Slalom, Men

For the first time at the Olympics, the slalom was started with a qualifying round of two runs. The top 25 finishers in each run were advanced to the final round. When the slalom started, Austria’s Pepi Stiegler had already won an Olympic silver medal (1960 giant slalom) and bronze medal (1964 giant slalom). He easily made it through the qualifying and led the first run of the final, followed by Austrian team leader Karl Schranz and American Jimmy Heuga in third. The second run leader was France’s Guy Périllat, who had barely finished the first run in the final, and moved up only to 12th place. The second best time was posted by American Billy Kidd, earning him the overall lead. Heuga followed three skiers later, and although he would have the third best time of the second run, he could not move ahead of Kidd overall. Stiegler was off 15th, the last of the top seeds in the run, and would finish eighth in the run, but with a time that enabled him to win the gold medal by a narrow margin over Kidd. Stiegler eventually settled in the United States, finally in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and his daughter, Resi Stiegler, would later ski in the Olympics for the United States.

Prior to 1964, and Billy Kidd and Jimmy Heuga, no American man had won a skiing medal at the Olympics. Previously the best finishes were fourth by Brooks Dodge in the 1956 slalom and Tom Corcoran in the 1960 giant slalom. In a strange quirk of fate, both Heuga and Stiegler, as well as the downhill gold medalist in 1964, Egon Zimmermann, would later be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.