At Home with Pepi

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

By Ben Cannon

Pepi Stiegler has had the experience of being
heralded as a living legend twice in his life.
When Stiegler arrived here in the fall of 1965, he’d just captured
the hearts of his countrymen, having taken the gold in the slalom
and bronze in the giant slalom in front of the home crowd during
the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck.

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Here, he’s as recognized for having built one of America’s top ski school programs, at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, as he is lionized for being the best skier on the mountain – long before anyone in the skiing world had heard of Jackson Hole. The resort was his private playground.

Stiegler’s decision to leave Austria at the height of his fame was not easy. Many in his hometown of Lienz were disappointed to learn that their beloved champion would be departing. Lienz is in the state of East Tyrol, which at that time was, “a little bit of a stepchild, kind of a neglected quarter,” Stiegler told me recently.

East Tyrol does not share a border with the country’s well-known region of North Tyrol, home to legendary ski areas like St. Anton and Kitzbühel. When Austria was still rebuilding from the Second World War in the 1960s, Lienz was isolated from whatever economic booms were occurring around the country’s glitzier resorts. Even today the town is not the easiest place to get to, as I found on a trip in late May.

Its two local ski resorts are quaint, at best. If Jackson Hole is vacant of visitors in May, during the lull between the winter and summer tourist seasons, Lienz seemed even more quiet.

In the town’s main square, I went for a nightcap after dinner one night off of the plaza. The bar was empty except for a trio of men at the end of the bar, who all appeared to be in their mid-30s.

Finally, one of them turned to me to ask me what I was doing there. It’s hard for me to say what got them more excited – the fact that I was visiting from Jackson Hole, or because I told them I was there to talk to people about Pepi Stiegler.
“Pepi Stiegler and Jackson Hole!” one of them, Bernd Troger, a restaurant owner repeated several times. Clearly proud to tell me about the legacy Stiegler left in Lienz, he also insisted on picking up my bar tab.

“You have to understand that Pepi Stiegler did something truly wonderful, something that the people in Lienz will always remember,” Troger said.
But will town’s future generations know about the great ski racer?

“That’s a good question,” he replied. “Some of the young people may not know.”
After the ‘64 Olympics, some residents of the ancient little town, now home to about 12,000 inhabitants, hoped to capitalize on the Pepi Stiegler brand. They gave him some land for a home, and even built a hotel that bore the hometown hero’s name.

Before leaving for America, the mayor of Lienz pulled him aside.
“He told me ‘It’s all for one and one for all,’” Stiegler said. “He meant that all of the town was for me, but I was failing them. It wasn’t difficult for me to understand his message.”

Today, Austria has become one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, boasting a high quality of life for Austrians. And Lienz prospers without the resorts. Two manufacturing plants brought a few thousand industrial jobs to the local economy. Thousands of people who live in nearby Italy come to Lienz to shop, according to Helga Machne, a former mayor of the town.

Around the same age as Stiegler, now 72, Machne has done much to help improve the Lienz economy and its overall reputation. Stiegler and Machne have known one another for years, and most recently reconnected when Stiegler visited Lienz last December.

Machne is an elegant and accomplished woman – the first female in Tyrol to be elected mayor, later serving in the Austrian parliament. In recent years, she has tried to persuade Stiegler to leave his Olympic medals – the gold and bronze from Innsbruck and also a silver from the 1960 Olympics in Squaw, Calif. – in Lienz’s local history museum.

“If he keeps [the medals], in 100 years nobody will know who Pepi Stiegler was,” she told me.

Machne knows well the story of leaving Austria to make better money in the United States. In the 1960s, she landed at Boyne Mountain, Mich. with the wave of Austrian ski instructors recruited by American ski resorts to jump start their ski schools.

“After the Olympics, everybody was waiting for Pepi Stiegler to take over the ski school and stay here,” Machne said. “They were a little bit disappointed when he didn’t. At that time we had a very poor life here in Lienz. After the war we had almost nothing, but there was a good chance for us to earn money in the U.S.”  
Like the majority of Austrian skiers who came to America, however, Machne eventually returned home to settle.

Some of Stiegler’s teammates on the Austrian squad were able to parlay their success on the race course into national stardom.

Toni Sailer, nicknamed “The Blitz from Kitz,” is famous to this day not only around the resort town of Kitzbühel, which hosts the great Hahnenkamm downhill race, but throughout Austria. Sailer, who made Olympic history when he won all three alpine events at the 1956 Winter Games in Cortina d’Ampezzo, went on to star in a handful of campy comedic films, of which it’s charitable to say that the skiing far outshines the acting. Many of those old Sailer movies still play on Saturday mornings on Austrian television.

But unlike the Blitz from Kitz, Stiegler shied away from the spotlight. A teenager devoutly focused on race training, he initially felt inadequate around the lions on the Austrian team.

He showed me an old photo someone had recently sent him, of the Austrian national team circa 1958, a time when great Austrian skiers dominated ski racing. There’s Toni Sailer on the end! It took a moment to pick out Stiegler. He gave me a hint.

“I’m the one who looks like he doesn’t have any self-confidence.”
He’s right: among this who’s who of brash-looking athletes in the prime of their physical lives is one standing in the back, unsmiling. The young man’s eyes seem to telegraph uncertainty.

Stiegler came to Jackson Hole at the behest of JHMR co-founder Paul McCollister. He wondered for a few years whether anyone would ever show up – a time now remembered as the halcyon days of skiing, when the mountain belonged to the instructors, which included about a half-dozen Austrians. Then, during Stiegler’s second winter as ski school director, the Aerial Tram opened.

“The most important thing for a skier is a good mountain,” Stiegler told me a few months ago at his Aspen Drive home. “Rendezvous Mountain is an extremely good mountain. The whole place has developed into the most sought-after mountains in the world, up there with Chamonix and Zermatt and those places. I feel very privileged to have had the experience I had here.”

When Stiegler returns to Lienz to visit, he stays in the apartment he owns, which his daughter, ski racer Resi Stiegler, uses as a base while on the circuit. He usually keeps a low profile, as he does at home in Jackson, where he prefers spending time among his books rather than playing host to more than a few close friends and family.

He has multiple sclerosis, which sometimes makes him feel very weak, and pokes holes in his memories of the last 10 or 15 years.

It does not, however, stop him from hiking mountains, or trying to keep his wits sharp by reading, which his doctors tell him is good therapy for his brand of MS. You could even say he’s kind of passionate about reading.

“Every time I read a new book, I will always learn new words,” he said. His love of reading, and the personal upheaval of a divorce, led Stiegler to Montana State University in Bozeman, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English lit in 2002. The college diploma is one of his proudest achievements.

But even while he might find some beauty or personal solace in the poetry of Toni Morrison, or by plowing through a dense history of the Bolsheviks, as he’s currently doing, Stiegler will only let on that he’s deeply fascinated by the English language.
In Lienz, Machne told me I should meet someone who knows Stiegler: Walter Mair, who writes “very beautiful books about our mountains,” she said.

At nearly 70, Mair is two years Stiegler’s junior. Both men are rare birds for how well they’ve aged. Each has a set of blue eyes, possessed by a boyish twinkle. Maybe it’s Tyrolean.

Mair, who has written more than 20 books about the history and geography of East Tyrol, including a series of mountaineering guides, told me that he and Stiegler met about 12 years ago. The two first crossed paths while skiing above Lienz in the Hochstein backcountry.

Nowadays, Mair checks on Stiegler’s Lienz apartment, watering the plants and making sure nothing’s awry.

“I hope he will come back here to live one day,” he said, “but I know his children are back in America, and that has become his home.”

When they are not climbing or skiing during Stiegler’s visits, the two men sit around and chat about old times, about a past they do not have common, yet in a sense share as sons of Lienz and conquerors of mountains.

“He was like a master artist,” Mair said, still moved by this friendship forged in the late afternoon of life. “Whether he moves fast or slow now, he’s still a legend.”
In time, even the town fathers who held onto the hope that the Olympic champion would return to Lienz and help lead it into a brighter future gave up on the idea. Around 1980, about 12 years after it was completed, the Pepi Stiegler Hotel was finally renamed.

To what must have been the strong-willed Machne’s objections, Stielger, on his most recent visit, retrieved his medals from Lienz, where they were on display in the old castle that houses the local history museum.

While other Olympic memorabilia, like the skis and boots Stiegler used when he won the slalom in Innsbruck, remain in Lienz , he wants his children – Resi and his son, Seppi, an accomplished racer in his own right – to ultimately decide what becomes of the medals.

“The people who knew me in Lienz, many of them are gone. So I’ll have to negotiate the medals with my kids.”

But tomorrow, Stiegler told me, he plans to hike up Snow King. JHW

PHOTOS BY J. SELKOWITZ/SELKOPHOTO
Pepi Stiegler

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At Home with Pepi | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

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