Austrian Toni Matt, age 19, erred in his calculated turns and made the blunder of skiing straight over the lip of the headwall with a 60 mph wind at his back.
That race witnessed what is easily the most legendary run ever made in the Western Hemisphere. The third Inferno was not held until 1939. Dick Durrance won the second event with a record time of 12:35 in 1934. Washington, NH Tuckerman Ravine's summit-to-valley Inferno race began in the 1930s. Downhill was forever changed, and the image of the out-of-control skier in the yellow suit will never fade. Anyone who saw his run will put it at the top of this list. He couldn't possibly ski this way! How's he staying on the course? He's going to get killed.Klammer himself admitted that he thought he was sure to crash during his crazy flight. But it wasn't the medal that made this run spectacular, it was Klammer's style - or lack thereof - that left viewers speechless and on the edge of their seats. 33 quicker than Russi and grabbed the gold. Klammer, the "Austrian Express" came in at 1:45.73. Swiss Bernhard Russi paced the field with a time that withstood run after run. Klammer's edge-of-disaster blast for the gold changed everything. Olympic Downhill, Innsbruck, 1976 Prior to this run, if you had asked anyone with even a casual interest in skiing to describe a ski racer, they would've used words like "finesse" and "precision" and "ballet on snow," etc.
Maybe if he heard Jim McKay's voice-over. Bogataj learned of his fame in the late 1970s, and perhaps because he was only superficially hurt in his pinwheeling crash, could never really understand why Americans were so captivated by it. The footage is still shown over three decades later, and it is still chilling. Bogataj retired a few years later to a quiet life of farming, having virtually no clue that he was immortalized as "the agony of defeat guy" seen on ABC's Wide World of Sports opening sequence. He was hurt badly, and the competition was called off. The next skier made a flawless jump, then fell heavily during a skidding stop in the runoff area. Bogataj was dazed and bruised, but otherwise unhurt. This set the stage for an unpronouncable Yugoslavian ski jumper to tumble off the ramp on an aborted attempt. Visibility was nil conditions were dismal.