50 years later, first U.S. men’s alpine medals still reverberate in American skiing lore

Kidd, Heuga set stage for decades of success with silver, bronze at 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck

Billy Kidd and Jimmie Heuga on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1964.

To say there was a little pressure on the American men heading into the final alpine event of the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, is to engage in a massive act of understatement.

American women had piled up seven medals (three gold) in the five Olympic Games leading up to Innsbruck, including three silvers on home snow at Squaw Valley in 1960. The American men were shut out of the medals at Squaw and had been blanked at all five Games since alpine skiing debuted in 1936 at Garmisch, Germany.

Steamboat’s Buddy Werner, the greatest American racer of his day, had broken his leg training at Aspen two months before Squaw, so at age 28 he went into the 64 Olympics on the downside of his storied career – still seeking that elusive first U.S. men’s medal on the sport’s greatest stage.

Then there was the coach. Hard-charging Bob Beattie — a former football coach turned two-time NCAA champion ski coach at the University of Colorado. Beattie was brash, driven and intensely demanding of his athletes. He also pulled a Joe Namath five years before the Jets’ quarterback guaranteed victory over the Colts in Super Bowl III – promising men’s medals.

But so far at the 64 Games, the American women had done their usual part, with Jean Saubert collecting a bronze and a silver in slalom and giant slalom (GS), but the men had once again missed the podium in the downhill and the GS.

Beattie desperately needed a medal of any color when his four American men — William Winston “Billy” Kidd, Jimmie Heuga, Chuck Ferries and Werner — took to the snow for the closing slalom on Feb. 8, 1964.

“The problem that we had is we had promised America 1-2-3 in every event, so we had no way to go but down, and this was the last event,” Beattie said by phone from his home in Woody Creek near Aspen. “To say there was a little pressure was good in a way, because it meant everybody really focused and charged and we wanted it badly.”

Kidd and Heuga wound up claiming silver and bronze, with Kidd just .14 seconds from Josef “Pepi” Stiegler’s gold-medal time and Heuga just .39 behind in the first Winter Olympics in which times were calculated to the hundredth of a second by IBM.

“I missed the gold medal in the Olympics by 14 hundredths of a second, and then I spent six years trying to make up 14 hundredths of a second,” said Kidd, who finally got his gold at the 1970 World Championships and went on to become Steamboat’s iconic, cowboy-hat clad director of skiing.

Kidd also won the overall title of the inaugural World Pro Ski Tour, which Beattie founded in 1970. “[Beattie] changed the sport in America and certainly changed our lives,” added Kidd, who was 20 when he won his medal 50 years ago Saturday.

Ferries, the first and still only American to win the Hahnenkamm slalom at Kitzbuehel, Austria, crashed and was disqualified in that 64 Olympic slalom. But Werner – the first and still only American man to win on the full-length Hahnenkamm downhill course – wound up 8^th.

“This is the greatest day in our ski history,” Werner said after the race, according to a Sports Illustrated article at the time. “For a lot of years I was the only guy, but now we’ve got these two and we’ll get a bunch more.”

Werner would die in an avalanche while filming a ski movie in Switzerland a little over two months later, and 50 years later teammate Bill Marolt says Werner’s death still “leaves a deep, deep hole in your heart.”

Marolt, who didn’t race in that slalom but was 12^th in the GS at Innsbruck, never again raced in the Olympics. Instead he went into coaching, and his CU ski teams won seven national titles in 10 years; Bill Johnson and Phil Mahre finally won U.S. men’s gold medals when Marolt coached the U.S. Ski Team at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics; and CU won a national championships in football when he became athletic director.

Now the outgoing president and CEO of the United States Ski and Snowboard Association, Marolt has presided over the most successful U.S. ski teams ever. His “Best in the World” mantra drew heat from European ski powers during the 2006 Torino Games, but at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics the record American medal haul proved his point. Call it bravado, call it determination, Marolt says he got it from Beattie.

“A lot of the things that I do today are lessons I learned going clear back as an 18-, 19-, 20-year-old,” said Marolt, who credits Beattie with originating and executing the concept of the U.S. Ski Team. He credits Werner, Kidd and Heuga with laying the foundations for future success.

“Buddy coming out of Steamboat Springs and going to Europe, battling away, attaining the results and getting the respect of the international press and becoming an international star,”Marolt said. “Motivating kids to get involved.

“Winston, he is in a sense the face of U.S. skiing. Billy Kidd. Lives in Steamboat. Wears a cowboy hat. Was truly a phenomenal skier — technically an incredible feel and touch — but he also has an incredible feel and touch for the industry, has a passion for it.

“And Jimmie was the ultimate when you talk about focus and the willingness to put yourself to the test, and everything that he did as a competitor as part of that team manifested itself when he was stricken with MS [multiple sclerosis in 1970]. He didn’t let it defeat him. He helped himself and he’s helped hundreds of thousands of other people by his attitude and by his actions.”

Heuga established the Heuga Center for Multiple Sclerosis in the Vail Valley (now Can Do Multiple Sclerosis) and died at the age of 66 in 2010.

“Our organization, USSA and the U.S. Ski Team, we have a history of success if you go back through the years,” Marolt said, “particularly Buddy and Billy and Jimmie; they’re a huge part of that history, a huge part of the foundation.”

Editor’s note: This story was produced for the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Museum and a version first ran in the Vail Daily. The museum is located on the third level of the Vail Village parking structure, adjacent to Vail Village Covered Bridge. It is open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, call 970-476-1876 or go to www.skimuseum.net.

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David O. Williams

Managing Editor at RealVail

David O. Williams is the editor and co-founder of RealVail.com and has had his awarding-winning work (see About Us) published in more than 75 newspapers and magazines around the world, including 5280 Magazine, American Way Magazine (American Airlines), the Anchorage Daily News (Alaska), the Anchorage Daily Press (Alaska), Aspen Daily News, Aspen Journalism, the Aspen Times, Beaver Creek Magazine, the Boulder Daily Camera, the Casper Star Tribune (Wyoming), the Chicago Tribune, Colorado Central Magazine, the Colorado Independent (formerly Colorado Confidential), Colorado Newsline, Colorado Politics (formerly the Colorado Statesman), Colorado Public News, the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Colorado Springs Independent, the Colorado Statesman (now Colorado Politics), the Colorado Times Recorder, the Cortez Journal, the Craig Daily Press, the Curry Coastal Pilot (Oregon), the Daily Trail (Vail), the Del Norte Triplicate (California), the Denver Daily News, the Denver Gazette, the Denver Post, the Durango Herald, the Eagle Valley Enterprise, the Eastside Journal (Bellevue, Washington), ESPN.com, Explore Big Sky (Mont.), the Fort Morgan Times (Colorado), the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, the Greeley Tribune, the Huffington Post, the King County Journal (Seattle, Washington), the Kingman Daily Miner (Arizona), KUNC.org (northern Colorado), LA Weekly, the Las Vegas Sun, the Leadville Herald-Democrat, the London Daily Mirror, the Moab Times Independent (Utah), the Montgomery Journal (Maryland), the Montrose Daily Press, The New York Times, the Parent’s Handbook, Peaks Magazine (now Epic Life), People Magazine, Powder Magazine, the Pueblo Chieftain, PT Magazine, the Rio Blanco Herald Times (Colorado), Rocky Mountain Golf Magazine, the Rocky Mountain News, RouteFifty.com (formerly Government Executive State and Local), the Salt Lake Tribune, SKI Magazine, Ski Area Management, SKIING Magazine, the Sky-Hi News, the Steamboat Pilot & Today, the Sterling Journal Advocate (Colorado), the Summit Daily News, United Hemispheres (United Airlines), Vail/Beaver Creek Magazine, Vail en Español, Vail Health Magazine, Vail Valley Magazine, the Vail Daily, the Vail Trail, Westword (Denver), Writers on the Range and the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. Williams is also the founder, publisher and editor of RealVail.com and RockyMountainPost.com.

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