The finals of this season’s FIS Alpine Skiing World Cup will be held next week in Sun Valley, Idaho. The overall World Cup will be awarded along with cups in each of the disciplines. This year there isn’t a whole lot of suspense for the overall World Cups. Marco Odermatt has already clinched the men’s and Federica Brignone may not have clinched, but has a substantial lead for the women.

Fifty years ago in 1975 that was not the case, at least for the men. There were three men with a chance to win the overall cup going into the final races and their names are legendary: Franz Klammer, Ingemar Stenmark, and Gustavo Thoeni. In true Hollywood fashion, it came down to the final race which that year was a parallel slalom. For those not familiar with Alpine racing, that is head-to-head racing, not the more traditional timed individual racing. Both Thoeni and Stenmark won their way through the brackets and faced each other for first place. Thoeni won which gave him the overall cup!!

Gustavo Thoeni Today

Gustavo Thoeni was born in Trafoi, Italy in 1951. Trafoi is a skiing area in the southern Tyrol so Thoeni began skiing at an early age. His first pair of skis were handmade by his grandfather. His father taught him to ski and he was racing by age 14. At 17 he was named to the Italian national team. He made his World Cup debut in the winter of 1969/70 and started off with a GS win in Val D’Isere. In that season he had 4 wins and 9 podiums. The next season he would have 11 podiums out of 17 races and win the overall World Cup at the age of 19!

Thoeni would follow that with overall cups in 1972 and 1973. He would finish second to his teammate Piero Gros in 1974 before winning again in 1975.

In World Championship competitions Thoeni would win 5 gold medals and 2 silver. He would compete in three Olympics (1972, 1976, 1980) winning one gold and two silver medals. Thoeni would retire from competition after the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics.

Thoeni was primarily a technical event skier, but I was surprised to find out he had a second place finish in the infamous Hahnenkamm downhill! He also had several Combined wins which would have involved skiing downhills.

Thoeni would become a coach for the Italian team and in fact, was the personal coach for Alberto Tomba. Eventually Thoeni became the General Manager for the Italian National Ski Team. He retired in 1999 and now runs a hotel back in his native Trafoi.

What about the women’s overall World Cup in 1975? There was a certain lack of suspense as Annemarie Moser-Proell won her fifth consecutive overall World Cup. She won the Downhill discipline cup and the GS discipline cup winning 5 races in row at one point! She was fourth in the Slalom discipline, just in case you thought she skipped those races. Just a note, Super G was not an event until 1982, I believe.

Annemarie Moser-Proell 1980 Olympics Lake Placid

Born Annemarie Proell in 1953, she grew up on a farm in Kleinarl, Austria. The only way into town was by foot or skis so she started skiing at a very young age. She made her World Cup debut at age 14! She began her string of overall World Cups in 1971 at age 17.

In 1974 she married Herbert Moser and used the hyphenated last name of Moser-Proell.  After winning the 1975 overall cup, Moser-Proell would take a season off to care for her father who was dying from lung cancer. He died in June of 1976. Moser-Proell would return to racing for the 1976/77 season and finish second in the overall. In 1979 she would win her sixth overall World Cup.

In World Championship competitions Moser-Proell would win 5 golds, 2 silvers, and 2 bronze medals. She competed in two Olympics 1972 and 1980. She skipped the 1976 Olympics to care for her father. She won silver in downhill and GS at the Sapporo Olympics and crowned her career with a gold in downhill at the Lake Placid 1980 Olympics.

Moser-Proell set a couple of marks in her career. Her 62 World Cup victories stood as the record for women until Lindsey Vonn surpassed it and then of course Mikaela Shiffrin surpassed Vonn. Moser-Proell’s reaction when Vonn was approaching her record was “Records are there to be broken.” One record that Moser-Proell has that I doubt anyone will break was winning 11 consecutive downhills! That was across two seasons winning 8 in a row at the end of one season and then the first 3 in the next season.