Classic Corner: Downhill Racer

In the aftermath of another Olympic season, we are agitated again about the high personal cost of winning. Is it all worth it? Younger and younger athletes are pushed to the limit of physical safety and mental health in order to ascend fleetingly into the pinnacle of their sports, into white-hot fame, and into million-dollar endorsement deals. The heart of a champion, these days, is pumped with endurance-enhancing drugs and/or dissected endlessly in television coverage and social media  – see, as the latest examples, Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva and U.S. alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin this winter, and U.S. gymnast Simone Biles last summer.

Though the demands on Olympians seem to escalate, skepticism about our costly obsession with (athletic) victory is not new. Witness Downhill Racer (1969; available on the Criterion Channel), released over a half-century ago, in an era in which the Vietnam War threatened to undermine America’s pervasive “victory culture,” to borrow historian Tom Engelhardt’s phrase. Proclaimed by Roger Ebert “the best movie ever made about sports,” Downhill Racer features a 32-year-old Robert Redford, on the brink of mega-stardom, as Dave Chappellet, a psychologically stunted U.S. alpine skier willing to sacrifice life, limb, and all human intimacy for his singular goal of Olympic gold. But like many young athletes, Chappellet doesn’t have the perspective to consider the long-term costs of his short-term drive to win, a point emphasized towards film’s end: When a journalist asks him, “What are your plans after the Olympics?,” Chappellet makes it clear that he has none, repeating the phrase “This is it.” Reflecting the anti-triumphalist mood of the 1970s, Ritchie would go on to skewer America’s all-consuming preoccupation with winning in The Candidate (1972), The Bad News Bears (1976), and Semi-Tough (1977), as Zach Vasquez outlines here.       

Downhill Racer opens in the international ski season of 1966, on the legendary downhill course at the Lauberhorn races in Wengen, Switzerland. There, American skier Tommy Erb suffers a bone-shattering crash, a disaster presaged by the film’s foreboding (and distractingly dated) score by Kenyon Hopkins. Erb is played by ex-U.S. Ski Team member Joe Jay Jalbert, who also served as the film’s technical advisor, Redford’s ski double, and cameraman—risking his own life and limbs careening downhill at 80 mph carrying a 40-pound camera in order to capture the film’s exhilarating skiing footage (including plenty of P.O.V. shots). By opening with, and lingering on Erb’s terrible accident (including a weird blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of an open wound), Ritchie is implying his skeptical cost-analysis of modern competitive sport from the start. That the balance sheet is “in the red” is made more explicit in a second crash later in the film that mirrors this first one: another season-ending, bloody blow-out of American skier Johnny Creech (Jim McMullan) who, laid up in a hospital bed, scoffs at his sports’ relentless demands: “sacrifice without end.”

But back to the season of ’66. Chappellet is summoned to Switzerland to replace the injured (and expendable) Erb on the U.S. Ski Team. Arriving, he is clearly out of his depth, new to international travel and competition, dumbfounded by foreign tongues. But he’s cocky nonetheless, and uninterested in making nice with his new teammates, his coach Eugene Claire (a rising Gene Hackman, two years before The French Connection), or the foreign media. In Switzerland, he refuses to race when he is given a late starting position (bib 88), complaining “I’ll be up to my knees in ruts.” But at the next race, in Austria, he agrees to race at number 79^th. There, he surprises everyone by coming in 4th, hurtling himself down the mountain with wild abandon, in stark contrast to the skillful finesse of his teammate-cum-rival Creech, who he displaces. At the season’s final race, the Kitzbühel World Championships, Chappellet turns in the field’s fastest time at the split but crashes spectacularly before the finish line. When he blames the snow conditions and his start position, Coach Claire puts him straight: “No. You just weren’t good enough, that’s all. You lost your strength.”  

Thus chided, Chappallet petulantly commits to a summer of strength training, administered by Assistant Coach Mayo (a barely recognizable Dabney Coleman, eleven years prior to 9 to 5). But instead of a Rocky-esque montage of muscle and grit-building, Ritchie breezes through the training (a few laps around a track in country-club whites) to give us, instead, a fundraising montage, suggesting that money is the real engine of Olympic sport. In it, Coach Claire appeals to investors’ financial interests – “Every racer on a well-equipped winning team is a foreign sales representative for U.S. ski products”  – and to their nationalism, in the triumphalist Cold War tones that Ritchie and his contemporary New Hollywood filmmakers found fatuous. “These fine young competitors are roving ambassadors for the American Way of Life,” we are told, and they are proof, finally, that “the richest nation in the world” can produce a downhill champion. (In real life, the U.S. did not achieve that feat until 1984, when Bill Johnson won Olympic gold in Sarajevo.)

Here it is worth pausing to appreciate Downhill Racer as an historical document and, as such, a barometer of alpine skiing’s evolution—or devolution, if we take Ritchie’s point. Cutting edge at the time, the equipment seems primitive: the helmets are adorned with leather ear flaps, the skis are treacherously thin planks of uniform width, the poles straight, and the gates bamboo. Hand-timing predominates, and safety nets are nowhere to be seen. Relatedly, the level of competition seems quaint by comparison to today’s standards. The notion of a thirty-something breaking onto the U.S. Ski Team out of obscurity, and undergoing light off-season training for the first time, is laughable in a world in which alpine skiers are pipe-lined  for stardom in their teens, train tirelessly to peak athletic condition year-round, and retire in their thirties. So is the notion of athletes waxing their own (lone) pair of skis on race day, in a world in which athletes travel with an entourage of equipment managers and upwards of sixty pairs of skis. So is the notion of a ‘just try out these skis’ endorsement deal Chappellet strikes with a European manufacturer,  in a world in which an Olympic skier can make millions endorsing brands like Adidas, Visa, and Land Rover. 

But, again, back to ’66. After summer training in Oregon, Chappellet pays a visit to his hometown in Colorado, in a sequence that can be understood as an antidote to network television’s coverage of Olympian backstories to this day, predictably filled with the undying support of family members and loved ones, and the implicit moral that every sacrifice is worth it. In Idaho Springs, Chappellet’s father (Walter Stroud) maintains a dilapidated ranch and his cold-hearted disdain for his son’s chosen pursuit. (Without explanation, Mother Chappellet is conspicuously absent.) It is clear that Dave has inherited the chip on his shoulder, and related self-isolating inexpressiveness, from Chappellet Senior, which Dave unleashes on his estranged hometown sweetheart, rejecting her emotional needs after she has satisfied his physical ones. In this hometown sequence’s final moment, father and son deign to have a conversation. in which Mr. Chappellet dispassionately disparages amateur sport, not least of all because it pays nothing: “I hope you don’t end up asking yourself the question some folks ask me: ‘What’s he do it for?” Dave fumbles in response, “Well, I’ll be famous. I’ll be champion.” 

His dad’s retort is devastating: “World’s full of ‘em.” 

After this summer interlude, Downhill Racer’s second act is driven by a romance that buds over the ski season of ‘67. It is here that Ritchie most entertains the appeal and rewards of being a world champion. And, despite the impression of heavy-handed excoriation I’ve given above, Ritchie does allow for a degree of ambiguity, not least of all by casting the era’s most godlike human man in the role of Olympian-protagonist, and the cinematography that captures the visceral thrill of his sport. In the season of ’67, Chappellet’s rising star wins him a glamorous and gorgeous Swedish girlfriend Carole Stahl (Camilla Sparv), who drives a racy goldenrod Porsche. The couple are glorious in figure-hugging 1960s alpine fashion, Redford in stark white turtlenecks and Sparv in fur-lined overcoats. As if lifting it straight out of a contemporaneous Warren Miller ski film, Ritchie inserts a sun-spotted ski sequence in their hot and heavy courtship, the two of them carving perfect S-turns in virgin snow. Chappellet’s racing also wins him public adoration, with crowds and the media swarming. Cockier than ever after the ’67 season, Chappellet fails to keep up with Carole in the off-season and is surprised to find she has moved on when he returns to Europe for the ’68 season and an Olympic year, with the games held in Grenoble, France, the setting of the film’s final act.

I will not spoil the ending, except to say that it is the best part of the film, offering a well-earned (anti)climactic, anti-triumphalist moment that clinches a top seed for Downhill Racer in the canon of sports films. And except to say, sorry Ritchie, we never learn: Winning still wins. 

“Downhill Racer” is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.