As the world's best women skiers line up for the season-opening World Cup ski races today and Sunday at the Park City Ski Area, the line is clearly forming behind American racer Julie Parisien, the world's top-rated slalom racer coming into the season.
This will come as surprising news to those ski racing fans - and we're not talking about a small group here - whose intense enthusiasm begins and ends with the quadrennial two-week passages of the Olympic Games. They'll remember that it was Parisien who, during last winter's Albertville Olympic Games, endeared herself to masochists everywhere when she placed fourth in the slalom, missing an Olympic medal by five-hundredths of a second.Parisien did it the hard way. She won the first run of the two-run race at Meribel, France. She had a choke hold on the world. But after a European-style three-hour lunch break - time she spent thinking about how good she'd look in gold - Parisien returned for the second run without a vengeance. Skiing last in the field, she got out of sync, bumped a gate, finished in the dreaded fourth position, and, just like that, became Albertville's personification of the agony of defeat.
Given the psychological crunch that can accompany such a prime-time crash, no one would have been surprised to see Parisien drift into the pack after that day in the French Alps - just another domestique done in by the pressures of the Games.
But Parisien would have none of that. The only thing she took from that day in Meribel was a vow that she drafted in her mind during that half-a-minute as she stood alone at the bottom of the second run, looking back up the hill at the electronic scoreboard that was unblinkingly giving her the worst news of her life. That vow: "Oh, I will never do that again.
"I never wanted that feeling again," said Parisien. "I gave away an Olympic medal. I said, `Here, take it.' During the break I didn't think enough about the second run. I sat in my room and thought, `Wow, maybe you've got a medal.' In ski racing you can't do that. You can't ever let up."
And so she hasn't.
In the weeks and months since the '92 Olympics, Parisien has emerged as the world's top slalom skier. She won the World Cup's season-ending slalom event in Sweden just three weeks after Albertville, a race that gave her the No. 1 ranking in FIS slalom points coming into this season. She spent the summer training with a vengeance in between replacing the four teeth she broke when she was run into by a recreational skier in Austria last winter. And just last weekend in an FIS-sanctioned preseason event in Beaver Creek, Colo., she won the slalom and placed second in the giant slalom.
She's as ready for the ski season to get started as the people who make snow tires.
Actually, to those who know Parisien well, her impressive bounce back from her Olympic devastation is merely another in a series of making the best of whatever life offers. She has a long history of being an opportunist, dating back to when she was 41/2-years-old and her mother sent Julie and her brothers and sister to the local ski area.
This was in Auburn, Maine, a small mountain town that boasted, besides brisk winters, a ski resort called Lost Valley.
Jill Parisien, who, with her husband Victor, an orthopedic surgeon (speaking of opportunists), still lives in Auburn, does not deny her objective when she bundled up Julie, Anna, Rob and J.P. and sent them off to Lost Valley for the day. It was not to make them world-class skiers.
"Skiing is a great baby-sitter," she said. "It was the best way to get them out of the house."
The Parisien kids made the best of it. All excelled at ski racing. All graduated from Maine's prestigious Burke Mountain Ski Academy. And three of the four joined the U.S. Ski Team. Rob skied for the men's team until he turned professional this season. On the women's team, Julie, who turned 21 this summer, is joined this season by Anna, 20.
"It's funny," Julie said yesterday in Park City as she counted down the hours to the beginning of the 1992-93 season. "I have much more faith in myself than I've ever had. I believe in myself more strongly. I've learned the balance between ego and confidence - and a lot of it has to do with what happened to me at the Olympics. In a way, what happened was good."