KVITFJELL, Norway -- The valley floor lies below like a frozen black-and-white photograph of pine trees and snow drifts.
The lead-gray sky is above.
And on the course are the Winter Olympic daredevils, the downhillers crouched in aerodynamic tucks, coming by one after another like airliners on a runway, flashes of fury and sound catapulting off a jump and soaring through the air at 80 miles an hour.
"It's like jumping off an eight-story building," said American racer Kyle Ferguson. "And landing."
This is the Olympic downhill at Kvitfjell.
It took five years to build and extracts one-minute, forty-five seconds of skiing perfection from the world's best racers.
It snakes two miles through a forest and drops a half-mile into the valley.
The winner will be crowned king of the hill in ski racing.
But these are uncommon times on the international skiing circuit, a period when a sport has collided with issues of life and death.
The racers are still mourning the death of Austrian champion Ulrike Maier, who was killed during a race two weekends ago when she slammed into a timing device on a course in Garmisch, Germany.
The accident has been so traumatic to the women's tour that many of the top racers have expressed second thoughts about racing in the Olympics. Even 1992 Olympic women's downhill gold medalist Kerrin Lee-Gartner of Canada says she does not yet know if she wants to defend her championship in Norway. And it was Gartner who led the lobbying to have the women's race placed on the same mountain as the men's, an Olympic first.
The downhill always has been about speed. But it also has been about danger. Two years ago in Wengen, Switzerland, an Austrian skier, Gernot Reinstadler, caught the tip of his ski in the webbing of a snow fence and was killed.
"Downhillers live with a certain fatalism," said Bernhard Russi, the designer of the past three Olympic downhill courses.
"We should never forget that we are in a sport using a helmet," said Russi, who won the 1972 Olympic downhill gold. "When you use a helmet, it is in some ways special."
For the past few weeks, racing officials have defended the safety of their courses. Russi says that Kvitfjell, like virtually every modern course, is safe for the men and the women.
"The racers should always have fear," he said. "If the fear is not there, then the respect for the downhill is not there."
