A Trail Of Tarnished Gold Moe Plays Mental Game In Attempt To Reclaim Olympic Glory

Where do you start with Tommy Moe? With the blown-out knee? Nope. That’s healed. With the sliced thumb? That’s been repaired by a surgeon.

With the gold medal. You start there and go on. Since Moe won the gold in the downhill in Lillehammer, Norway, four years ago, his life has been filled with fame and more money than he ever dreamed he’d have.

But the gold has brought bad luck and pain, too. It has brought so much adversity that Moe’s confidence is as low as it ever has been in his racing life.

His downward spiral began the winter after his Olympic gold. Moe was back on the same course in Lillehammer, flying down a steep piece of real estate near the bottom of the course - a section named Tommy Moe’s Channel in his honor - when he crashed.

“I hooked an edge,” he said after a recent workout. “I fell backward, tweaked myself a bit. Tore my ACL. I knew right away. Soon as I fell. I heard it explode. Quite frankly, since then I haven’t done a lot.”

Not on the ski slopes, anyway.

He missed the rest of the 1995 season. It took him most of 1996 and 1997 to gain back the speed and confidence he had lost. He was just rounding into form last winter when he came to Kitzbuhel, Austria, for the most famous downhill in the world to race.

He was tending bar at a pub where the racers traditionally gather the night after the race. He went to hop out from behind the bar, and when he put his hand down to lift himself, a broken glass sliced the flexor tendon in his thumb.

After surgery in Innsbruck, he went home for the rest of the winter. He returned to the World Cup, but he has lost the speed and the edge that he always carried around.

“I kind of hit rock bottom after that,” he said. “My career has always been a lot of ups and downs. You do something stupid like that, you have to bounce back. I have a whole new set of goals this year. This year is big again. The psychological aspect of it is almost there.”

Almost. But not quite. As he nears Saturday’s men’s Olympic downhill, the 27-year-old Moe is not among the favorites. He is coming off several middle-of-the-pack races in World Cup competition. He is nearly always a second or a second-and-a-half off the lead. In the world of the downhill, that’s miles away.

He changed skis. He had been racing on the same design that he won with in Lillehammer. For three seasons. Other racers went from using skis with a foam core to ones with a wood core.

Moe stuck with his foam models and watched as the competition leap-frogged ahead of him.

Over the summer, he had his racing skis redesigned, and now he’s using the wood-core model, which absorbs vibration better.

Now, with his equipment right, he is still in the middle of the pack and he has nowhere else to look except at himself.

“I’m still the same skier that I was four years ago,” he said. “I’m skiing at about the same speed, but other people are going faster. I have to find some more speed.”

He knows where he will find it: in his head. Four years ago, he was a gunslinger on the slopes. He took the tightest line down the mountain and dared the others to follow him.

A few weeks ago, he felt the old feeling coming back. Moe finished 14th in a training run in Switzerland, “the fastest I’ve gone in a long time, and it gave me a lot of confidence,” he said. “On the day of the race, I knew I was going for it.”

Except he crashed.

And it was the best thing that happened to him in a long time. It was the first time he crashed in a race since he blew out his right knee.

“I was really going for it,” he said, “and I hit this little pothole and I crashed. It was good for my state of mind, crashing at about 70 mph, because I got up and skied away.”

The difference between winning a medal and being mediocre is all mental. It is all confidence. Moe said he never thought about his knee before the crash, but then he couldn’t help but think about it. After this crash, he knew the knee was fine.

So now he’s getting some of that confidence back.

But you still have to wonder if his Olympic success has made him a little bit soft, a little bit complacent, a little too self-satisfied with what he has already accomplished.

Moe’s sudden success turned his life upside down.

“It was kind of hard to deal with at first,” he said. “All of a sudden, I was somewhat of a household name. I’d make an appearance at a ski shop and there’d be 150 people lined up outside the door, waiting to get my autograph. I was blown away. It was cool. These little kids coming up to me with wide eyes saying, ‘That’s Tommy Moe.’ It was mind-blowing.”

He made “a lot of money” off his medal. Mostly from sponsors. Moe was not a favorite to win the gold. His sponsors had so little faith in his medal chances that he had huge incentive clauses in his contracts because the sponsors believed they would never have to pay them off.

“I cleaned up on incentives,” he said, smiling. “Then, the next season, all my contracts were out and I was ranked No.1 in the world. I had great bargaining position. I made great money.”

The Jackson Hole ski area in Wyoming signed him as their ambassador and gave him a condo.

“I make $10,000 to go somewhere and sign autographs,” he said. “I’m the ambassador at Jackson Hole. The whole thing is kind of mind-blowing.”

And the whole thing can kind of quench the thirst for more success.

So Moe talks about being the same racer, but it sounds as if he is trying to convince himself.

“My primary goal this season is to defend my Olympic title and get on the podium in the World Cup,” he said, getting an edge in his voice. “I have to keep it simple. Ski fast. These Europeans are blockheads. I should kill them. They can’t ski any faster than me. We’ll be racing on neutral ground in Japan.”

Where do you start with Tommy Moe? You start with the gold. Moe is a work in progress. He is still trying to decide whether he was lucky or fast enough to win that gold.

And until he decides that he was fast enough, he’ll never find the lost speed that he’s searching for.