The Flying Fr

In full flight down an Alp's snowy flank, Austria's Annemarie Proell resembles nothing so much as a controlled crash about to happen. Feet well apart, arms locked to her thighs, in an awkward-looking squat that offends purists, she rockets out of the starting gate toward the first turn. Her motives for that all-out start are direct: "I try to risk as much as possible in the first few gates," she says. "It makes the competition nervous--I know they watch me."

This winter Annemarie has not only made the competition nervous, but she has nearly demolished it. Her friends call her style "brutal." She stays in her patented crouch through her entire run. More prudent racers straighten up from time to time--at the cost of a fraction of a second--as emergencies dictate. Proell disdains such caution and her total abandon has already won her two World Cups. She is assured of a third before the spring thaw. This season she won all eight women's downhill races, becoming the world's first skier--male or female--to score a sweep in one of the three Alpine events.* In late December, she cracked Jean-Claude Killy's record of 18 World Cup race victories: as of last week, she had won 28, making her, at age 19, the winningest cup skier of all.

Proell burst on the Alpine scene in 1969: a skinny, blonde 15-year-old with freckles, who was the youngest member of Austria's eight-girl national skiing team. Two years later, after packing another 40 pounds on her 5 ft. 6 in. frame (she now weighs a chunky 150), she won her first World Cup.

Annemarie's success story was as schmaltzy as a Viennese operetta. Born to a poor mountain-farm family in Klein-Arl near Salzburg, she was the sixth of eight children. When "Annemie" was 4, her father whittled her first pair of skis. "From then on," says her mother, "I hardly saw Annemie during the day. She even skipped breakfast to make a few runs before school began." She paid at best only minimal attention to her studies during her nine years of schooling, much preferring to test, and often beat the boys in climbing, skiing, even schoolyard brawling.

That spirit carried her through her one major setback so far: failure to win in the 1972 Winter Olympics at Sapporo. The Austrians went into that competition confident of success, and Annemie was expected to pick off a gold medal or two with little trouble. The team's morale was destroyed, however, the controversial disqualification of Star Skier Karl Schranz (TIME, Feb. 14, 1972), and Annemarie had to settle for a pair of silver medals. After that setback, she thought of giving up skiing, but the mood lasted only a short time. Then she threw herself into her harsh training regime, modeled after that of a prizefighter--long-distance runs, shadow boxing and rope jumping--and had a metal plaque made for the dashboard of her car: NEVER FORGET SAPPORO. Said Proell to a friend: "When I'm second, 1 see red."

Kid Sisters. If anything ever lures Proell away from skiing, auto racing might do it. Romance for the moment runs a poor third. Her current car is a hopped-up Ford Capri, painted black and gold in the colors of Brazil's World Champion Emerson Fittipaldi. She is renowned for flogging it along slippery Alpine roads at speeds of up to 160 m.p.h. Whenever her training schedule permits, she flies off to Grand Prix races to watch the progress of such motoring pals as Fittipaldi, Jackie Stewart and Jackie Ickx.

But her skiing days seem far from ended. Last week she was racing in World Cup competition in Alaska, after a painful fall that knocked her out of a cup weekend in Quebec. Beyond the current North American tour there is next year's World Cup and, in 1976, the Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. How long will she continue to ski? "I don't know," she says, "but there will be Proells on the slopes for years to come. Wait until you see my kid sisters --they'll be the best yet."

*Downhill, slalom, and giant slalom.

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