After his fourth consecutive season title in downhill in 1978, he began a prolonged slump until the end of the 1981 season. He may have been affected by his brother's spinal cord injury in a downhill race, as well as a change of ski supplier (from Fischer to Kneissl). Unable to make the strong four-member Austrian downhill team for the 1980 Olympics, Klammer could not defend his Olympic title at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Rather than retire, he worked long and hard at a comeback; finally in December 1981, after another ski change from Kneissl to Blizzard, he won at Val-d'Isère. The following season he regained the World Cup Downhill title, his fifth, followed by the 1984 victory at Kitzbuehel, his fourth on the Hahnenkamm. At the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo, (then Yugoslavia, now Bosnia), Klammer finished a disappointing tenth on a less-than-challenging course on Bjelašnica. The race was won by the brash Bill Johnson of the U.S., an excellent , who had recently won his first World Cup race on a shortened course at Wengen. Johnson had promising training runs and publicly predicted his Olympic victory. Klammer had been involved in a controversy with Johnson when he described him to a teammate as a nasenbohrer after he won a race earlier in the season. The term is slang in some German speaking areas for a rookie but its literal translation is nose picker.