Look into those blue village-of-the-damned eyes and you get a hint of the madness that makes men and women downhill racers. Listen to him talk and you get a sense of the discipline that makes them winners. “The human body wasn’t meant to go fast,” says Kitt, with the hint of a grin beneath the flaming red Fu Manchu mustache he has sprouted in the last few weeks. “God only gave us legs that would let us go so fast. Then you jump on some skis and you start going 80 miles per hour and you got to adjust things a little bit. It’s just a big challenge to stay within the realm of control at high speeds.”
When Kitt is good, no American is better. When he’s at his best, no one in the world is. But the difference between good, best and disaster is a matter of centi-seconds in the downhill-skiing’s equivalent of getting shot out of a cannon. So Kitt’s chances of winning a medal at the Winter Olympics, maybe even a gold, are good but by no means certain. The last American to achieve that feat was Bill Johnson in 1984. No other American, in fact, has won a medal of any kind in the Olympic men’s downhill.
Kitt’s record this season is as up and down as the drops he faces. In December, at Val d’Isere, he stunned the ski-race world by winning a World Cup race and with it, recognition as a major contender. It was the only American triumph in the last eight years in a World Cup downhill. In the races that followed, Kitt was erratic. A week after Val d’Isere, at Val Gardena, he lost a pole in a wild turn, still finishing fourth. Six weeks later, at Kitzbuhel, Austria, in the famed Hahnenkamm race, he set a course record before finishing second to Switzerland’s Franz Heinzer. But in another race on the same course the day before, he slid to a finish so far behind the rest of the top seeds he might as well have hiked. And a week after that, he placed a miserable 22nd at Wengen, Switzerland.
Kitt remains confident. “He’s calculating what he needs to do to get where he wants to go,” says his mother, Nancy, back in Rochester, N.Y., where Kitt was born, 23 years ago, on Friday the 13th. She and Kitt’s father, Ross, who runs the family book-publishing business, were part-time ski instructors. They started Kitt racing at the age of 6 on a 650-foot slope at Swain Ski Center–a “bump,” Nancy calls it, compared with the runs he now faces. Kitt enrolled in a Lake Placid ski academy at 13, then transferred to the respected Green Mountain Valley School in Vermont. He joined the U.S. ski team as a backup in 1987 and finished 26th in Calgary amid a dismal American showing. As older stars like Johnson, Doug Lewis and Felix McGrath retired, Kitt emerged as America’s best hope of reviving a team in disarray.
“The best thing to do,” says Kitt as he contemplates Albertville, “is try to stay stable and keep the skis pointed downhill.” Every downhill racer knows that. The trick will be to stay right on the edge-without going over it.
