The Downhill Racers (1963) by Oakley Hall (ed. Jerry eBooks 2021)
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Overview: Downhill racing is a lonely competition. No one understands what it is like except the racers. . . . Always, in the downhill, there is a kind of chilly, gray, shivering mood, and yet there is the inner warmth of pride that you can do this well, the knowledge that it is a brave thing to do, and, over all, that great, tight constriction of wanting so much to win. . . .” Thus Jack Roche, top-seeded skier, central character, and narrator, indicates the tremendous pressures that shape the drama of this exciting new novel by Oakley Hall.
Jack and his friend, Chris Leary, are traveling the ski circuit during a season of racing trials preceding the Olympic Winter Games. With Anne and Georgie, girls competing in the women’s trials, they drift into the welcome companionship of a foursome as they move from Vermont to Colorado to California. With every race, won or lost, the necessity to win looms larger, for each of the four a different shadow of threat. How each deals with if affects the rest, and the tangle of their personal lives involves Jack Roche most of all.
The world of amateur ski competition is immediate and alive in Oakley Hall’s fascinating portrayal: the constant pitting of skill and nerve against danger and unquenchable fear recalls the classic spirit of Olympian endurance feats. But the challenges, Jack Roche discovers, are not all obvious. As in any arena, the contest can bring, along with glory and fame, the mania to win that transcends reason, jealousy that degrades friendship, ambition that betrays love. The four young people in this crucible of championship strife are driven, by themselves and by others who count on them to win, into situations that demand their actions as the people they really are, not merely as performers wearing racing numbers on an icy slope. It is this dynamic interplay of human circumstances that gives The Downhill Racers the relentless reality of great storytelling, with a background as vivid as it is original in modern fiction.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
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