COUNTRY: | AUSTRIA |
ISSUE DATE: | 20 January 2015 |
CIRCULATION: | 150 000 |
STAMP DESIGN: | Marion Füllerer |


He was the fifth athlete to win three gold medals in the same Olympic games, and became the most successful athlete at the 1956 Winter Olympics. The Super-G event did not exist until the 1980s, added to the Olympics in 1988. Through 2014, Sailer remains the youngest male gold medalist in Olympic alpine skiing.
From 1948 through 1980, Olympic alpine ski events doubled as the FIS World Championships, therefore the Olympic champion in any event was also the world champion. The combined event was dropped after 1948 to make way for the giant slalom in 1950. No Olympic medals were awarded for the combined event from 1952 through 1984, but it was an FIS world championship from 1954 through 1980. During this era, it was conducted as a "paper" race, using the results of the three events. A stand-alone combined event returned to the world championships in 1982 and to the Olympics in 1988, with one run of downhill and two runs of slalom.
Two years after the 1956 Olympics, Sailer won three gold medals and one silver at the 1958 World Championships in Bad Gastein, Austria. He won five of six possible Olympic/World Championship races, missing a perfect record with a silver in the Bad Gastein slalom, seven-tenths of a second back. Sailer also repeated as champion in the combined for a seventh world title in two years. Due to controversy over his amateur status after receiving compensation for acting (and skiing) in movies, he retired from ski racing competition in 1959.
Stamp images and description thanks to Austrian Post - Österreichische Post