Sunday at Snow Basin, weather permitting, the men will tackle a 1.9 mile course known, in a rare bit of understated nomenclature, as “Grizzly.” Here’s a taste of what racers will face: Speeds of 85 mph–and that’s not in a narrow tube like in skeleton. That’s out there, on your own, unmoored, where you can head in any direction your skis take you. Like, say, into a tree.

Right out of the gate is a stretch known as Ephraim’s Face, a plummeting 70-percent incline that will push racers to 75mph in just 10 seconds. Most of us have owned cars that didn’t do zero-to-75 that fast.

The course is studded with four jumps–one of them blind, coming up after a hard bend, and another right in front of a not-too-cushiony TV scaffold–that will slingshot racers 150 feet through the air.

For a few extra giggles, race officials hose down Grizzly with water, turning it into a slick sheet of ice. At the bottom of the hill, after digging their ski edges into that granite over and over again, racers will feel like their quadriceps have taken a shotgun blast. That’s assuming they get to the bottom of the hill.

Gallows humor aside, the stakes are seriously high. In the past four months, the downhill circuit has witnessed a pair of horrific crashes. On Nov. 18, Austrian Hannes Trinkl was nearly killed after fracturing his skull during a training run. Trinkl, the bronze-medalist in Nagano, recovered and could take the gold tomorrow. Switzerland’s Silvano Beltrametti was not so lucky. A crash during a World Cup race in Val d’Isere, France, left Beltrametti paralyzed from the waist down. As in NASCAR, crashes are simply part of the game–even, in some cases, a badge of honor. Who can forget Austrian skiing legend Hermann Maier’s ugly spill at Nagano four years ago? Asked afterward how bad it was, Maier answered, “It wasn’t Lufthansa.”

In the downhill, guts get you nearly as far as skill, which, historically, has given American skiers a fighting chance against the far superior technique of European powerhouses like Austria and Norway. (Of the four Alpine events, downhill is the least technical.) It also sets the stage for some mighty upsets. In each of the last two Winter Games, a racer has come out of nowhere to win the gold. At Nagano, France’s Jean-Luc Cretier threw a wrench into the Maier-led Austrian machine. (Maier, by the way, is sidelined this year after breaking his leg in a motorcycle crash.) American Tommy Moe took the gold medal at Lillehammer in 1994-and never won another race.

Here in Salt Lake, however, Alpine experts are predicting, well, something more predictable. As terrifying as Grizzly is, it’s about as technical as downhill gets. “It’s so steep they’re trying to bring us back and forth a lot so we don’t get out of control,” top U.S. medal hopeful Daron Rahlves said on Tuesday. Ordinarily, this would be terrific news for Rahlves, 28, a sharp racer who won the Super G world championship in January 2001. But this season so far has been a disaster for the Sugar Bowl, Calif., native. Though he’s improved of late, consistent mistakes have kept him off the podium thus far. His final training run Saturday at Snow Basin, meanwhile, was mediocre at best.

If you’re looking for a horse to bet on–and patriotism isn’t an issue for you–lay some money on Austria’s Stephan Eberharter. No one has benefited more from Maier’s absence than this 32-year-old comeback kamikaze, who was all but washed up in 1996 when his coaches demoted him to the Europa Cup, skiing’s equivalent of triple-A baseball. Eberharter snapped back into form, returned to Austria’s A-team and took silver in the giant slalom at Nagano. In 2001, he dominated the World Cup downhill circuit, clinching the season title last week in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

Like so many other sports, life in the downhill is a series of hot and cold streaks. And no one right now is hotter than Eberharter. In this particular sport, however, the course often gets the final word. And on a run called Grizzly, it could really make some noise.