A Quick Peek at the Valley

The black-rock Alps are squiggled with icing, like Hostess cupcakes. Off in the distance, overlooking everything, is Mont Blanc, a good place for a writer to collect his thoughts (and buy a pen).

Albertville itself is nothing much, and you can see why Einstein, Schweitzer, Brooks, Marv and Fat found it easy to leave. As towns go, its biggest excitement is when the truck delivers the new ChapStick shipment. Otherwise, this is a pretty sleepy hollow. It’s Kennebunkport without the glitz.

But the 16th Winter Olympics actually have very little to do with Albertville. The village got the Games by default. All the surrounding resorts craved the publicity. No neighbor wanted another to have it. Li’l Albertville became a compromise choice--you know, the kind we might end up with at the Democratic Party’s national convention.

Val d’Isere didn’t want Courchevel to be the host. Courchevel felt the same about Val d’Isere. And the same held true for all the nearby resorts, Coq au Vin, Chardonnay, Hollandaise, Montand, Depardieu, Yves St. Laurent and L’Eggs. Everyone there said: “If we can’t have it, you can’t have it.” So, theygave it instead to down-in-the-valley Albertville,which is to skiing what Nebraska is to surfing.

And here we are.

The last Winter Olympics were in Calgary, a North American metropolis with a rodeo, four-lane roads, hundreds of restaurants and more striptease clubs per capita than any city since Sodom. All the skating events were conducted inside the city limits, and all the skiing and sledding events were an hour or two away by bus.

Here, the hamlet of Albertville offers little in the way of entertainment, unless maybe you want to go over to the Hans Brinker Shoppe for Skate Sharpeners to watch the sparks fly. As for the roads, yes, you can still get to the ski slopes by bus, provided the passengers vote which way to lean so the driver can decide which two tires to keep on the pavement.

I don’t want to say the roads here are dangerous, but if my insurance guy finds out I’ve been driving here, my premiums will skyrocket. I’ve been on roller-coasters that were wider. Now I know why they run the 24 Hours of LeMans in this country. France is a fine place to drive as long as the cars go only one way.

Sunday, I am supposed to go up to Val d’Isere to see the downhill racers in the men’s alpine skiing. Yesterday, I put in my official request to rent a helicopter. If you think I’m going up there in anything with wheels, you’re loonier than Clare. My body is too wide for some of these roads.

It also can be hazardous here to skate. Already, there has been enough mixture of rain and sunshine to make some of the speedskaters feel like puddle-jumpers. Since the events are scheduled for the daytime, the icy track has been melting. So, if you have Bonnie Blair or Dan Jansen in the pool, you might really have them in a pool.

Calgary put the skating indoors, where it belongs. I know we all enjoy the idea of seeing someone named Sonja or Katarina doing figure-eights on a frozen pond with Thumper the rabbit skidding on his paws. But unless Albertville’s caretakers can come up with a superior ice maker and quickly, they had better switch the speedskating from afternoon to night and dress the skaters in phosphorescent suits.

Personally, I am looking forward most to the sled stuff.

Herschel Walker, the American football player, is here for the bobsled, and I know why. He came here from Minnesota to get warm. Herschel spoke here Tuesday of the difficulties of bobsledding, of the required combination of raw power and nimble movement that, as Walker put it, necessitates one’s being “like a raging bull one minute and like Tinkerbell the next.”

Which, naturally, made me wonder why the United States is using Herschel Walker instead of Jake LaMotta or Julia Roberts.

The luge warfare, featuring men and women riding garbage-can lids, will be held along with the bobsled at La Plagne, which is French for either “the Prone” or “the Plunge,” I forget. Whatever it means, if these people don’t watch where they’re going, they are going to end up in l’ambulance.

All in all, a swell time should be had by all. Unless somebody drops through the ice, goes over a cliff or falls on his Alp.