He made only the small print in British newspapers awash with oceans of words welcoming home Ellen MacArthur, but this Austrian is as much what courage and solitary defiance is all about as is our satellite-navigated queen of the waves.
Maier’s return to the top of his mountain is the stuff of white-knuckle daring and perseverance after an accident that almost cost him a leg, threatened to take his life, yet could not prevent him coming back to capture one of the rare gold medals to elude him in his prime.
MacArthur and Maier are two of a rare kind. They are obsessives, champions of the power of the mind over the physical on land and sea.
At the Nagano Winter Olympic Games in 1998, I watched Maier as he hurtled down Mount Karamatsu at a speed approaching 80mph. Pushing the limits recklessly far, the downhill racer missed a turn; he was tossed like a rag doll into the blue sky, and when he hit the snow he cartwheeled again and again before crashing to a motionless rest. He dislocated a shoulder, bruised discs in his back, damaged his sternum, had a grotesquely swollen knee and a mass of contusions.
Three days later, Maier won the Olympic super-G event; after three more days he triumphed in the giant slalom.
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The Herminator is a man of action rather than words. Born to parents who were ski instructors, he was bypassed by the Austrian elite system. Too small, they said. Then, after he had a rapid adolescent growth spurt, too gawky. Maier went his own way, through bricklaying, bodybuilding and demonic six-hours-a-day training.
He was at the top of his world when the big accident came in August 2001. Riding his motorcycle on the snaking pass to Austria’s Olympic sports camp, he was hit by a Mercedes. Maier’s motorbike was kaput, and so nearly was he.
“Hermann is alive because he had the perfect chain of first-aid,” observed Dr Johannes Zeibig, one of the medical team who pieced him together and supervised what, even to them, was an almost unbelievable recovery. The fact that his personal physician was at the scene within minutes saved him. The availability of a helicopter, the readiness of orthopaedic and plastic surgeons to operate for six hours, and specialist knowledge of his blood counts taken daily in training all came together.
Above all there was Maier’s indomitable willpower.
“Single-handed sailing is in the mind,” observed Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the first non-stop round-the-world solo mariner. So it is in skiing.
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Six weeks after his road crash, I visited Maier in the Austrian Alps. There was a new motorcycle near by, but first he was learning to walk again — slowly, painfully, every step an effort. “I don’t talk about skiing,” he said. “I can’t feel or think about it. I cannot put on a boot, so what would be the point?” His grey-blue eyes showed pain he would also not talk about.
“Look,” he said impatiently. “My goals are going to the toilet alone, taking a shower. I don’t have goals I cannot make. My goals have to be human.”
More than three years on, the 32-year-old Maier appeared to be competing against athletic decline. The body looks similar, but he still does not have the same feeling in the right leg to ski downhill as he once did.
But he summoned two giant slalom runs at Bormio, Italy, to be world champion by fractions of a second. “It’s unbelievable,” he said. “I really gave everything in the second run, but a medal was so unexpected.” Not any medal, but a gold for extreme human striving.