Outdated News, Part 3: Franz Klammer Does Some Things Quite Well, But Nobody's Perfect

Franz Klammer is one of the best skiers of all time.  Everybody knows that.  His career was lengthy, starting with a win at Schladming in 1973, a final victory at the Hahnenkamm in 1984, with a gold medal in Innsbruck in 1974 and 23 World Cup victories in between.  So, in the interest of history and posterity, here's Franz doing his thing in 1984:



It really goes to show you just how much things have changed.  Really, it doesn't get a whole lot more dangerous than what you see there, so it does make you wonder how we got to the place we are now, covered in B-net and yet still getting dinged left and right.  Perhaps Franz is skiing the course as it is, and too many of us ski the course we wish we had (or think we deserve)?  How often have you been to a race and watched skier after skier blow out in the same gate, even after they've gotten the course report?  Skiing the course you wish you had, where you can hit every apex at full throttle and lay it over as hard as you want, is often different than skiing the course as it actually is.  The correct line is not always the one we've dreamed about and idealized in our mind before the run.  Not casting blame about, just a thought that I know a few of us could stand to consider.

Back to Klammer.  Winning gnarly Downhills is something he does well.  Something he doesn't do very well is to help FIS shed their image as a male-dominated and sexist organization.  Witness the promotional poster for the Bad Kleinkirchheim Women's World Cup, in which the race organizers, Klammer, and FIS by extension made themselves out to be a bunch of chauvinist idiots:

This is a poster for a women's World Cup sporting event? I mean we're really just one or two garments removed from Logjammin' here. The sexual overtones of the poster are obvious: two women in tight clothes fawning over and stroking the big man in the suit. Is this what we've come to in women's athletics? "Hot young broads in tight clothes! Everywhere!"

For all of our sake, I hope we're better than this. Pro sports is already a male-dominated enterprise, from the playing field to the coaches to the front office.  This was an opportunity to reverse that paradigm, but instead it got flipped back around so that Klammer, Hujara, and Hungus remain on top.  Is this really the best we can do?  For a frame of reference, here's the poster from the men's race that same weekend:

Not even a hint of menage-a-trois! It took me about 5 seconds to find this photo of Bad Klein's analogous hometown girl:

But no, we'll take Janka's kissy face and Klammer's giant wang salad fingers (seriously, look at his hands in that picture) over Viktoria Rebensburg eating everybody's face.  I mean yeah, she's wearing the leader's bib, but it's the women's leader's bib so I guess it doesn't really count.

It should surprise no one that this same cabal of dimwits didn't include any women in their injury "study."  We're better than this.  We have to be.  Please?


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