Heini Hemmi on his Olympic victory "They wanted to give us sleeping pills before the second run"

In blue Sport, Heini Hemmi remembers his gold medal run in the 1976 Olympic giant slalom, ambivalent aids and throat compresses with gentian schnapps.

Everyone has their own techniques for overcoming nervousness. Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, the former world-class footballer, once drank two glasses of cognac before a European Cup final when he was young - his knees were shaking so badly. Bernhard Russi once said in an interview that he was close to a nervous breakdown before the 1972 Olympic downhill in Sapporo and that he anaesthetized himself more or less with night-time sport.

Heini Hemmi, the Swiss giant slalom ace of the 1970s, abstained from using substances to help him before the second run at the 1976 Olympic Games in Innsbruck - even though the federation offered him "substances", as he recounted in the talk "Legends for eternity" on blue.

Hemmi & Co. tried it with booze wraps

The background? The two giant slalom races in Innsbruck took place on two days. Because two different sides of the valley were prepared, gates, cameras and the rest of the equipment had to be repositioned, which took time. So Hemmi and Co. had to wait a whole night before they could start the second run. A test of nerves. The people in charge of the association also suspected this. Hemmi says: "They wanted to give us sleeping pills because of the mental strain." But that wasn't an option for Hemmi - he preferred to sleep badly. "We might have slept at the start otherwise," he says. "Fortunately, everything went well."

But because the air was dry and dusty, Hemmi, like many other athletes, had a sore throat. "We were advised to make compresses. But there was only gentian schnapps. And it stank horribly, so we took the compresses away in the middle of the night."

"Stenmark had let one out"

Stories that Hemmi can laugh about today. And for good reason: he still skied to victory after finishing in third place on the first day. Ingemar Stenkmark, the Swedish top shot, was in the lead when Hemmi set off on his second run; he had only been eighth in the first run. "It didn't really happen that Stenmark started ahead of me on the second run. I knew from the start that I had to give everything or nothing." When Hemmi skied under a chairlift in the middle of his run, he heard the announcer on a megaphone talking about a "huge spectacle". "I knew then that Stenmark had let one out."

But Hemmi outdid Stenmark. And even Gustav Thöni, who was more than a second faster in the first run, was unable to displace the Swiss; the Italian came fourth, the Swiss Ernst Good took silver and Stenmark bronze. "Obviously Thöni had slept even worse than me. He slowed down completely," says Hemmi.

Hotly courted after Olympic victoryHeini Hemmi: "I received thousands of fan letters, love letters and other offers"

Heini Hemmi was once a crash pilot"I was sent to a psychologist - I had to play games in the sandpit"

Door to door with the tennis kingHeini Hemmi: "That's life with Roger Federer as a neighbor"

He even advertised underwearHemmi reveals: "This is how Bernhard Russi and I became the first professional skiers in Switzerland"

The whole talk with Heini Hemmi in the video