Dominic Demschar stood in the start gate of the men's slalom, a man steeped in his sport.
His father, Herwig, had coached professional skiers in Austria and the US and was a mover and shaker at the Salt Lake City 2002 and Torino 2006 Winter Olympics. His mother, Michelle, has run peak ski bodies in her native Australia and the US. His elder brother, Daniel, was also a pro racer. Demschar lives and studies in Salt Lake City, American skiing heartland. His parents live at the nearby Park City resort.
In PyeongChang, as in Sochi four years ago, Demschar wore an Australian team ski suit of a particular fit. He lived in Australia when a toddler, and trains still at Mt Buller in the off-season, but mostly can be found as an itinerant on the world's pistes, or at home in Utah. His drawl is American. If we're honest, the convenience works both ways. If Demschar tried to enter Parliament in Australia, he would be turned away before he reached the metal detector, but the medal detector is another device altogether.
Demschsar knows the perils of skiing, inside out. He was still in nappies when one of his father's charges, Ulrike Maier, died after crashing in a race. It had fallen to Herwig to tell her parents. He would have seen many others fall by the wayside, painfully. Don't be fooled by winter sport's fluffiness.
He also knows skiing's quirks, particularly that it is cruelly unforgiving. A tennis player can lose a set 0-6 and still win the match. A cricketer can make a duck in one innings and a hundred in the next. A striker in soccer can botch six chances, as long as he takes the seventh.
But nearly all the winter sports, one slip is dearth. This is what swimmer James Magnussen failed or chose not to acknowledge when he called out Australia's winter athletes for getting a soft run. He was calling out privilege, from a position of privilege. Austrian Marcel Hirschler had won gold medals in giant slalom and combined in PyeonChang, but that gained him no concession when he missed a gate half-way down the first run in the slalom and became just another DNF. This, Demschar would have seen from the top of the course.
Demschar would have been dimly conscious of other pressures on and peculiar to Australian winter Olympians, to wit, funding and validation, especially for Alpine skiers as distinct from newer-fangled freestylers and snowboarders. Not our thing, the anti argument runs, as if we in our tens of thousands pop down to the local park each night to hurl javelins, put shot and swim butterfly. In this environment, every run is a dash for cash. It shows on Channel 7, which as good as blocked other media, The Age included, out of these Olympics.
But Demschar knows how skiing gets in your blood. For him, it was there at birth. Now that blood was fairly pumping as he stamped his skis in the start gate, a respectable 33rd in the giant slalom in his pocket, and Greta Small's 20th in the women's downhill for further bolster, four years of waiting done, 64 gates to come, 64 quick, sharp turns, swaying left and right as the lactic acid built and burned, the finish line too far and away and yet too near, and after a chairlift ride back up the hill, 64 more gates, 64 more moments on the literal edge, and, well, who knew then, but Hirschler was out …
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So, with a yelp, off he went, and if at that moment you had blinked you might have wondered why he was now standing at the side of the course, hand held to helmet, staring into nothing, feeling miserable and maybe even a little ridiculous, and you might have guessed that at the pole that marked first gate, almost touching distance away from the start, his left ski had bitten fractionally more into the snow than he anticipated, which meant he straddled the pole, which meant he missed the gate, which as he said could happen to any racer at any gate, and did to more than half the field, but happened to him at the first.
Which meant that for him at the Olympics, for four more years, that was it.
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SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
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