Singing Praises of Whistler/Blackcomb : Skiing: Located 75 miles north of Vancouver, resort has been getting rave reviews.

After conducting a survey of its readers and the media recently, Ski magazine ranked the top 20 ski resorts in North America, starting the list on its cover in this fashion:

1. Vail, Colorado.

2. (You’ll never guess!).

Etc.

OK, three guesses. No, it’s not Aspen . . . not Sun Valley . . . not Mammoth Mountain. Give up?

The second-most highly rated ski resort on this continent is 75 miles north of here, via mostly a two-lane highway that could use some patching and widening here and there. And it’s No. 2 only on the basis of points awarded in 11 categories--challenge, terrain quality, terrain extent, snow making, ski school, lifts, location, food, customer service, apres-ski and family programs.

Fittingly, perhaps, the computer picked high-tech, semi-urbanized Vail as No. 1, but when the same respondents were asked to name their favorite resorts solely on “gut feeling,” both readers and reporters moved No. 2 up to No. 1: It’s Whistler/Blackcomb, the new crown jewel of skiing.

And appropriately, there is a queen to reign over this snowy domain that rises more than 5,000 vertical feet above a forested valley in British Columbia. She runs a hotel that bears her name--no, it’s not Leona Helmsley--although the property was sold last year to the Japanese.

Nancy Greene Raine is Whistler/Blackcomb’s most visible resident and possibly its most valuable asset.

Ask her why the resort has suddenly become hot, and she says: “Whistler made it into the consciousness of the big time just recently because of customer satisfaction. And (that) really started happening about three years ago, when both mountains went to the peaks and opened up all those bowls.

“Plus, (there was) increased base development. Every year there’s more shops, hotels, restaurants--more apres-ski . . . and I think about five years ago we had enough apres-ski to satisfy people. Added to that was all the lift expansion, and suddenly the quality was just fantastic.”

Greene and her husband, Al Raine, a former coach of the Canadian ski team, opened the Nancy Greene Hotel in 1985, obviously capitalizing on her ski racing victories, which are manifest in the three huge trophy cases along one wall of the lobby. They contain, among other things:

--An Olympic gold medal for the giant slalom in 1968 at Grenoble, France.

--An Olympic silver medal for the slalom in the same Games.

--World Cups for being skiing’s top female racer in both 1967 and ‘68, the first two years those trophies were awarded--and the same years that France’s Jean-Claude Killy was the men’s champion.

“And here,” she said, pointing to a little medal with a threadbare ribbon attached, “is the first medal I ever got, just for racing, in 1958.”

Now 45 but looking maybe only one decade older than when she retired at 24, Nancy Greene Raine is justifiably proud of her reputation as Canada’s greatest skier, but she’d much rather talk about Whistler/Blackcomb and its coming of age as a world-class ski resort.

“We started noticing two years ago (in customer surveys), that we were comparing very favorably (with other resorts),” she said. “So, when that starts happening, then you say, ‘OK, they’re going to notice us sooner or later because people are going to tell them.’

“And the other thing is, people would come here not quite knowing what to expect, and when they got here, it was so much better than they had imagined that they (would) go away feeling, ‘I ought to tell people about this. It’s so good, and they’ve never heard of it.’ It’s kind of like a new find, and you want to tell somebody if you’ve been there and you know they haven’t.

“So, word of mouth is really important. Last year was fun because everybody that came was blown away. This year, everybody is coming with high expectations, so we’re all saying to our staff, to everybody in the valley, ‘We’ve got to work a lot harder this year because they expect more . . . to live up to expectations.’ ”

FIRST THE MOUNTAINS

Skiing started on Whistler Mountain in February, 1965, but not much happened until Blackcomb Mountain was developed next door in the winter of 1979-80. At the same time, Whistler Mountain’s north side was opened, and Whistler Village was created in the 2,200-foot-high valley, between the two mountains.

“Now, the toughest decision you have to make is to decide which (mountain) to go up, because they’re both right there, right on Mountain Square,” Greene said.

Indeed, the lifts go in both directions--an express gondola to Whistler’s Roundhouse Station, a trip that used to require an hour’s ride on four chairlifts now sliced to 18 minutes, or a triple chair that launches skiers into Blackcomb’s extensive lift system.

Between them, the mountains have 29 lifts with a total capacity of more than 44,000 skiers an hour. But the most impressive statistics are the vertical drops, or maximum changes in elevation from peaks to valley--5,006 feet on Whistler and 5,280 feet, or exactly one mile, on Blackcomb.

These are by far the greatest verticals in North America. For comparison’s sake, the vertical at Jackson Hole, Wyo., is 4,139 feet; at Aspen Highlands, Colo., 3,800 feet; at Heavenly Valley, near Lake Tahoe, 3,600 feet; at Sun Valley, Ida., 3,400 feet; at Vail, Colo., 3,200 feet, and at Snowbird, Utah, 3,100 feet.

The longest run at Whistler/Blackcomb is about seven miles, and more than half of the terrain is rated intermediate, with the balance almost evenly split between advanced and beginner.

For several years in the ‘80s, the mountains, which have separate owners, kept trying to outdo each other in erecting lifts to ever-higher points, until both finally peaked out. Now, they are continually upgrading their lifts.

“Whistler will close about the 25th of April this year,” Greene said. “Blackcomb will go to May 6, because the first week in May is a big Japanese holiday--it’s Golden Week. But anyway, Whistler is closing early, and they’re taking out the old gondola and the old chairlifts down the south side and replacing it all with quad (chairs) for next year.”

Whistler’s south side was developed first and still has its own base area, called Whistler Creek, but the new center of activity is about 10 minutes farther up the road in Whistler Village, where the mountains meet--in a spirit of both cooperation and competition.

“The cooperation (between Whistler and Blackcomb) is really done in destination marketing,” Greene said. “And the organizing body for that is the Whistler Resort Assn. . . . Both mountains sit on the board of directors there.

“They set a dual mountain lift rate, but they play games a little bit. In the local market, they’re very competitive, and the weapons are service.

“If you buy a single-day dual-mountain lift ticket, it’s quite expensive. So they price it that way to try to force the individual day-ticket buyer to decide on one mountain or the other. Once you get into three days and up, there’s a price break. The dual-mountain ticket becomes as cheap as a single-mountain ticket, per day. And the longer you stay, the cheaper it is.

“And then, on the (dual) ticket they have a bar code, and each time you use it, (it’s recorded), so if you ski both mountains, they split the revenue for the day. If you ski (just) one mountain, that mountain gets the revenue. Because of the bar code, there’s a tremendous amount of service on the mountain.

“Normally, the skier comes in and he’ll ski one mountain the first day, the other mountain the second day. And the third day, he’ll decide which one he wants to go back to. The fourth day, if he had a great time again, he may ski three days on one mountain. Then the last day, he’ll say, ‘Gee whiz, I’ve been skiing on Blackcomb all week. I’d better try Whistler again.’

“So, generally it splits, on a five-day ticket, three days on one and two on the other. (This encourages each mountain) to compete with service. The service up there is amazing. You know, you can go into the restaurant on top of the mountain, make a reservation for lunch, have dining (on) tablecloths, linen, fine wine, champagne. And just all kinds of little things.

“It’s a perfect example of the benefits of competition: The customer wins.”

DOWN IN THE VALLEY

The Nancy Greene Hotel has 90 rooms and 37 suites, making it the fourth-largest in the village. The new Chateau Whistler, built by CP Resorts, has 350 rooms and is situated near the main Blackcomb base area. There are condominiums springing up all over the place, but compared to Vail, the scale of development seems more in keeping with the environment.

“The (main) difference between Vail and here is that our valley is so heavily wooded that we have a tremendous amount of development in this valley, but you don’t see it,” Greene said. “And also, we don’t have a four-lane highway going through the middle of it. There’s a bit more of a pristine feeling here, still.

“And we have very, very strict controls. The whole valley has been master-planned. We have decided on the finite limit to growth.

“The other thing is the quality of the planning that went into the village here. We learned a lot from Vail. We had the planner who had worked extensively at Vail, not in the beginning but in subsequent years--Eldon Beck, the fellow from Stanford. He’s done a lot of the planning here.

“Our whole concept was to try to make it a European-style village, that (kind of) scale. And what we realized was that people who like the old European villages, what they like is the feeling of intimacy you can get, that is there because there are no cars.

“So, we designed a pedestrian village, and then in (building underground parking for) the village, we had some help from the B.C. and federal governments. There’s room for 1,500 cars under the village. Every hotel guest can park his car right under his hotel. That’s a tremendous asset.”

Although B.C. skiers tend to drive their own cars up the Sea-to-Sky Highway (Route 99), boosting weekend crowds and creating traffic congestion, skiers coming from outside the province for a week or so--about 15% of them from Japan, incidentally--can take advantage of frequent bus service direct from Vancouver Airport and not worry about a car.

AND IN THE SUMMER

The resort has one 18-hole golf course, designed by Arnold Palmer, with a second one due to be built this spring, and Bjorn Borg is lending his name to a planned tennis complex, but between 1,000 and 2,000 skiers also show up daily in the summer to join various ski teams training on Blackcomb’s glacier.

Greene said: “Now, what you do (in the summer), is you go up the two quads and there’s a shuttle bus that takes you from the top of the second quad on a road to the bottom of the third quad, because it’s around the corner of the mountain, on a different face.

“You go up the third quad and then you’re actually one mile up, where there are two T-bars . . . You’re on a ridge, at the top of the glacier. You just ski down the glacier. And now they’ve opened up the second glacier, which is four times bigger than the first one.

“What happens, though, is that when the weather is good, people will go and ski the glacier. When it’s not, there’s nobody up there.”

THE RACING RAINES

Although Al Raine has been active in Canadian ski racing since the early ‘60s, Greene said he was never her coach.

“Except in tennis,” she added.

“I didn’t actually meet him, romantically, until after I retired, in the spring of ’68.”

They have twin sons who just turned 20. “Charles and William,” she said. “And they both race. Willy is still racing. In fact, he has been invited to go with the national team for the month of January to some technical races in Europe. Charlie has stopped racing . . . and discovered all the other exciting things to do in life, so he’s working here now.”

Asked if she ever had second thoughts about retiring at the relatively early age of 24, Greene said: “Those days, there was no money in ski racing. I was one of those people who refused to deal under the table, so I was working in the summertime and saving my pennies and living on a pittance. And suddenly, when you win big, you know that there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (outside amateur racing), and it looked pretty good.

“I don’t regret it at all. To me, the pleasure of competition was getting to the top. To stay on top becomes a real job then, I think. The fun of it, the challenge and the satisfaction--probably, I had the best part of that.

“You’re just sitting up there waiting to be knocked off after that.”

Despite winning gold and silver medals, Greene still looks back on the 1968 Winter Olympics with mixed feelings because she could manage only a 10th in the downhill.

“To me, when I look back on it, my biggest single disappointment was that I didn’t get a medal in the downhill,” she said. “Downhill was always my best event as a rising skier, and then my skiing (technique) improved.

“I just blew the race. I won the next three World Cup downhills. . . . (But at Grenoble,) I cried for two days. That was my biggest frustration.

“Probably the one I wanted to win the most was the downhill. People might not realize, but I came in second to Erika Schinneger four or five times (in 1967).”

Schinneger, who won the women’s downhill in the 1966 World Championships, went through four sex-change operations the following year and was ultimately removed from the Austrian team--after becoming Erik.

“Because she wasn’t racing (in 1968)-- he was now out of it--I was really the No. 1 (female) downhiller that year,” Greene said.

“By the way, I’m sort of looking forward to meeting Schinneger in the next couple of weeks. I’m going to Austria for the Hahnenkamm (at Kitzbuhel Jan. 20-21). They’re having a legends race, and he will be there. I’ve never met him since he retired.

“From everything I’ve read, he’s had a tremendously interesting life. He’s just written a book, you know, called, ‘My Victory Over Myself’. I haven’t read the English version--I’ve just seen the German version--and I would like to read it. He has children and has really come to grips with everything that happened. Yes, he is the father of children.”

Although the Raines sold their hotel to a Japanese company, IPEC, Greene said: “I have a long-term contract to do marketing and PR. Al has a one-year contract as general manager, but he wants to retire--he’s 47. He’s also chairman of the Whistler Resort Assn., and is the kind of person who’s a builder. To run the hotel is a job that someone else can do.

“But as long as my name is still on the hotel, I’ll be personally involved on a regular basis with it.

“Now, I come over in the morning and say to Al, ‘What should I do?’ And he says, ‘Go and ski with the guests.’

“I come down after skiing and I say, ‘Oh, (the skiing) is great. What do you want me to do?’ And he says, ‘Go down to the bar and have a drink with the guests, you know?’ ”