On Friday the 13th of February, the skies over Hakuba, Japan, are at last sun-streaked and cloudless. Up until this morning, these Nagano Olympics seem to have been cursed by the Shinto gods. Not enough snow. Too much snow. Too much fog. Sleet. Rain. There was even an earthquake, a 5.0 temblor — not powerful enough to do any real damage, except, perhaps, to a racer's concentration. The downhill event has been delayed by nearly a week. But this morning, at dawn, the officials tell the Olympians to wax their skis. It's show time.

Hermann Maier, wearing bib number four, is standing in the chute, immersed in the ritualistic tics of the countdown: digging in his skis, planting and replanting his poles. He wears a red-and-white spandex suit and a red crash helmet adorned with the eagle of the Austrian flag. The course, having been machine-spritzed with mist through the night, is now a long neck of blue ice, fast and slick, with the hard glint of chromium.

"I suppose," Maier says to me when I meet him at his gym in the Austrian Alps, "you're going to want to know all about the sturtz."

The what?

"The sturtz — the crash. The Americans only want to know about the crash. It's all they care about. Violence makes all the headlines in your country." The 25-year-old champion curls his lip in disgust. "There was an American photographer on the mountain. He didn't say, 'Hey, you all right?' He says, 'Hey, great picture!'"

But it was a great picture. The video of Maier's downhill crash was something like the Zapruder film of the Winter Olympics, microanalyzed for the exact moment of error and the exact moment when bones should have cracked, an alarming sports reel played and replayed in the craven knowledge that all of us, everywhere, especially Americans but probably even well-mannered Austrians, are beady-eyed rubberneckers who can't help ourselves. Here was a piece of footage lurid enough to replace the stale old "agony of defeat" clip at the start of ABC's Wide World of Sports, the one in which Yugoslavian ski jumper Vinko Bogotah endlessly pinwheels down the mountain during a 1970 contest in Obersdorf, West Germany. Maier's sturtz in Nagano was more than just a spectacular wipeout. It was an anarchic burst of kinesis that refreshed our understanding of why alpine skiing is so exciting to watch in the first place: the possibility of pure, white-knuckled calamity, the chaos lurking just behind the scrim of mastery and finesse.

Maier comes from a country where skiing is less a sport than a national science project, a country that produced two of the greatest theoreticians of motion, Ernst Mach and Christian Doppler. To crash, and to crash so crazily, so wantonly, is a most un-Austrian thing to do, and Maier remains deeply unhappy that he will be forever linked to such a messy encounter with the laws of physics. "If you ask me," Maier says, "I would prefer to be famous for winning two gold medals in Nagano rather than for my screwup."

Thus chary about going down in history as skiing's Olympic crash-test dummy, Maier has dedicated himself to putting in a steady, chaos-free season on the slopes of the world this winter. He not only aims to win the World Cup overall title for the second year in a row, but also plans to beat Swede Ingemar Stenmark's 1979 record of 13 World Cup victories in a single season and to prevail in a slew of events at the World Championships in Vail next February. And he intends to do it with deliberate and measured rationality. "You better believe it," he tells me. "I'm done with the crashing." He says this with a vehemence that protests too much, as if he suspects that certain bad habits can't be extinguished, as hard as one may try.