When I remember that FIS year, the beginning, I think first about the night Leafy and I stopped in Geneva on our way to Chamonix. I was still in the Army and hadn t made the FIS team, though I was on the Garmisch ski patrol and was able to make most of the races on the European circuit. But Leafy had done the best of the Amer- ican men in the World Championships of the F~d&ation Intemationale de Ski, and people were beginning to talk about him as a coming champion. Georgiana Brown and Anne Patterson had gone down to Chamonix on the train with Mrs. May and the rest of the American girls. Leafy and Brown and Anne and I weren t a foursome yet. I still didn t know Anne very well. Most of the top girls had men racers who acted as private coaches--to keep their equipment in shape, advise them on waxes, help them train on the courses, and after a race tell them the mistakes they d made. Leary did this for Brown, and early in the season Anne had had something of that relationship with Ernst Hochner, a big country boy from Lech. He spoke no English except a phrase he d picked up somewhere--\"Let s go, bay-beel\"Eand Anne wasn t the kind to learn any more German than she needed to draw her racing number; so when they were together he would silently hold her hand, and it was embarrassing to see a kind of pulse beat in his eyes when he looked at her. He hit a tree and broke himself all up before the FIS, and the last I heard was that he would probably never ski again. It was almost dark when Leary and I came into Geneva, and we stopped at a clean little hotel on the left bank of the lake. The manager was offended because we wouldn t take
|
商品评论(0条)