Olympics by Jean-Claude : Killy’s Name Sold Committee on Albertville; Now He Tries to Handle the Headaches

Jean-Claude Killy, looking slight for a legend, sits behind his desk in the office of the organizing committee for the 1992 Olympic Winter Games.

He wears a blue dress shirt by Polo and a tie. His brow is furrowed, in Gallic resignation. He makes jokes at his own expense. The effect is anything but Olympian for the co-chairman, who has a detail or two left to attend.

They’re still pouring concrete at the local railway station in this sleepy town where the installation of parking meters was an issue in the last mayoral election. There have been complaints about apathy and price gouging. Thus, what little thought the local populace is supposedly investing on the Games centers on how it can separate tourists from their francs.

Some skiers fear that no one will finish the Killy-designed downhill course. Sand from the foundation came through the ice on the speedskating oval. Springs below the ski jump threatened to collapse the facility.

In other words, as Olympic Games go, everything is right on schedule.

“I always recall the last three weeks in L.A., always,” Killy says. “The only thing they could talk about was the (Soviet) boycott and the smog and the traffic jams and the security problems. And we have all that as a lesson because our organization is not as big as the Summer Olympics, but we are on 13 sites. That means a lot of headaches.”

Imagine this: Jean-Claude Killy, 47, desk-bound and besieged by administrative detail.

In 1968, when Killy invented skiing, at least as far as the younger mass audience was concerned, a Democrat sat in the White House, as his party had in 28 of the previous 36 years. Joe Namath’s white shoes caused a furor. Wilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia 76ers took two shots from the floor in the second half of the Game 7 loss to the Boston Celtics in the NBA’s Eastern finals. Gene Mauch, boy manager of the Phillies, was fired for the first time.

Nearly all of his contemporaries have long since been passed by the march of generations, but Killy’s legend is undiminished. Twenty-three years after his Grand Slam at Grenoble, he remains the first name in skiing.

Even among skiers, 23 years have brought few challenges.

“Maybe Franz Klammer,” says Bob Beattie, the coach of the U.S. team in ’68 and now an ABC commentator, naming the Austrian downhill champion of the 1970s. “It would be between the two of them.

“Killy had that dash to him, always attacking, looking like he was going like hell. People at home watching, most of whom would never even think about skiing, could associate with that.

“It was a very colorful sport then, probably more than it is now. He was French, and they’re a colorful people. Television was just becoming an entity, so there was a lot more interest. People were seeing (ski racing) for the first time.”

Bingo! When Austria’s Tony Sailer scored the only other Alpine grand slam, at Cortina, Italy, in 1956, it may have been a big deal in Europe, but to Americans, it was a bunch of kids playing on a hillside half a world away.

There was no American TV there. U.S. newspapers relied on wire-service reports, which concentrated on the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. On Feb. 4, when Sailer won his third gold medal, in the downhill, the headline in this newspaper read: “Russia Shuts Out U.S. Hockey Team.” Sailer wasn’t mentioned until the 11th paragraph.

Twelve years later, when Killy staged his grand slam, he became an international superstar.

“I thought it was going to last four years,” he said. “And then I would have a little money and I’d go back to Val d’Isere. I was going to manage my father’s ski shop. It was about twice the size of this office.

“Four years is an Olympiad. That means more Olympic champions kicking the old ones out. Didn’t work.”

Killy shrugs, still embarrassed by his celebrity. It has made him a fortune in commercial endorsements, but he pays dues, too, starting with his participation in this decade-long headache. A local from the province of Savoy, Killy became involved in the Olympic bidding process in the early 1980s, just so the national government would allocate money to improve the local infrastructure, building roads and bringing in the bullet train from Paris.

Unlike some Olympic sites, Albertville isn’t a resort but a jumping-off point at the base of the French Alps for resorts in the mountains, such as Val d’Isere where Killy grew up.

The Albertville bid encompassed multiple sites throughout the region, concentrating on Killy’s legend as its selling point. Other bidders showed off charts and graphs and architects’ drawings. Albertville came to the International Olympic Committee offices in Lausanne, Switzerland, with a video showing a young skier from a tiny mountain hamlet--like Killy!--dreaming of winning fame through the Olympics.

When Albertville got the Winter Games, Killy stayed on to help manage them and lived to regret it. Squabbles broke out between towns over who would get which event. There was a demonstration in the streets of Chambery, with people carrying anti-Killy signs. Three days later, he resigned.

Even then, Killy allowed himself to be talked into returning. Of course, it took no less then French President Francois Mitterand, Prime Minister Jacques Chirac and IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch to persuade him--but he’s back.

“I think he’s kind of suffering through this thing,” Beattie says.

“It’s kind of interesting, Killy running an Olympics in France after being the star of one previously. I mean, I’m really glad he’s doing it. We had a chance to talk a year and a half ago. This is not really what I think he loves to do in life. . . .”

The irony is that unlike the starry-eyed kid in the video, Killy never dreamed the dream his life turned out to be.

It just happened.

The stereotypical Savoy skier is a hayseed from a small mountain town, for whom Paris is as distant as Beijing. In these circles, Killy was a relative boulevardier. He was born in a suburb of Paris. His father, a former Spitfire pilot for the Free French, moved the family to Val d’Isere when Jean-Claude was 2, and opened a ski shop. Jean-Claude skied for fun.

“I did it because it was the only thing you could do then in Val d’Isere,” Killy says. “In 1950, there was no hockey, no nothing.

“(The fulfilled dream) would make a very nice story, but it wouldn’t be true. You try to be better week after week, but that doesn’t tell you you’re going to be an Olympic champion. I hear guys asking me, ‘When you came to Grenoble, did you know you were going to win three gold medals?’ If I had known I was going to win one , I would have signed (for it) with both hands.

“I had no master plan. I had no career plan. My ambition was applied to next week, never more than that, because we didn’t have much information on the outside world. We were very isolated. We didn’t have television. We didn’t know an Austrian team existed.”

He was soon to find out.

Beattie said: “We first met Killy in 1961 in Val d’Isere. He was 18, the same age as (U.S. racers) Jimmy Heuga and Billy Kidd. He was just a young kid then, bumping all over the place, falling down and going fast. It was pretty obvious he was a talent.”

At 19, Killy was invited to join the French team. Coach Honore Bonnet was enchanted by Killy’s daredevil style but advised him that he was going to have to start finishing races if he wanted to win some. At 21, the prodigy Killy was entered in all three men’s Alpine events at the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Olympics but busted out, falling in the downhill, losing a binding in the slalom and finishing fifth in the giant slalom, which he had been favored to win.

By 25, Killy was considered the world’s top skier. Enormous pressure accrued. With the 1968 Winter Olympics coming up on French soil at Grenoble, he was the great national hope to end years of Austrian domination. Ski-wear and equipment manufacturers lined up to sign him.

Killy actually asked his new friend, Mark McCormack, the American agent who was making fortunes for Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, if he was better off retiring now, lest defeat tarnish his budding commercial appeal.

The old Olympics were colliding with the new Olympics.

Television had arrived. Commercial pressure was a fact. IOC President Avery Brundage, trying to hold back the tide, ruled that all trade names and logos would have to be removed from skis and other equipment and clothing.

When Killy won the downhill, heralding the new age, his friend, Michel Arpin, rushed out to embrace him at the finish line. On Arpin’s back, turned flush into the TV cameras for all the world to see, was emblazoned the name, “Dynamic,” the maker of Killy’s skis.

The downhill brought the first of his gold medals. He thought he had blown it before the race, skiing over a rough spot and scraping the wax off his skis.

“I said, ‘OK, it’s all over, it’s gone,’ ” he said. “We didn’t have time to dry and warm the skis so we could apply wax again. The Olympics were gone. I had a friend with me and I said, ‘OK, we have to do it that way now. I’ll have to ski even harder. I’ll take all the chances, absolutely all that might give me the gold medal.’

“I was the favorite, so you cannot show despair or weakness or fear. You cannot do that when you’re on top of the hill, getting ready to ski the race of your life, knowing that it’s going to be decided by a few hundredths of a second.”

Voila! Killy launched himself off the top with his famous leaping start, invented shortcuts the rest of the field hadn’t imagined and won--by 0.08 of a second.

“The guy was that kind of athlete,” Beattie said. “What you very rarely find, and it’s the same in almost every individual sport, is the guy that has that kind of a mind. I mean, there are very few people who can concentrate like a Killy can. I think that’s what defined him.”

Killy won the giant slalom easily. His third victory, in the slalom, was decided in a committee room. The race was skied in a dense fog. The Austrian hot gun, Karl Schranz, complained that someone had crossed in front of him during his run, causing him to ski off course. He was given another run, turned in the best total time and was congratulated at the finish line as the winner. Upon further review, a jury of appeals ruled by a vote of 3-2 (two Frenchmen joining a Swiss) that Schranz had missed a gate before he saw the mystery intruder. Killy was moved from second place into history.

Not that he was worried about it. Thinking he had won two golds, he had already gone back to Val d’Isere and started to party heartily.

“There was a two-day victory party with everyone in the village,” Killy said. “You know the two-horsepower Citroen? We had 13 people in it, to tell you how it was.”

And now, for the rest of his life. . . .

Out to make some francs, not to mention bucks, Killy had McCormack sign him up with half the U.S. economy. There have been reports that his countrymen were offended by the sight of their Jean-Claude hawking Chevrolets, but Killy denies this. He says there was real resentment when he threw over the French company, Dynamic, and sold his prestigious endorsement to the American ski company, Head.

He never quite made it back to his dad’s ski shop in Val d’Isere, either.

He became a jet-setter, racing cars and flying helicopters. To escape high French taxes, he moved across the Swiss border to Cologny, a posh suburb of Geneva where his neighbors include Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia and Charles Aznevour.

He had a brief fling with the U.S. pro skiing circuit, coming off a long layoff to become the class of the competition once more.

He made a movie, “Snow Job,” and married his beautiful leading lady, Danielle Gaubert, who had been a leading light on the Parisian night-life circuit and recently had been divorced from Rhadames Trujillo, son of the dictator of the Dominican Republic.

In general, Killy was rich and getting richer.

He also was becoming more frankly American in style, reflecting the new pro-U.S. vogue in France that emerged in the 1970s. He learned aggressive U.S. marketing concepts from McCormack. Mountain kid no longer, he got the telephone in his car.

“I started enjoying my life more, understanding what was going on and taking an interest in it,” he said. “That wasn’t the case in my first four years (after Grenoble).”

In the early 1980s, he joined the Albertville committee, expending enormous energy on the dark-horse bid. Albertville officials thought they would need the personal touch to win attention; Killy visited IOC officials in 36 countries. He became an intimate friend of the powerful IOC chief, Samaranch. At the Calgary Winter Olympics in 1988, Samaranch had but two official guests, King Juan Carlos of Spain and Killy.

Skeptics say Samaranch, determined to bring the ’92 Summer Games to his native Barcelona, Spain, needed a way to placate France, because Paris was also a contender, and bought the French off with the ’92 Winter Games.

Be it ever so political, it was a coup for Albertville and Savoy. However, everyone quickly fell to quarreling over the spoils and attacking the front man, national hero or no national hero.

Killy’s Olympic teammates, Leo Lacroix and Marielle Goitschel, both representing Les Menuires, which had a women’s Alpine event switched out of town, blasted him publicly. Killy was called dictatorial. The mayor of Les Menuires said he “has adopted the methods of American businessmen who have no consideration for the human impact of their decision.”

In December of 1986, three days after 3,000 demonstrated against him in Chambery, Killy resigned.

“My pride was hurt,” he said. “It was stupid, my fault.

“I understand today, but I didn’t then because I thought, ‘Gee, we had gotten the Games for these guys.’ If I had said the night before getting the Games, ‘Look guys, to get the Games it will take this and that,’ they’d have said, ‘Do anything you want, we don’t care, because you’re going to get us the road and the train and the telephone system.’ So my surprise was very large.”

Killy’s resignation stunned France. A poll showed him to be more popular than ever. Goitschel and Lacroix said they had spoken in anger.

Killy had a real problem, however. Danielle had cancer, and he didn’t want to leave her side. On Nov. 3, 1987, 11 months after Killy left the committee and one day after their 14th wedding anniversary, Danielle died.

Saddened and in no mood to work, Killy stayed away for four more months before Mitterand, Chirac and Samaranch prevailed upon him to return.

Four years later, all he has to worry about are some games and 10,000 details.

“We believe we have everything under control in most instances, but actually we’ll know after the Games,” Killy says, choosing French fatalism over Ueberrothian optimism.

“There is no way to tell. We know the athletes are going to come, we hope. We have contracted for 1,500 buses, so they will be here. That will be helpful with our traffic plan. If that is going to be too tight or too loose, there’s no way to tell.

“We obviously have some weather considerations we don’t have control over. That can make a big difference. So I’m tempted to tell you, ‘Yes, we have everything under control.’ But I’d like to see you the next day after the Games and we can go over it again.”

Killy says he has “no idea” what he’ll do afterward. Because of his friendship with Samaranch, he is being mentioned as a possible successor to the IOC president, but he says that is impossible.

His legend will continue as before. What, him surprised?

“Always!” he says. “Every morning I get up and I’m surprised, which is something I cherish because it shows it doesn’t go to my head.

“I’ve learned in the States to remain curious about life and appreciative of every day that’s coming and enthusiastic about things that are thrown at you--which is typically American.”

Our very own Alpine hero, by adoption.