TWIN PEAKS.(champion skier Hermann Maier)

Wherever Hermann Maier goes, a small oompah band seems to follow. Most of the time, it is a ragged little outfit: a bass drum and a tuba, perhaps, with a clarinet tweedling beside them. But sometimes, on the occasion of great victories--Maier may be the best Alpine skier of his generation, and is one of the most beloved figures in Austria--his fans pull together a full brass band. Last February, in his home town of Flachau, in the high Alps south of Salzburg, the chalets were hung with banners of pigs on skis (Maier's lucky symbol, the "Gluck Schwein"). A small stage had been erected in the town square, and the Burgermeister and a silver-haired m.c. were taking turns paying tribute. Though an Arctic wind whistled down from the surrounding peaks, the band was scantily clad in lederhosen and kneesocks, with boiled-wool jackets and eagle feathers in their hats. Their director, Rupert Weitgasse, had even written a special tune for the occasion: "The Hermann Maier March."

"Aber schnell jetzt!" a woman beside me mumbled, hopping up and down and clutching herself to keep warm. But there was no hurrying this ceremony. In the previous few weeks, the people of Flachau had witnessed a kind of Second Coming: Maier's miraculous return, after a near-fatal motorcycle accident, to a sport that in Austria is almost a religion. Two thirds of Austria is mountainous, and skiing is both the predominant pastime and a principal industry: a number of large ski manufacturers are Austrian, and many towns survive on ski tourism alone. The country has long dominated the sport of ski racing: Austrian men have won the over-all World Cup title five times in the past six years, and in 2001 they won every major Alpine title. "People like to say that in Austria skiing is like football, baseball, and basketball put together, but that doesn't capture the magnitude of it," Phil McNichol, the head coach of the United States men's ski team, says. "You can stay at the tiniest Gasthof in the smallest village, and there will be this little hausfrau there, and if you ask her about skiing she'll start rattling off World Cup split times from ten years ago. It's shocking."

My cousin Heimo, who lives in a village a couple of hours from Flachau, likes to rail against the "mythologizing" of Austrian skiers. "It's absurd, this hero worship," he told me when I visited. "They do well in this one activity, so we assume they can do anything. Our political system is full of former ski stars." Yet Heimo still remembers how it felt, thirty years ago, when Karl (the Great) Schranz, a prohibitive favorite at the Sapporo Olympics, was disqualified for violating his amateur status. "It was a national catastrophe," he says. "When Schranz came back to Vienna, the crowd that met him in the Heldenplatz was larger than during the Anschluss." Heimo's seventy-three-year-old mother, Helga, was washing dishes in the next room while we talked. "If Japan weren't so far away," she joked, hefting a pot like a battle-axe, "we would have declared war."

Maier, who is thirty-one, is the ideal archetype for such sagas. Blond and blue-eyed, with a face as sturdy as a Kugelhopf, he's a simple man with epic ambitions--"more Hector than Odysseus," Heimo says. Like most Austrian skiers, Maier has never moved away from home, and never quite adjusted to his celebrity. When we first met, in Flachau, he had just come from filming a live talk show in Berlin, in a cavernous auditorium of the kind usually favored by televangelists. He had spent an hour sitting stiffly on a couch beside Jennifer Lopez and Peter Falk, neither of whom had much idea what their wacky German host was saying. When Lopez walked offstage after her interview, the cameramen focussed on her famous behind, then replayed the shot in lurid slow motion. "I was too shy to watch," Maier told me.

I'd often heard Maier's manner described as robotic, and his stilted English seemed to bear this out ("I fell on my button and it was big swollen"). But when we switched to the singsong of his native dialect, with its amiable gutturals and contractions, he showed a certain gruff good nature--almost an innocence. "I've stayed pretty much the same," he said. "I'm a skier and I live for skiing."

Maier's legend is rooted, in part, in his unpromising adolescence. He first put on skis at the age of three and was racing by five. His father, Hermann, Sr., was a local racer who now runs a ski school in Flachau. He drilled his son in textbook techniques, then sent him off, as a ninth grader, to a nearby ski academy in Schladming. Less than a year later, the academy sent him back. Maier had Osgood-Schlatter syndrome--a growth disorder that often strikes young athletes, inflaming the tendon that connects the kneecap to the tibia. From the ages of sixteen to twenty-two, when most future Olympians are competing in national races, Maier worked as a bricklayer in Flachau. He seems to have enjoyed the work, but he never stopped skiing. In the winters, he would wake up before dawn, stick a few tree branches in the slopes above town, and work on his slaloming technique. He became an avid weight lifter, adding nearly sixty pounds of pure muscle, and grew nine inches in two years. By the time he was nineteen, he was a certified instructor at his father's ski school and was no longer suffering from the growth disorder. By twenty-one, he was champion of Salzburg. By twenty-four, he had won his first World Cup race.

The World Cup ski circuit is among the most gruelling and dangerous sporting events in the world. It consists of around forty races on two or more continents over the course of six months. Unlike the Winter Olympics or the biennial World Championships, the World Cup is held every year. It's a team competition as well as an individual one: each time a racer wins or places in the top thirty, he racks up points for his country as well as for himself--from a hundred points for first place to one point for thirtieth. There are four kinds of events: slalom, giant slalom, super-G, and downhill. Slaloms have shorter, slower courses with sharper turns; the downhills and super-Gs focus on speed, with spectacular jumps and long stretches of pure gliding. Many skiers specialize in only one event, but to win the over-all title--the most coveted prize in skiing--a racer has to dominate two or three, skiing at a death-defying pace week after week. An Olympic gold medal, by contrast, is just a good day's work.