The Olympics According to Jean-Claude

He is one of the most glamorous skiers of all time, a French national hero named to the Legion of Honor.

Jean-Claude Killy is probably the only French athlete many people in the world can name -- 24 years after he won his last big race.

And that fame, along with years of hard work, played a big part in bringing the 1992 Winter Olympic Games to France.

A triple gold medalist in skiing at Grenoble in 1968, the last time France hosted the Olympics, he is now co-president of the organizing committee as the Winter Games make their return to the French Alps.

Killy, 48, is the first gold medalist to run an Olympics, and has repeatedly expressed confidence that the Games will be the best ever.

Not all has been smooth schussing for the ex-champion, however. Financial pinches led Killy to propose eliminating two resorts as competition sites. That produced a storm of protest, including calls for him to resign, which he did in January 1987.

That November his wife of 14 years died. Close friends urged him to return to the organizing committee, and he did in March 1988.

“I came back fully conscious of the cause, drawn back by Olympism, and I have no second thoughts,” he told Le Figaro. “I had led a fabulous process. I couldn’t believe that it could go on without me.”

Killy grew up in the village of Val d’Isere, where his family moved when he was two. He took to the slopes at three, and in his heart has never left.

In those days in Val d’Isere there were few things to do besides ski. Killy would shun school for the slopes -- he eventually left school at 15 -- and remembers being chased by a priest, on skis, for cutting Bible class.

Coaches and friends remember him as a risk-taker driven by a motivation to win. Killy did win various junior and national championships, though he had mixed results: a couple of broken legs before important championships, and hepatitis and amebic dysentery resulting from French compulsory military duty in Algeria in 1962.

Those ailments plagued him at the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck where he placed fifth in the giant slalom, the only race he finished.

But his stardom was sealed with a fantastic 1966-67 season when he won 23 of 30 races, and then his three victories at the 1968 Olympics.

He took the downhill, slalom and giant slalom when he was half his current age. That feat was accomplished by only one other, Austrian Toni Sailer the 1956 Olympics in Cortina.

“Jean-Claude is a very romantic guy who was a great skier, plus he is French, which made it even more perfect,” former figure skating star Peggy Fleming once said. “Every girl fantasized about Jean-Claude.”

So did corporate executives. Killy has plugged Rolex watches, Bic pens, United Airlines and Chevrolet cars. Even Hollywood got him -- he starred in the movie “Snow Job” as a jewel thief on skis.

He runs a chain of sporting goods shops and his company Veleda makes upscale skiwear popular in Europe and Japan; his business and sports empire is estimated at $725 million.

There is a slope named after him in Val d’Isere, and the area the resort sits in is known as Espace Killy.

Some believe the next step for him is presidency of the International Olympic Committee.

“Nothing is more Olympic than Killy,” said Le Figaro magazine last month.

“This February, it will be 11 years dedicated to these Games,” Killy told the weekly. “That’s as long as my career as an athlete. And a longer part of my life than when I was a member of the French ski team.”

That dedication reflects the passion he brings to the job. As he told the official Olympic magazine in an interview published 92 days before the ’92 Games:

“I would like the people who come to go home with the feeling that they spent a fortnight of their lives in parentheses, on another planet: the planet of the French Olympics.”