Killy too much his own man to step into Samaranch'

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Killy too much his own man to step into Samaranch's shoes
WILLIAM BLAKE wrote: "Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street." Jean-Claude Killy, France's triple Olympic skiing champion from Grenoble in 1968, has never jostled in the street nor,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], I suspect, anywhere else for that matter. He may have been born closer to the Savoy in London than to the Savoie region of France where he grew up and his reputation on and off the piste was forged,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], but he is classically of mountain mind and mentality.
Born on the outskirts of Paris, he was only three when he put on his first pair of skis. "Everybody in Val d'Isere skied. In fact,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], if you didn't ski they thought you were strange. There was nothing else to do, no swimming pools, no television. I knew nothing about the outside world, I knew nothing about life outside the valley and I guess for me it stayed like that until I made the French team at 18. I had no plans; life was simply going to school, eating and skiing."
His dislike of all things establishment and external regimentation surfaced early in life, when he was chased regularly by the local priest,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], in full robes and on skis, for avoiding Bible classes. "He was probably the best skier I came across for several years, but he never caught me," Killy said.
His early racing experiences, from the age of six, were confined to the local area. "We were very small communities dotted around some valleys. My only concern was to ski faster than the other kids and faster than the day before. There were no inspirations or heroes. I had a very close friendship with my father and there was always the priest to keep me focused."
In 1959 he was selected for the France B ski team, but only on making the A team two years later did he become acquainted with the household names of French skiing.
"I knew nothing about the Olympics until watching the Squaw Valley games in 1960 many weeks later on newsreel at the cinema, but I do remember it being a terrific moment in my life when I realised big racing could be mine,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]," he said.
Yet at this stage of his career winning an Olympic title was not remotely within his frame of reference. He speaks about the games with a mixture of admiration, fear and plain superstition. "I knew it would be great to be an Olympic champion but I thought that if I dreamt about it it wouldn't happen. I've always felt there's been a mysterious halo around the title."
By 1964, the year of the Innsbruck Games, and having recovered from two broken legs two years earlier, he became France's leading male skier, winning downhill, slalom and giant slalom titles at the national championships. He was not ready for the Olympics, however. "I went to Innsbruck poorly prepared. Not smart enough mentally and competed badly. It was a good learning experience," he said.
He left Innsbruck with a fifth place in the slalom, two no-finishes and no doubts about the scale of the physical and mental commitment that would be needed four years later.
"I passionately wanted to became an Olympic champion. The colours and the power of Innsbruck and being in an Olympic village all added to it but I could still not bring myself to dream too much."
In 1965, on the infamous Hahnenkamm in Kitzbuhel,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Killy defeated the European champion, Karl Schranz, in the slalom. He followed that by winning three gold medals in the World Championships in Chile, and in 1967 finished the season by becoming the first winner of the new World Cup title, having earned the maximum score of 225 points. His nearest rival finished on 114. He repeated the feat in 1968.
"I went to Grenoble knowing that I had won World Championships and World Cups, but also knowing this was a very different story, unlike anything before. The pressure was intense. Everybody thought of them in France as de Gaulle's Games and I was the favourite for three events. I remember a journalist writing that I would win all three and thinking the guy was a maniac. Just give me one!"
Despite ongoing wrangles with his federation and disputes over endorsements, he won the downhill from an unfavoured 14th place on the start-list. Then he won the giant slalom and finally inflicted another major defeat on Schranz in the slalom. Killy had become only the second skier to win all three disciplines at one Games. The feat had previously been accomplished by the Austrian, Toni Sailer, in the 1956 Olympics at Cortina.
If his relationship with officialdom was in choppy waters before the Games, the seas became monstrous afterwards. The International Olympic Committee president, Avery Brundage, who was obsessed with the amateur-professional divide, had skiing firmly in his sights, with Killy having exacerbated the situation by acquiring a Porsche to go with his gold medals.
"Brundage wanted to take my medals off me," Killy said. "He didn't like the equipment pool that my federation had set up for the skiers, but I guess it was the Porsche that finally did it. I told him he would have to come to the mountains and take them off me and when he did I'd be there with a gun. I knew nothing about the Olympic movement or its president. I never heard from him again."
Not so from the other president in his life. The hero of de Gaulle's Games was feted in the Champs Elysees,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], given a bank holiday in his honour and awarded the national order of merit.
Killy saved Brundage further blushes when soon after the Games he turned professional. He signed a sackful of endorsements,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], returned to Val d'Isere, built a ski centre and almost as an afterthought won the World Professional Championships in 1973.
His commercial success has ranged across an astonishingly broad portfolio of interests. He remains a director of Rolex, was chairman of Coca-Cola France and a successful owner of a sportswear company. In the early Seventies he was signed by Mark McCormack and managed by a young, recently retired British skier,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Ian Todd, who went on to run McCormack's business and is now director of global marketing at Nike.
"His commercial success is more extraordinary than his sporting, which is saying something," Todd said. "He has achieved it all with little educational background. People think he left the sport wealthy. I doubt he had more than $5,000. He's the toughest person I've ever met. He has such amazing inner strength. He just doesn't care what people think, but unerringly understood what people wanted."
That included driving a Mini Cooper into the lobby of a hotel in America when it was de rigueur in the pop world to drive them into swimming pools. "He carefully cultivated the cavalier, tearaway image,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], which had marketing cachet at the time. But actually it was intensely alien to his private nature," said Todd. "It has always been his way or the highway."
The highway led him to "one of the proudest moments" in his life,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], when he brought the Winter Games to France for only the second time in their history, at Albertville in 1992. Killy's meticulous planning and autocratic tendencies overcame the "logistical nightmare" of embracing 13 different sites in a number of disparate mountain towns and villages. He has never sought the plaudits. The night he won the bid he had a quiet dinner with two close friends in Geneva rather than return as the conquering hero to Albertville's celebrations.
For his efforts he was appointed to the IOC in 1995, where many predicted he would become Juan Antonio Samaranch's successor. Many, including enough IOC colleagues to have made a difference in July's presidential election, encouraged him over the past few months to throw his hat into the ring, including, some suspect, Samaranch, who in private saw him as "the future of the Games".
"I would have loved to manage the Olympic movement,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]," Killy said. "But the political aspect doesn't appeal. I need more freedom." It was probably the collegiate nature of the job too. He was never a natural team player. "That's why I like individual sports. You don't have to share responsibility for team performances. I'm much more at home managing big events."
Others, including a member and friend who said "it would have killed him", told me he was right not to allow his name to go forward. As an IOC member he was always "on the side of the competitor".
This was sorely tested when,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], as president of the organisation who promoted the Tour de France, he was confronted by the disfiguring episode of drug abuse in 1998 which reduced the Tour to farce. "I knew things were going on amongst the teams but was powerless to do what I really wanted," he said. He believes that doping is the biggest challenge the IOC face. "We can't give up the fight but sadly I don't think we'll ever win the war. We've now got a 100 per cent test for EPO,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], but they've moved on to other things. I do think we need life bans."
Sadly few can see him remaining active over the long haul in the IOC,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], where his skill and vision are needed more than ever. Now he has decided not to run for president, Killy is certainly enough of a politician to realise that his influence will wane.
If he had not been a skier he would love to have been a racing cyclist. "Not the Tours but the big one-day races like Paris-Roubaix - now that is a tough bitch." He was not, he was an Olympic champion and in France they do not come with more respect.
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