Olympic Games’ Real Home Is in Switzerland : Sophisticated Lausanne, on Lake Geneva, Is Surrounded by Alpine Beauty

What European city is the home of the Olympic Games? Not Barcelona. That’s just this year’s site of that most famous of athletic competitions. The real home--the permanent Olympic capital--is the quiet, hilly little city of Lausanne, Switzerland, on the shore of Lake Geneva (or Lac Leman as the Swiss call it), about 35 miles from Geneva itself.

Lausanne’s situation, on a piece of gently curving shoreline at the top of the lake, is a privileged one--high enough to survey much of the surrounding landscape with its dramatic Alpine backdrop, but bordering the lake and thus linked intimately with its cosmopolitan community of commerce and leisure.

There has been a settlement on this spot at least since Roman times, but Lausanne--named for the river, once called the Laus, now the Flon, which flows into it from the north--began to grow into a real city only in the 15th Century. And in 1803, when Napoleon divided Switzerland into 19 new cantons, Lausanne was named capital of the canton of Vaud, and its fortunes further improved. Later in the 19th Century, it grew into an important railway junction, and with the opening of the Simplon Tunnel on the route to Italy in 1906, it found itself in the middle of the principal trade corridor between Paris and Milan, and profited accordingly.

The city owes its Olympic connection to Pierre de Fredy, the Baron de Coubertin, the visionary French educator who founded the modern Olympic Games in the late 19th Century. The Baron de Coubertin was quite taken with Lausanne, attracted by its beauty and its central location (at least in Western European terms), and probably also by the fact of Switzerland’s traditional political neutrality, and he decided that it would be the perfect home for his new organization. Accordingly, he negotiated contracts with the city, signed in 1915 at the Lausanne Town Hall, which established Lausanne as official headquarters of the International Olympic Committee, and provided for facilities for committee offices and archives, and for an Olympics museum.

The IOC’s first home in Lausanne was in a suite of rooms at the Casino de Montbenon in the middle of town (still used for civic functions). Soon outgrowing the space, the organization moved first to the Villa mon-Repos in the beautiful city park of the same name, and later to the Chateau de Vidy in the suburb of Vidy, just southwest of the city, where it remains to this day.

The original Olympics Museum, as founded by de Coubertin, was small and became somewhat neglected over the years, and in 1970 it was closed. When the IOC’s current president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, was elected to his post in 1980, he made the reopening of the museum one of his priorities--and in 1982 he reinaugurated it, this time in an old mansion on the Avenue Ruchonnet, a block or so from the Casino de Montbenon where the original headquarters had been.

When I was there in March, it frankly wasn’t much to see. It consisted of one large room through which snaked room dividers turned into bulletin boards. On each panel of these was a school-project-style poster devoted to a different year’s Summer or Winter Games, each one including a reproduction of an Olympics poster from that year, a handful of photographs and some brief and sometimes rather ridiculous explanatory text in French and English. (The poster for the ill-fated 1972 Munich Games included this sole reference to the massacre there of Israeli athletes: “The Olympic Games certainly were in no way responsible for the carnage. They were used by the Palestinians as a ‘sounding board,’ to quote a term used by Jean Lacourtre in Le Monde.”)

This version of the Olympics Museum closed, in turn, on June 30 of this year. This time, though, the institution’s future is not in doubt: On June 23, 1993, on the 99th anniversary of de Coubertin’s initial call for a revived Olympics, yet another Olympics Museum will open in Lausanne--and this one promises to be rather grand. It is being constructed on an eight-acre property on a knoll overlooking the Lake, just east of Ouchy, the city’s port community. Though it is still a work-in-progress, it is easy to see, looking up from the lakefront, that the grounds are being richly landscaped, with vast flower beds and scatterings of mature trees being planted amid terraced lawns extending up to the brow of the knoll. The building itself, faced with luminescent white marble, seems a bit cold, but is undeniably dignified.

The contents of the structure, according to IOC officials, will have virtually nothing in common with the exhibits that occupied the Avenue Ruchonnet mansion. One part of the museum will celebrate the many official Olympics sports and trace the history of the Games themselves (not in poster fashion), while another will be devoted to “Olympism, Culture and Society,” illustrating the impact of the games on architecture, the arts and city planning. Extensive collections of Olympics-themed medals, pins, posters, etc., will also be on display, and there will be a sophisticated audiovisual center and an Olympic Study Center open to interested parties. It sounds as if it will be something to see.

In the meantime, though, Lausanne has other attractions. It is not a showy city, even by Swiss standards, lacking the memorable urban imagery of, say, Geneva’s opulent quays and famous waterspout or Basel’s storybook medieval quarter. But its pleasures are real--not the least of them being the very topography of the place. Lausanne is built on the bias, on steep hills and gentle inclines alike, and thus its cityscape seems endlessly varied. The visitor is forever looking up, or down, at something, and forever rounding a corner to find an unexpected view, or an unexpected but attractive curtailment of view.

From the vast, if rather dully modern, Place de la Riponne in the center of the city, for instance, Lausanne’s 13th-Century cathedral of Notre Dame looms magisterially On its adjacent hill, somehow substantial and graceful at the same time. It may be reached from here on foot by means of long flights of covered wooden stairs, which have been here in some form since medieval times. Consecrated by Pope Gregory X and the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf I of Hapsburg in 1275 when Lausanne was a Catholic stronghold, this impressive Swiss Gothic edifice was taken over by Protestants in 1536. Remarkably, though, they didn’t strip the cathedral entirely of its Catholic decoration--and today, while it is certainly more austere than most of its strictly Catholic counterparts in France, it still boasts a remarkable rose window, several beautiful polychrome wood figures, and at least the ghosts of some impressive frescoes. The ambitious might wish to ascend the winding staircase in the cathedral’s main tower, from which the view across the lake is even more dazzling than usual.

For a city of fewer than 130,000 inhabitants, Lausanne has an amazingly active and varied cultural life. There are two full-time orchestras here--the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and the Chamber Orchestra of Lausanne--and the Theatre de Beaulieu, the city’s main concert hall, has recently showcased everyone from Lou Reed and Joe Cocker to the Martha Graham Company and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Helsinki. The great French choreographer Maurice Bejart has moved his troupe here, naming it the Bejart Ballet Lausanne, and there is a local opera company of some repute. The Theatre de l’Octogone in the lakefront suburb of Pully stages plays starring such noted French performers as Brigitte Fossey, Laurent Terzieff and Bernadette Lafont.

Another flight of stairs leads from the cathedral’s hill back down to the Place de la Palud, a charming little 17th-Century square defined by brightly colored, half-timbered buildings and by the aforementioned Town Hall with its handsome clock tower. Suddenly, the surroundings are intimate, the horizons as close as the next building. From here, the Rue du Pont leads to the Rue St.-Francois, which in turn feeds into the Place St.-Francois, where the rather somber 13th-Century St.-Francois church faces a miscellany of cafes and shops and the city seems to open up again. The Rue de Bourg, which extends off the top of the square, is the city’s main pedestrian shopping street (refreshingly low-key compared with the fancy-brand-name shopping clusters of Geneva), curving downhill, always promising more light and open air around the next bend--until it comes out on the busy Avenue Caroline. From here, the lushly verdant park of Mon-Repos is a few blocks east, and Ouchy is a long and jagged--but thankfully downhill--ramble to the southwest. The rest of Lausanne is all around.

The newly opened Fondation Asher Edelman in the same community--a two-level, 15,000-square-foot contemporary art museum, has recently presented the Robert Mappelthorpe show that so outraged some Americans and a retrospective of abstract expressionist Peter Halley’s work, and includes Koons, Flavin, Rauschenberg, Johns and Basquiat in its permanent collection.

The city’s most unusual and fascinating museum, though, is the Collection de l’Art Brut--”art brut” being the French term for what we would call “outsider art.” The collection has a complex history: In 1945, the famed French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet began amassing what he liked to call “extra-cultural” art, created by recluses, maladjusted persons, psychiatric patients, prison inmates and the like--works, he said, that were uninfluenced by cultural norms. Soon thereafter, he founded the Compagnie de l’Art Brut, with surrealist poet Andre Breton and other friends, to support and augment the collection, some of which was subsequently exhibited at various Paris galleries. In 1971, Dubuffet offered the collection to the city of Lausanne--like the Baron de Coubertin, he had simply fallen in love with the place--and in 1976 it opened officially in a portion of the city-owned Chateau de Beaulieu.

Some works in the collection are quite sophisticated--for instance, the sort of organic-constructionist pieces by Francis Palanc, a pastry cook from Provence who uses gum, powdered eggshells and jujubes as a medium. (“In moments of rage or discouragement,” notes an accompanying label dryly, “he destroys his pictures of which, therefore, very few exist.”) Some are crude, but still powerful, such as the bright gouache caricatures by Josef Wittlich. And the counterpoint of creations, which share a creaky garret room--scary rag dolls by Michel Nedjar and fantastical planes and weaponry by Andre Robillard--is positively chilling. Through the end of September, the museum is also exhibiting a special show from La Tinaia, the arts workshop at the San Salvi psychological hospital in Florence. One artist represented is particularly impressive--Giordano Gelli, a man who, explains a label, entered the hospital in 1928 “with an absent look and not speaking,” and who “one day began painting and sculpting and hasn’t stopped since.” His energetic but controlled figures recall Muller, Jawalensky and Dubuffet himself.

A few miles from Lausanne, in the town of Crissier, is an attraction of another sort--the restaurant called simply Giradet, which is the most famous eating place in Switzerland, and maybe in Europe as a whole. Though he boasts no stars in the Guide Michelin (Michelin doesn’t cover Lausanne and vicinity), Swiss-born chef Fredy Giradet is almost universally considered to be equal to, and probably better than, any three-star chef in France. A meal chez Giradet might include crayfish with curry sauce and couscous salad, chicken mousse with truffles and pistachios, wild salmon seasoned with olive oil and coarse salt, roasted leg of baby lamb and sliced poached pears with praline ice cream--and cost enough to feed most families for weeks. Everything, though, from the wines and the service to the tiniest detail of cuisine, will be perfect.

In Lausanne itself, good (if not exactly Giradet-quality) food may be had at the venerable La Grappe d’Or, an attractively old-fashioned place with beam ceilings and non-brut art on the walls, serving such dishes as tuna medallions in tomato butter and delicious roasted baby chicken with rosti (the Swiss potato specialty that suggests hashed browns as they might be served in heaven); at Le Richelieu in the Hotel Carlton, particularly good for such excellent seafood specialties as filet of bream with young leeks and black olives, and the large-scale La Rotonde, the second-story main dining room at the Beau-Rivage Palace hotel (see below), where a $60-per-person fixed-price menu might include mache and black truffle salad, omble chevalier (or salmon-trout, a particularly tasty local fish related to char) with champagne sauce, veal loin with lemon and a choice of desserts. (The Beau-Rivage also has a more modestly priced, Parisian-style cafe downstairs, quite lively and not bad at all.) On the other hand, for a quick lunch on the run (or walk), the Mansour-Fouland falafel stand on the Place de la Riponne serves hefty and very satisfying falafel sandwiches on pita bread for $4.50.

There is also a delightful hotel-restaurant called La Debarcadere in the lakeside town of St. Sulpice, just west of Lausanne. The rooms are so quiet that you can hear the water lapping practically outside the door, and the kitchen can offer everything from simply grilled omble chevalier or lamb chops to quail stuffed with foie gras or frogs’ legs lasagna.

Back in the middle of the city, the Lausanne Palace is an elegantly appointed, rather stuffy luxury business hotel, turn-of-the-century in style but contemporary in its guest facilities, where a single room runs about $200. The Hotel Carlton, almost as centrally located, is more modest in scale but very well run and comfortable. If you don’t need or want to be in the middle of Lausanne, though, and if price is no object, the place to stay is definitely the Beau-Rivage Palace in lakefront Ouchy, tranquil and grand--a truly remarkable old hostelry with bright yellow awnings, a beautiful atrium lobby, Gobelin tapestries on the walls, and guest rooms that are positively opulent, and priced at about $250-$425 for a double. It’s the kind of calm, ever-so-slightly creaky--but magnificent--place you read about in books from the ‘20s and ‘30s, and despair of ever finding in this age of electronic doorkeys and computerized checkouts.

The Chateau d’Ouchy, a block or so away from the Beau-Rivage, is a semi-budget choice. It looks elegant from the outside--it occupies a 13th-Century palace, and has a superb view of the lake--but the too-bright lights and the rack of videos for rent in the motel-style lobby warn the guest, quite accurately, that the rooms are functional at best and furnished without a whit of charm or taste. If you insist on charm and taste, of course, you can always “borrow” the lobby of the Beau-Rivage. Or, next year after June 23, stroll along the lake for a bit and visit the terraced gardens of the Olympic Museum.

GUIDEBOOK

Loping Through Lausanne

Getting there: Swissair flies nonstop from LAX to Geneva or Zurich for about $900 round trip, weekdays, with seven-day, nonrefundable, advance purchase; about $950 weekends. There are also frequent connections to Geneva through many other European cities. Lausanne is about 30 minutes from Geneva and two hours from Zurich by car, and there is regular train service between both cities and Lausanne (about $25 first-class, one way from Geneva), including direct trains from the Geneva airport. There are also several TGV (high-speed) trains running between the Gare de Lyon in Paris and Lausanne. The trip takes 3-4 hours depending on routing and costs about $90 one way. It is thus possible to visit Lausanne on a day trip from Paris, leaving early in the morning and arriving in Lausanne about 11 a.m., then leaving the city at 7 p.m. and returning to Paris before 11 p.m.

Where to stay:

Hotel Lausanne Palace, Rue du Grand-Chene 7-9, CH-1002 Lausanne; from U.S. telephones, dial 011-41-21-20-37-11, fax 011-41-21-23-25-71; rates: single $160-$220, double $205-$305, suite $570-$1,475.

Beau-Rivage Palace, CH-1000 Lausanne 6, Ouchy; 011-41-21-617-17-17, fax 011-41-21-617- 78-78; single $165-$305, double $235-$425, suites $350-$1,670. (Both the aformentioned hotels are members of Leading Hotels of the World; for reservations, call 800-223-1230.)

Hotel Carlton, Avenue de Cour 4, CH-1007 Lausanne; 011-41-21-26-32-35, fax 011-41-21-26- 34-30; single $105-$120, double $140-$170, suite $185-$200 (10% discount on weekends).

Chateau d’Ouchy, Place du Port 2, CH-1000 Lausanne 6, Ouchy; 011-41-21-26-74-51, fax 011-41-21-617-51-37; single $90-$125, double $130-$185, suites $215-$290.

Le Debarcadere, Chemin du Cret, CH-1025 Saint-Sulpice; 011-41-21-691-57-47, fax 011- 41-21-691-50-79; single $100-$150, double $150- $220, suites $240.

Where to eat:

Giradet, 1 Route d’Yverdon, Crissier; 011-41-21-634-05-05; dinner for two without wine, $250-$360.

La Rotonde Beau-Rivage, Beau-Rivage Palace (see above); dinner for two without wine, $125- $190.

Cafe Beau-Rivage, Beau-Rivage Palace (see above); dinner for two without wine, $60-$130.

Le Richelieu, Hotel Carlton (see above); dinner for two without wine, $85-$160.

La Grappe d’Or, Rue Cheneau-de-Bourg 3; 011-41-21-23-07-60, fax 011-41-21-23-22-30; dinner for two without wine, $75-$225.

Le Debarcadere (see above); dinner for two without wine, $90-$210.

Note: Many restaurants in Lausanne, as elsewhere in Switzerland, offer three- or four-course fixed-price meals for about $35-$60 per person. These usually offer a choice of three or more house specialties per course and are invariably good values.

What to do:

Collection de l’Art Brut, Chateau de Beaulieu, Avenue des Bergieres 11, Lausanne; open Tue.-Fri., 10 a.m.-noon and 2-6 p.m., Sat.-Sun., 2-6 p.m.; admission $3.50.

Fondation Asher Edelman, Avenue General-Guisan 85, Pully; open Tues.-Sun., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; admission $8.40.