Jean-Claude Killy: France's king of the ski slopes

Barnett Singer

JEAN-CLAUDE Killy always did things right. Having turned 61 last August, this ex-skier supreme is still much alive, if not on the slopes. He is Val d'Isere's unofficial king, and has been a driving force behind that ski resort's designation for the 2009 World Ski Championships. And he hopes this example will give impetus to Paris' candidature for the 2012 Summer Olympics, one of five world cities vying for the prize.

A nearer goal constantly in Killy's mind is getting the Turin Winter Olympics (due to begin 10 February, 2006) in perfect shape, as he and France's foreign minister, Michel Barnier, once did for those at Albertville in 1992. Barnier still keeps Killy's picture on his desk, and considers his five years of exhausting Olympic preparations at Killy's side among the best of his life.

As chief of the present International Olympic Committee, Killy has saluted fine work already done in Turin, but acknowledges difficulties in producing a suitable bobsled track, accommodations for media and athletes, hospital and other support systems (he has proposed locating some across the frontier in France)--and all on time, ever his great foe, and within budget.

Killy almost has the puritanical zeal of an old Swiss watchmaker; however, the residence he intermittently occupies in Geneva is located in un-Calvinist environs where rich French notables like Charles Aznavour also roost. In fact, despite a quintessentially French name, Jean-Claude's background includes Swiss German on his father's side, and Belgian, Swiss German, and Swiss-French Huguenot on his mother's, with perhaps Irish in there as well (Kelly putatively becoming Killy).

Val d'Isere, where Jean-Claude grew up in the late forties and early fifties, wasn't just an ideal place for a budding skier to mature, though one hears tales of the precocious three-year-old skiing off his snowbound house roof! It was also the last of village France, with palpable limits, yet freedom from ephemeral diversions. Killy attended the republican lay school staffed by a tough, but fair instituteur, who gave kids two afternoons a week to ski, and pushed Killy to jump farther and farther when he began competing in other parts of the region. Val's priest who supervised catechism at a quarter to 12 each day was himself a superb skier, and in his robe tracked a young Killy evading religion on the slopes.

This was then an unchic, isolated spot (especially when electricity blew out for days) of no more than several hundred inhabitants, where everyone knew everyone, but where mountain insularity and argot began ceding before 'Chinese' outlanders who like Killy's parents, had come to settle there. Val was well behind stations de ski like Chamonix that it would later surpass. But there were Savoyard fondues and cheeses about which Jean-Claude would always be particular, and a healthy outdoors life of constant competition on rudimentary, leg-breaking skis to keep a young boy busy and mostly happy.

Speaking of food, his father and mother tried to make a go of a little restaurant there, and it was perhaps due to his father's lack of business acumen, among other traits, that Killy's mother ran off one day, leaving three children behind, in favour of another lover. For this to happen in 1953 when Jean-Claude was ten was, to say the least, scandalous, but also an important event in his character formation. Keeping the hurt inside, Killy henceforth learned in an existential manner to rely on no one but himself, and toughened his hide.

He was then packed off to a prison-like boarding school, and, like so many future geniuses, couldn't stand most subjects there, except geography, which made him dream of wider horizons, a la Saint-Exupery, his favourite author.

Some believe that Killy simply took out his psychological pain on the slopes, trying to win at all events. That he would also become a topflight business type was maybe an unconscious need to make up for his own father's want in that domain as well. That father blessedly allowed him at sixteen to leave schools that repressed him, fuelling a bloom of acne and only making the slopes more attractive. At the end of the fifties the French ski team came calling, led by a new coach, Honore Bonnet, who had shone in the Resistance, married an Englishwoman, and now found himself, Jean-Claude, and an imminently bright future for French skiing at the same time. Like Killy's first village teacher, Bonnet had the right mix of severity and Provencal informality (his home region), helping Killy become the eventual ski champion this coach already foresaw in his crystal ball.

For Jean-Claude attacked hills like no other, falling more, trying harder, his sole enemy himself. Killy's technique of avalement--literally, swallowing the bumps by thrusting knees outward--was revolutionary for its day. Here was a priestly, honest, concentrated perfectionism, and Bonnet knew early on that for Killy second would never cut it.

If one competed against older men, all the while assimilating some of their style, or fractured bones en route to the top, that was part of the process. When Killy took his military turn in a dying French Algeria of 1962, he did that stint with similar self-mastery, navigating through the heartbreak and blistering heat, and returning to France with hepatitis, but with unshaken will.

He then began taking on the Austrians, led by dashers like Egon Zimmerman, four years Killy's senior. He bashed through the gates, and in the off season forced his way up mountains on a bike, Lance Armstrong style, jogged, or tried bulking up, still fighting whatever Algerian bug lay inside. As the 1964 Olympics beckoned, the odd observer was likening the twenty-year-old Frenchman to a former young star of the 1956 Olympics, Austria's Toni Sailer.

On the paternal home front a new marriage helped provide a needed backdrop of stability, bringing Killy a step-sister he valued from the start, and a rejuvenated father, once a quixotic air ace before the Fall of France. That father now became a rock of support.

But Innsbruck wasn't yet Jean-Claude's Olympic moment, and back home in Val d'Isere, the Goitschel sisters, Marielle and Christine, were celebrated for their medals, while Killy returned with nothing to show but lessons. One was to stop idolizing these Austrians he needed to vanquish. A second was to pay more attention to the way his equipment was maintained, his skis waxed or filed. (The latter became easier when he delegated the work to Michel Arpin, who in a car race with Killy from the Riviera to the Alps, had crunched himself into a temporary coma, and the end of a ski career.) Arpin became a dependable source of fraternal feedback and technical aid.

Killy also gained from a sojourn in the new world, skiing with more flexible young American stars like Billy Kidd. He became an Americanophile, and learned how to pace himself better. In the years 1964-65 wins piled up in races across alpine Europe that the Austrians told Killy he couldn't win, and his hot streak kept going as he started the 1965-66 season with firsts in giant slalom, downhill, and combined at the 'Criterium of the First Snows' in Val d'Isere. Then came more firsts at hallowed testing grounds like the Adelboden and Hahnenkamm.

Competing at the World Cup of 1966 in Portillo, Chile, Killy spoke almost in tongues with Arpin, keeping private strategy even from his poker-playing buddies on the French team; and there he won the downhill, primed now for the upcoming Olympics of 1968. He kept improving not only equipment preparation, but even his diet and yoga routines--everything to come out at the top of a sport then at its apogee.

After his triumph at Portillo it was inevitable that Killy would meet President de Gaulle and be congratulated for serving his country so well. But the Austrians were less impressed, with the exception of Sailer, who denoted the same hunger and attention to detail in Killy as he had had before his own 'grand slam' triumph in 1956. Could Killy himself pull off a hat trick of Olympic victories at Grenoble in downhill, giant slalom, and slalom? Sailer wouldn't rule it out, but thought that as specialism advanced, such a feat had become very difficult.

Before those 1968 Olympics, which would glue Frenchmen to TV sets across the country, Arpin fed into Killy's artistic need for the best, scrubbing and rescrubbing on wax, tinkering with 15 pairs of skis at a time, like a saxophonist with his reeds, and finally choosing. This was part of winning; so was checking out the state of the snow and the bumps, until they became engraved inside Jean-Claude like old La Fontaine poems. So too was putting on a poker face, and psyching out the opposition.

The Last French Monument (General de Gaulle) opened the games, and the first big event, downhill, appropriately became a duel of two Frenchmen. Ironically, Killy had scraped off Arpin's magnificent wax job just before the race, yet managed to beat Guy Perillat's prior time by .08 of a second--an almost Einsteinian time designation! It was close, but it was gold.

Then came the giant slalom, and Val d'Isere saluted both this alumnus, as he copped a more smashing victory in major event number two, and Marielle Goitschel, his childhood tomboy friend, who also won gold here. To win the third leg in slalom, and a Grand Slam, was now within the realm of possibility.

But Killy knew how demanding the event would be with its many gates, weather alternating from foggy to clear to foggy, and with two runs combined into a total. He decided to ski rather conservatively, and was bested in time by a Norwegian, who, however, had missed a couple of gates, it turned out, and was disqualified.

But Killy did not have his slam in the bag. An arch-rival, Austria's Karl Schranz, who had also missed gates in the fog, was permitted a supplementary run, supposedly (as he pleaded) due to a police official obstructing him on the slopes. With his re-run Schranz bested Killy by .34 of a second; however, a jury then voted by three to one (with one abstention) that Schranz had exaggerated his case, and that Killy's victory ought to stand.

With this slight taint, the feat was complete, and Jean-Claude stood on the summit of the ski world. He knew there was nowhere to go but down, and was already looking for something solid in the business realm, particularly with Avery Brundage becoming rigorous about so-called amateur status in the sport.

Never one to chase sponsors before, Killy now decided to sign with an American sports agent, Mark McCormack, who had worked with golf's Arnold Palmer, among others. The Killy name soon helped flog Chevrolets, Eagle shirts, United Airlines, and Evian water, as well as items in his own field (among which, Lange boots and Head skis).

Jean-Claude's love of America was not merely due to its openhearted response to his Gallic verve; nor was it just the ready gush of dollars emananating from its corporate offices. Another reason was perhaps that despite his success he was still at bottom a marginal at home, but less so in that mixed societal salad that was America. Having kept much inside over the years, he would feel at home in a psychologically limber atmosphere veering into the 'Me Decade'.

A buried yen to ski competitively came back in the early seventies, when the idea of a professional racing circuit in the States took hold. Some of the proposed venues, like Vermont's Mount Snow, were derisory, compared to skiing in the shadow of the Jungfrau or above Grenoble; but Killy took it seriously, supported now by the kind of wife he perhaps was destined to marry.

For instead of one of many ski bunny groupies he could have walked down the aisle, this man, seared by his mother's abandonment, chose a mature actress, Danielle Gaubert, as his wife, already possessing two children from her previous marriage to Trujillo's son. They became a fine match, and he even learned aspects of her trade and made a movie with her.

The next Killy incarnation involved him flying myriad miles in the eighties as a lobbyist for a French group desiring to make Albertville (and surrounding ski areas) the site of 1992's winter Olympics. Almost as in an important race, the voting was close, but Killy's team won, and he was then impelled (not without misgivings) to become president of the organizational committee for those games.

Would this give him down time he loved, such as circling Lake Geneva on a bike at predictably urgent speeds? More, would it allow him to care for his wife, suddenly stricken with cancer and operated on in August, 1986, then fighting for her life? Killy put everything into finding top specialists for her, dropped his important bureaucratic position, but ultimately lost Danielle in 1987. Despite the presence of his children (including those from Trujillo), he felt alone and down.

He finally returned as co-chair (with Barnier) of Games preparations, and could one doubt that those preparations were minutely exhaustive? Killy knew how long prior debts from the Grenoble games had lingered; so for a man who had rubbed shoulders with America's business elite, budget was now an idee fixe.

Killy's input also rewarded skiers who could overcome difficulties on entirely redesigned courses at Val d'Isere. He consulted with top French skiers who had followed his era, and with others who knew their stuff when it came to designing bobsled runs or hockey rinks.

Despite the fact that these winter Olympic events were spread out over a huge area, and that some teams resorted to their own chefs, eschewing French food, the weather cooperated (with one exception), and all went well, fuelled by the work of 25,000 volunteers, and with almost a million people buying tickets. One of Killy's ancillary ambitions had also been fulfilled: to upgrade roads, tunnels, water purification facilities, and sewers of the entire Savoyard region.

Through the nineties, Killy continued to lend his name to prestigious enterprises, for example, as chair of Coca-Cola Beverages in France, and of the Tour de France bicycle racing organization. Even when it came to Killy skiwear, his parkas were naturally among the warmest to be had!

As with so many sports, the dawn of a new century brought nostalgia for a supposedly vanished golden age. The ex-star Franz Klammer bemoaned skiing's decline, and he and Killy headlined a Race of Legends in January, 2000.

Killy's agent extraordinaire, McCormack, passed away in May, 2003; but Killy remains much consulted, especially on afore-mentioned planning for Turin's Winter Olympics. And 'L'Espace Killy' of Val d'Isere is still a big travel hit for skiers wanting fine snow and slopes, particularly Britons.

Jean-Claude always did things right.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning