the true test of what you're made of. The last 40 yards is a gentle uphill. My legs are gone and, though I pole with everything I have, I'm not moving. Bland faces stare at me, watch me die just short of the finish line. No one shouts or cheers. This has happened a thousand times before and the pain is only part of the finish. Slowly I herringbone up that final grade, then stagger past the timing hut.
I fight a need to drop to my knees in the snow, pull off my goggles and wipe off the sweat that’s trickling into my eyes. It would be better if I were stronger at the end, my breathing even, my head clear, not dripping wet on aching legs. But I did it without stopping and for now that's enough.
Heinz Fringer won the race for the fifth time in less than ten minutes. Andrew Nelson pulled out all stops and did it in 12:17 for 104th place and a silver pin. Despite bruised ribs, Cai Palmer fell twice and still managed 14:55. Ian Symington went 15:13 and I skied it in 16:12- sufficient for a bronze pin, 155 in the Alten class and 683 over all. I wasn't brilliantly fast or even very fast but I figure if I trained seriously I could do it in a minute less.
That evening I attended the Inferno Ball. "You must come back," Lael Nelson told me after the Sir Arnold Lunn Cup was awarded. "You were fast enough to qualify for next year, which means you are honor bound to race again. No one does it once and quits. You go as fast as you can and are either invited back or not, but you don't quit. You simply must . . . am I making sense?"
Lael was making perfect sense. After I crossed the finish line and stood leaning on my poles trying to catch my breath, I realized that I had raced for sixteen minutes and, when it was over, wished I could go up and do it again. Next year I would know the course, would use the right wax and would take the Kanonenrohr’s high, fast line,
