Competition

Mikaela Shiffrin on Sunday celebrated her first Overall World Cup Championship, at the culmination of the 50th World Cup Finals in Aspen. She is the fifth American to win the overall globe, following Tamara McKinney, Phil Mahre, Bode Miller and Lindsey Vonn. At age 22, Shiffrin is already the three-time world champion in slalom and four-time World Cup champion in slalom.  Joining Shiffrin at the awards ceremony was Canada's Nancy Greene Raine, winner of the first two overall World Cup championships in 1967 and 1968.

 

Sa saison 1967 est un plus grand exploit que son triplé olympique. Dans une interview exclusive, Jean-Claude Killy se souvient de la première saison de la Coupe du monde, il ya 50 ans, quand il a remporté 12 des 17 courses, y compris toutes les descentes, et a terminé sur le podium dans 89% des courses qu'il a entrées, un record qui n'a jamais été surpassé.

Interview de Yves Perret, Skiing History Magazine, 2017.

Read this story in English.

Cinquante ans après, la saison 1967 reste un des moments les plus aboutis de l’histoire du ski alpin. La première Coupe du Monde de l’histoire coïncide avec un de ses exploits les plus marquants.

Vainqueur de 19 courses sur 29, dont  12 de Coupe du Monde sur 17, et des six combinés de la saison dont la Coupe des Nations pour un total de 25 « 1st places », Jean-Claude Killy a remporté le premier globe de cristal avec le maximum de points possibles (225) soit 101 points d’avance sur l’Autrichien Heinrich Messner, son dauphin.

Autre chiffre incroyable, il a terminé 88.9% des courses ou combinés auxquels il a participé  sur le podium…

En juin dernier, chez lui, à Genève, « King Killy » comme l’ont surnommé les journaux de l’époque, nous a reçus. Sur la table, il a ouvert les épais albums où sont classées avec méthode les coupures de presse qui retracent les moments forts d’une destinée hors normes. Sur un cahier où sont inscrits ses résultats, d’une écriture rectiligne, une phrase : « La victoire aime l’effort ».

Pendant plusieurs heures, Mister Killy est redevenu le meilleur skieur de la planète.

 

INTERVIEW

Jean-Claude, comment s’est dessinée la saison 1967 au cours des saisons précédentes?

Cela a été une lente construction, avec des étapes importantes et la même obsession : gagner.

En 1963, je termine onze fois à la deuxième place.

Les Jeux de 1964 à Innsbrück avaient été un désastre technique.

Je perds ma fixation avant dans le slalom. Je chute dans le premier dévers dans la descente. Mes carres avaient été mal travaillées.

Je finis cinquième du géant. Je n’étais pas prêt.

La semaine suivante, je remporte le Kandahar devant Jimmy Heuga, mon copain américain. Ce qui prouve que la base était présente mais que je n’avais pas encore tout résolu.

En 1964, je n’avais pas encore trouvé les solutions à mes problèmes de santé contractés durant la Guerre d’Algérie. J’étais maigre, je n’avais pas d’endurance.

Je faisais des coups comme au Critérium de la Première Neige en 1961 mais je manquais d’un système pour avoir de la constance dans les trois disciplines. Se spécialiser, c’est enlever des chances de gagner et je ne le voulais pas.

Je souhaitais mettre en place une organisation qui me permette de gommer un maximum de ces impondérables qui font la spécificité du ski alpin de compétition.

Un des moments importants fut lorsque Michel Arpin a été engagé par Dynamic pour s’occuper de mes skis. Nous étions très complices et il m’avait pris sous son aile depuis mes débuts.

Il était originaire de Saint Foy en Tarentaise, tout près de Val d’Isère, et nous parlions le même patois local. Je savais que mes skis étaient entre les meilleures mains car j’avais une confiance aveugle en lui.

 

Comment qualifiez-vous le processus qui vous a conduit jusqu’au sommet ?

Ma démarche était personnelle. En équipe de France, on passait tout l’hiver ensemble mais avant le premier stage d’automne, chacun avait sa façon de faire. J’étais à la recherche obsessionnellement de ce qui pourrait me faire progresser.

L’équipement était capital. Il était impératif d’avoir les meilleurs skis existants. On ne peut pas perdre une course à cause du matériel car c’est l’élément déterminant. Je skiais avec le matériel de deux marques, Rossignol et Dynamic, sans contrat d’exclusivité, ce qui me permettait de choisir à chaque course la paire qui me convenait le mieux.

Cela impliquait d’adopter une ligne de conduite différente … et de faire des sacrifices financiers dans l’instant.

En 1963, je termine même 2^e du Kandahar avec des skis de descente autrichiens. A Portillo, j’ai utilisé des Rossignol en géant et des Dynamic pour les autres épreuves. Monsieur Bonnet nous comprenait. Le but, c’était de gagner des courses de ski.

J’ai toujours fonctionné ainsi. J’étais animé d’une passion débordante pour le ski, mais tourné vers la compétition.

J’ai fait l’impasse sur les études. Cela laisse du temps… mais cela ferme des portes et peut compliquer la reconversion.

La compétition était une obsession saine car je conservais ma liberté intellectuelle.  Le ski était mon métier.

Pour moi, seule la victoire comptait. Je n’avais pas le choix. C’était simplement ma seule forme d’expression.

 

Quelles ont été les clés de votre réussite?

Il y a à partir de 1965, la conjonction d’éléments qui, liés, ont permis de poursuivre la montée en puissance.

L’organisation Bonnet  qui nous accompagnait vers les sommets en était une.

L’industrie française qui  nous soutenait avec Rossignol, Dynamic, Look, Trappeur, Salomon une autre.

Les stations françaises et les hôteliers n’hésitaient pas de leur côté à nous ouvrir leurs portes pour presque rien.

Nous entrons dans une des plus belles périodes de notre sport avec l’avènement du ski moderne.

Il y a la conjonction de moyens financiers accrus, d’hommes et de professionnels expérimentés.

La diffusion télévisée devient mondiale et contribue à faire des sportifs des mythes.

 

Il règne alors en France une atmosphère miraculeuse. De Gaulle l’affirme : « Nos sportifs sont nos meilleurs ambassadeurs. »

 D’un coup, on passe des dortoirs de l’UCPA à un hôtel quatre étoiles.

J’ai posé une à une les pièces du puzzle et cela ne s’est fait pas du jour au lendemain.

En 1965, je suis élu Skieur d’Or Martini et Champion des Champions du journal L’Equipe, je remporte 9 victoires, je finis sept fois à la deuxième place.

 

Quelle est l’importance de la création de la Coupe du Monde dans la réalisation de cette saison incroyable?

Cela faisait plusieurs années que les skieurs ne supportaient plus de jouer une carrière sur une journée de Championnats du Monde ou de Jeux Olympiques. En outre, à cette époque, il était rare, par exemple, de participer à deux Jeux olympiques.

On était tous passionnés de Formule 1 et, pour nous, la référence, était le classement de la saison de ce Championnat du Monde. L’idée d’un classement sur la saison nous semblait la plus juste expression de la réalité de notre sport.

Nous avons souvent discuté de notre frustration  et de ce qui pourrait résoudre le problème et il nous semblait facile d’adapter cela au ski.  Le plan de la Coupe du monde de ski alpin formulé en 1966 par le journaliste Serge Lang, en collaboration avec l'Américain Bob Beattie, le Français Honoré Bonnet et l'Autrichien Sepp Sulzberger, soutenu par le quotidien sportif parisien L'Equipe et des journalistes comme Michel Clare - et John Fry, qui a ajouté la Coupe des Nations au mix, allait dans ce sens.

A Portillo, on était dans l’aire d’arrivée de la descente après ma victoire. Tout le monde pleurait. Serge Lang me demande : « La Coupe du Monde arrive. Comment vas-tu l’aborder. »

Je lui ai répondu : « Je vais la survoler… » Dans mon esprit, cela ne signifiait pas que j’allais l’écraser mais que j’allais en tirer la quintessence pour franchir une étape dans mon parcours sportif.

S’il n’y a pas de Coupe du Monde, il n’y a peut-être pas cette saison 67. C’est plus fort que Grenoble. Il n’y avait désormais plus uniquement les grandes classiques pour couronner la réussite d’une saison.

Comment qualifieriez-vous les relations au sein de l’équipe de France?

Nous étions liés à la vie à la mort. On s’entraînait ensemble, on s’affrontait tous les weekends

Aujourd’hui encore, nous restons aussi complices que des frères.

Au printemps 1966, on a skié des kilomètres au col de l’Iseran sur le glacier de Pissaillas. On s’est mutuellement nourris de nos qualités, de nos personnalités. Il y a toujours eu entre nous du respect, de l’humilité.

En 1967, Honoré Bonnet était à un an de la retraite mais le système était en place et fonctionnait parfaitement.

Michel Arpin s’occupait de mes skis et des chronos. Je savais que je pouvais m’appuyer totalement sur son savoir-faire et chacun dans l’équipe avait son rôle.

Par exemple, Melquiond apportait son calme et sa sérénité. Nous avons été compagnons de chambre pendant 7 ans sans qu’il y ait le moindre conflit d’égo.

Périllat était le capitaine de route écouté et respecté.

Léo Lacroix amenait son optimisme, sa bonne humeur… et son talent.

Mauduit le géantiste et Jauffret le slalomeur étaient des skieurs magnifiques.

Tous les talents de cette équipe et ces tempéraments additionnés formaient une formidable escouade.

Abordons, la saison 1967… Débutée en décembre 1966 chez vous, à Val d’Isère, par le traditionnel Critérium de la Première Neige…

Léo dit encore aujourd’hui en riant : « Je suis le seul à avoir battu Killy en 1967 en descente » car il s’était imposé à Val d’Isère. Lorsque je le taquine, je lui rappelle que c’était en décembre 1966 …

Le Critérium ne comptait pas encore pour la Coupe du Monde. C’était un beau moment de la saison. Celui-ci est un peu particulier car c’est la première fois qu’il se disputait sur la nouvelle piste de la Daille, la Oreiller-Killy.

La Coupe du Monde débute le 5 et 6 janvier à Berchtesgaden où vous terminez troisième du géant. Mais le premier succès vient quelques jours plus tard dans le géant d’Adelboden, première victoire d’une série de huit en comptant les combinés…  

Je gagne avec le dossard 13. Adelboden a toujours été une des pistes de références en géant. Y gagner, c’est valider une condition physique et des qualités. Le premier succès est un passage important.

 

Vous enchaînez avec deux victoires (descente et slalom) à Wengen. Quelle est l’importance de ce doublé?

Je préférais Kitzbühel à Wengen.

Dans la descente, je devance Léo de 25 centièmes. C’est la première victoire française dans le Lauberhorn depuis Guy Périllat en 1961. Elle a d’autant plus de saveur que les Autrichiens avaient qualifié notre triomphe de Portillo de folklorique et ils nous attendaient au tournant.

Pour toute l’équipe, c’est un moment important.

Je domine aussi le slalom qui est, pour moi, le plus pentu et le plus difficile de l’année.  

Avec ce triplé, puisque je remporte aussi le combiné, j’ai l’impression de rentrer définitivement chez les grands.

 

Kitzbühel, la semaine suivante, est un moment à part. Comment l’avez-vous vécu?

Courir à Kitzbühel était ce qu’il y avait de plus excitant. On était en Autriche, pour défier des mecs qui représentaient le ski, supportés par une foule immense. On me respectait mais j’avais des rapports parfois compliqués avec le public.

Il m’est même arrivé d’envoyer Jean-Pierre Augert, qui me ressemblait beaucoup, pour traverser la foule et signer des autographes.

Gagner à Kitzbühel, c’est le rêve de tous les skieurs. Cette année-là, je remporte la descente, le slalom et le combiné et je deviens le premier à réaliser ce double triplé.

On n’a pas conscience aujourd’hui de ce que cela représente mais remporter, comme à Wengen, le combiné est important même si cela ne comptait pas pour la Coupe du Monde. 

En descente, je devance Vogler d’1’’37 et je bats le record de la piste qui appartenait à Karl Schranz.

Le slalom de Kitzbühel est le plus beau. Il est très varié, avec des dévers, des changements de rythme. Il règne parfois une ambiance hostile et il faut savoir rester dans sa bulle. Je bats le Suédois Grahn, qui faisait partie des meilleurs spécialistes de la discipline de plus de deux secondes en gagnant les deux manches.

Il a régné durant ce weekend une ambiance que je n’oublierai jamais. J’ai traversé la station sur les épaules des moniteurs de ski de la station pour aller chercher mes récompenses. Cela aurait été impensable quelques années plus tôt.

« Superman sur des skis » titrait le Kronen Zeitung, un des principaux quotidiens autrichiens le lendemain.

Après ce weekend victorieux, Toni Sailer a écrit: « Killy pratique un autre ski, un ski d’un échelon supérieur à celui des meilleurs. Ses victoires sont celles d’un athlète complet arrivé à maturité. »

J’ai  alors marqué 151 points sur 175 possibles. Messner, deuxième,  possède 75 points.  

 

La série continue en descente à Megève…

La piste Emile Allais est très exigeante avec son mur Bornet qui est le passage le plus difficile et le plus dangereux des descentes internationales sur lesquelles j’ai couru.  

Je devance Hans Peter Rohr de deux secondes. Je réussis ma meilleure descente. Je suis étonné de l’avance. C’est ma huitième victoire consécutive et le globe de cristal de la descente est gagné.

 

En slalom, Périllat s’impose  et s’excuse de m’avoir battu. Il voulait surtout dominer Schranz, notre éternel rival.  Pourtant, je suis malade, je tombe dans la première manche mais je finis deuxième quand même et je gagne le combiné.

 

Je déclare forfait pour les épreuves de Madonna. Je prends quinze jours de pause et je fais ma rentrée à Chamrousse pour les pré-Olympiques où je m’impose en descente.

Un jour Toni Sailer m’avait raconté qu’avant ses trois victoires de 1956 aux Jeux Olympiques de Cortina, il avait arrêté de skier plusieurs jours. « Tu devrais faire cela » m’avait-il dit. Je l’ai imité en 1967, puis, un an plus tard avant les Jeux Olympiques de Grenoble, où je m’étais échappé une semaine à Montgenèvre chez mes amis Jauffret et Melquiond pour m’éloigner du ski et de la compétition.

Durant toute ma carrière, je me suis inspiré d’autres champions pour optimiser mon ski. Zeno  Colo que j’avais vu emporter le starter avec lui pour sa façon de sortir du portillon de départ, Adrien Duvillard pour sa manière de conduire le virage ou même le sauteur en hauteur soviétique Valery Brummel dont j’ai repris les exercices de weight lifting vus à la télé.

 

Les semaines suivantes, j’enchaîne ensuite sur le Kandahar à Sestrières avec un triplé français -Killy, Orcel, Périllat- en descente et une victoire dans le combiné très recherchée à l’époque. J’aime cette piste et l’entrée en forêt, superbe, le long des arbres.

  

 

La saison s’achève aux USA avec la traditionnelle Tournée américaine. Comment l’avez-vous vécue?

La fin de saison s’est déroulée dans la facilité. Il y a zéro doute, zéro soucis, zéro angoisse. Je suis sur un nuage.

Nous nous envolons pour les USA et c’était un moment que nous attendions avec impatience. J’étais très ami avec les coureurs américains –notamment Billy Kidd et Jimmy Heuga, le fils d’un berger basque français qui avait émigré aux Etats-Unis- qui étaient aussi de magnifiques skieurs.

Aller là-bas, traverser l’Atlantique était toujours un plaisir et une aventure. Pour ma génération, c’était un voyage important. Un de mes rêves d’enfant était de connaître l’Amérique

A la fin de cette saison 1967, cette tournée est un monument médiatique.

J’ai des propositions d’agents. On m’offre 200 000 dollars pour rejoindre le circuit professionnel et gérer une école de ski aux USA.

A l’escale de New York, une conférence de presse est organisée. Nous sommes reçus par le gouverneur du Massachussets.

On attend beaucoup de moi mais je dois rester concentré.

Dans Sports Illustrated, dont j’ai fait la couverture à trois reprises au cours de ma carrière, on peut lire des titres comme « Lafayette, they are back » ou « King Killy ».

Mais pour moi, il s’agit de ne pas perdre le fil de la saison et de terminer le boulot.  

 

L’étape de Franconia est importante…

Je gagne la descente. Une section difficile de la piste de Cannon Mountain est rebaptisée « Killy’s Corner» (Virage Killy). Cette fois, c’est sûr, je gagne la Coupe du monde.

Je remporte aussi le géant, le slalom et le combiné. Ce sont des moments de plénitude rares mais la saison n’est pas encore terminée.

 

Il reste pourtant deux dernières étapes à Vail et à Jackson Hole, comment les abordez-vous?

La Coupe des Nations devient un enjeu pour nous qui nous pousse à ne rien lâcher. L’équipe de France s’impose et c’est toujours un bon moment de gagner collectivement.

A Vail, je gagne deux géants, une descente et un slalom.

Evian, le commanditaire de la Coupe du Monde, offre le voyage à Robert, mon père, qui amène le globe de cristal  à Jackson Hole.

Là-bas, j’étais fatigué, j’avais souffert d’une sinusite les jours précédents.

Je reconnais la descente … en luge pour ménager mes forces et prendre un peu de bon temps.

A Jackson Hole, je gagne encore un géant.

La saison est finie ou presque puisqu’il me reste encore des courses en Suisse à mon retour à Verbier où je gagne, et à Thyon, où je suis battu par Mauduit.

Mais c’est durant la tournée américaine que le « boulot » a été terminé.

Je suis heureux de partager du bon temps avec mes copains.

 

Quels ont été vos adversaires durant cet hiver magique?

C’est une saison d’une incroyable densité avec 14 skieurs issus de sept nations, qui ont pris la deuxième place des courses que j’ai remporté.

Heinrich Messner a terminé à la deuxième place du classement général de la Coupe du Monde. C’était un skieur « classique », un homme discret mais toujours régulier et difficile à battre.

Je me suis retrouvé à quatre reprises sur la plus haute marche du podium accompagné de mon grand copain Jimmy Heuga. C’était une époque encore « amateur » dans l’esprit. Il y avait une vraie complicité entre les skieurs de toutes les nations avec lesquels on partageait de très beaux moments.

Une fois sur la piste, nous devenions adversaires, sans que cela n’altère nos relations. On a parlé de rivalité, notamment avec Karl Schranz mais la bagarre, c’est sur les skis qu’elle avait lieu. Le reste du temps, on s’entendait vraiment bien. Avec tous les skieurs de cette époque, nous avons des dizaines de souvenirs en commun, de fous rires partagés et d’anecdotes.

 

Cette saison incroyable a déclenché une médiatisation et notoriété hors normes. Comment l’avez-vous gérée?

Cela a vite débordé du cadre du ski alpin. A partir de Wengen sont arrivés des médias qui n’étaient pas ceux qui nous suivaient d’habitude comme Paris Match ou l’émission de télé très populaire en France Cinq Colonnes à la une.

Aujourd’hui, on parlerait de presse « people » qui voulait tout connaître de nous et pas seulement de nos vies de sportifs.

En janvier, au Tenne, à Kitzbühel, où nous avions l’habitude de fêter nos succès, Perillat m’avait mis en garde : « Fais attention, ne t’occupe pas de ce qui se passe autour. Cela m’a coulé après ma saison 1961 (nldr : durant cette saison, il avait remporté toutes les descentes avant de connaître un passage à vide de plusieurs saisons). Mais je sais que cela ne t’arrivera pas car tu sais faire la part des choses. »

1967 m’est tombé dessus et j’ai appris à composer avec la présence constante des envoyés spéciaux de toute la presse française et internationale. Il fallait être capable d’ « ouvrir » les portes puis de les refermer. C’est également ce que j’ai fait la saison suivante à Grenoble. Trente minutes de point presse chaque jour et c’est tout.

 

Quand avez-vous pris conscience du caractère exceptionnel de cette saison 67?

Je ne l’ai jamais perçue dans sa totalité. Je ne me suis pas rendu compte de ce que j’ai réalisé. Bien sûr, il y a des chiffres : 12 de Coupe du Monde sur 17, vainqueur de 19 courses sur 29, et six combinés de la saison pour un total de 25 « 1st places.»

Mais je ne me suis jamais dit « C’est fantastique »

Il m’a fallu 50 ans pour m’apercevoir que cela n’était pas commun.

Chaque époque possède ses challenges. Longtemps, ce qui m’a hanté, c’est ma deuxième place en descente à Kitzbühel en 1968. Cela m’a rendu malade. Comme quoi l’esprit se focalise parfois sur des anecdotes.

La saison 1967 est posée dans mon histoire sportive entre les Championnats du Monde de Portillo en 66 et les Jeux Olympiques de 1968. Elle fait face aux objectifs d’une journée, les fameuses « courses du jour J ». Ce sont, pour moi, des exploits qui vivent bien les uns à côté des autres et se complètent.

Finalement, 1968 à Grenoble, c’était assez « simple »… Il y avait trois courses, dans un laps de temps déterminé, à une date connue bien à l’avance, avec un objectif finalement assez clair.

1967, c’est une construction plus compliquée, plus élaborée…

Les comparer, c’est comparer un sprint et un marathon.

A l’été 67, je suis passé à autre chose assez vite. J’avais une passion immodérée du sport automobile. La Targa Florio, Monza, les 24 Heures du Mans, le Nurbürgring au volant de Porsche ou d’Alpine.  C’était bien de vivre d’autres moments, d’autres sensations, d’autres défis.

Aujourd’hui, c’est en me replongeant avec plaisir 50 ans après à la demande de Skiing History dans cette saison incroyable que je me rends compte que ce n’était pas si mal. Thank you, guys !

Yves Perret, qui dirige une agence de médias sportifs à Grenoble, est l'ancien rédacteur sportif du journal Dauphiné Libéré et rédacteur en chef de Ski Chrono.

It's the first three-peat in World Championship slalom since Christl Cranz did it in 1937-39.

By Tom Kelly

The 19-year-old German ski racer gave a tug on the laces of her leather boots, clicking them into the cables on her long wooden skis. Behind her was the towering Piz Nair, the iconic peak on Corviglia at St. Moritz, high in the Swiss Alps.

A day earlier she had won silver in the downhill on Piz Nair - five minutes, 38 seconds down the mountain. It was the first medal of her young career. Now it was time for slalom, as she placed her bamboo poles into the snow and pushed out onto the course.

Christl Cranz was the first great superstar of women's alpine ski racing - a new sport in the 1930s, making its Olympic debut in 1936. Belgium born, her family moved to Germany after World War I when she was just a child. She was skiing by six and took to it with a passion, eventually winning a dozen world titles and her sport's first Olympic gold at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany in 1936.

Among her accomplishments were three straight World Championship slalom titles from 1937-39 - a feat never matched in 78 years. That is, until last week in St. Moritz when young Mikaela Shiffrin dominated the day to win her third straight gold.

There's a reason no one had matched the record of Christl Cranz. It's tough! The intensity of competition three quarters of a century later makes it more difficult than ever to stay on top.

As the second run approached on Saturday, Shiffrin sat in the snow atop the slalom hill on Suvretta. An umbrella provided shade for her as the sun baked the snow. Her physical therapist piled snow atop her boots to keep the plastic hard and responsive for the race just minutes ahead.

Shiffrin came to slalom day with a different look about her - hair braided into two pigtails, reminiscent of one of her slalom ski racing heroes Janica Kostelic of Croatia, who won the World Championship slalom in 2003 at St. Moritz. The two braids had brought her out of a funk two years ago when she had a slow start to the season before finally winning in Kuhtai, Austria on the eve of the World Championships at Vail/Beaver Creek.

While Shiffrin had a first run lead, the race is never over until the final gate. Swiss Wendy Holdener was only .39 back. Any simple mistake could spell the difference. Holdener would run 29th, Shiffrin 30th. And Holdener put down a strong run.

Now it was Mikaela's date with destiny.

"I tried to pretend like it was a new race completely," she said. "When I was in the start gate, nothing like that was on my mind. It was just, 'now it's time to go.'"

As an 18 year old in Schladming, Austria four years ago, Shiffrin broke through to win her first gold by .22 over home country favorite Michaela Kirchgasser. Two years ago, she withstood the pressure of a hometown World Championships to repeat the title by .34 over Sweden's Frida Hansdotter. In St. Moritz, Holdener had now put down the gauntlet with a solid run that ignited the hometown crowd.

Slalom is about subtleties. When you watch Mikaela Shiffrin ski, you may not even notice it - the direction, the precision, the comfort in her skiing, her confidence. But it plays out quickly in the timing splits.

Split by split, the light went green. Despite being 30 racers into a softening race course, Shiffrin continued to build her lead. And coaches knew the best was yet to come. In the first run, her entire lead was captured on the flat bottom split. And she did it again on the second run, crossing the line 1.64 seconds ahead of Holdener - an unimaginable margin.

Shiffrin is too early in her career to think much about records. "It's a lot to think about - it's a long time ago," she said in response to tying the record. "It's difficult to perform so well in big events three consecutive times. It's not easy and I can understand why people haven't done it.

"But my team around me is really great. My coaches are amazing and we've managed the season really well. I'm really proud of us taking a step back and saying 'I'm not doing the combined or super G. I'm just focusing on my events.' It put more pressure on the GS and slalom, but it worked out."

What sets Mikaela Shiffrin apart as one of her sport's greatest champions is her perspective. She doesn't get caught up in the hype. She endears herself to the media not so much as a champion, but as a real person who passionately cares about her sport.

"It's really cool. But, to be honest, I don't really know what it means yet," she said. "I wasn't thinking about that. Today my real focus was just on the day - on both my runs and my own skiing. I wasn't trying not to worry about anybody else - any of the other skiers.

"Today it wasn't about three medals," she said. "It was just about today and one medal."

Christl Cranz would have been proud.

By Yves Perret

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It was greater than his famous Olympic gold-medal hat trick. In an exclusive interview, Jean-Claude Killy recalls the first season of the World Cup, 50 years ago, when he won 12 of the 17 races, including all of the downhills, and finished on the podium in 86% of the races he entered, a record that’s never been surpassed.

Fifty years after the fact, 1967 remains one of the most memorable seasons in alpine ski competition history. Not only did it introduce the new World Cup—skiing’s first use of a season-long series of competitions to determine the world’s best—but it also resulted in an astonishing, never-to-be-repeated record. 

Jean-Claude Killy of France won 12 out of the 17 slalom, giant slalom and downhill races on the calendar. He was the victor in all the classic downhills, and the Hahnenkamm and Wengen combineds, something no man has since done. 

Jean-Claude Killy of France won 12 out of the 17 slalom, giant slalom and downhill races that made up the 1967 World Cup season. He was the victor in all the classic downhills, and the Hahnenkamm and Wengen combineds, something no man has since done. For the whole season, he participated in 29 races, and won an amazing 19 (66 percent) of them. He finished on the podium in 86 percent of the competitions he entered. He also won six of the season’s downhill-slalom "paper" combineds.

Killy won the first World Cup crystal trophy with a perfect 225 points, the maximum possible in a system in which a racer, who’d won three races in a discipline, could not earn more points in it. First-place was worth 25 points, compared to 100 points today. His one-man World Cup point total topped that of a whole nation—Italy, West Germany or the United States. 

In 1965 in SKI Magazine, Serge Lang had crowned him with the nickname “King Killy,” a title repeated by newspapers and magazines around the world. Last summer, the “King,” 73, invited me to his home near Geneva. On the table in front of us Killy spread open neatly organized, thick albums of press clippings displaying the highlights of his exceptional career. Written in upright handwriting in the notebook containing his race results, is the sentence “La victoire aime l’effort” (Victory loves effort). Over several hours of conversation, he was once again the best skier on the planet.

INTERVIEW: Part 1

Jean-Claude, how do you look back at your 1967 season, and how did it come together after what had occurred in the previous seasons?

If the World Cup hadn’t been invented, my 1967 season might not have been what it was. It was a greater achievement than my 1968 gold-medal hat trick at the Grenoble Winter Olympics, for which most people remember me.  

I got there by a slow process of building. My constant obsession was winning. I managed to pull off a couple of wins, like the Critérium de la Première Neige in 1961 when I was 18 years old. In 1963, I finished in second place 11 times. And the 1964 Winter Olympic Games in Innsbruck were a technical disaster. I lost the toe piece of my binding in the slalom. In the downhill, my edges weren’t correctly sharpened, and I fell on the first fall-away turn. I finished fifth in the GS. In short, I wasn’t ready. 

The week after the Olympics I won the giant slalom of the Arlberg-Kandahar in Garmisch, Germany, ahead of my American friend Jimmie Heuga. It proved that I’d brought my skiing to a decent base, but there were still kinks to be worked out. 

I hadn’t yet resolved health issues that had affected me since I suffered jaundice when I served as a 2^nd class soldier in the French Army during the Algerian war. I was skinny. I lacked endurance. In Paris, journalist Michel Clare introduced me to Doctor Creff, a specialist in exotic diseases. He found out that I also suffered from
amebiasis, and helped me to recover. But I had to work a lot harder than my teammates to be in top physical shape. 

I also needed a system that would allow me to be successful and consistent in not just one, but all three alpine disciplines—slalom, giant slalom and downhill. Specialization limits the opportunities to win. I wanted to develop a system that would address all of the variables that make alpine ski racing such a complex sport—equipment, start number, ski preparation, snow type, weather conditions and more.  

What made a difference?

A key challenge was equipment. It’s crucial to have the best. You can’t allow yourself to lose because of your skis. I skied on two different brands, Rossignol and Dynamic, without having an exclusive contract with either company. It allowed me to choose the pair of skis that would be best for each race. 

At the 1966 World Championships in Portillo, Chile, I used Rossignols in the GS, and Dynamics for the other events. In 1963, in the Kandahar, I even finished second on a pair of Austrian downhill skis.  I was prepared to make financial sacrifices so that I’d be free to use the equipment I wanted.

Above all, I was helped when the Dynamic ski company hired Michel Arpin to take care of my skis. He was from the town of Saint-Foy-Tarentaise, right near my hometown of Val d’Isère. We spoke the same local dialect. Michel had an amazing practical intelligence. Like me, he’d dropped out of high school at 15. When we started our collaboration, I told him: we will make fewer mistakes because we are going to know more than the others. I trusted Michel completely, and I knew that my skis were in the best possible hands.

Describe the process that took you to the top.

As members of the French national team, we spent the whole winter together. But before the first fall training camp we each pursued our own way of doing things. I was on a personal, obsessive quest to figure out what would help me improve, fueled by an overwhelming passion for skiing focused on racing. I opted not to continue my studies. I dropped out of high school. For many young racers, it’s a questionable decision. It limits your options, and can complicate finding a career after ski racing. For me, though, racing was a healthy obsession. It didn’t lessen my ability to think on my own. My aim was to be a free man. Skiing became my profession. 

Winning was all that mattered. I didn’t have a choice. It was simply my only form of expression. France’s head coach Honoré Bonnet understood that. The goal was to win races. 

What were the keys to your success?

Beginning in 1965, several factors came together, fueling the French national team’s growing momentum. The organizational talent and coaching of our leader Honoré Bonnet was one factor that helped us. Another was support from French ski industry—manufacturers like Rossignol and Dynamic skis, Trappeur boots, Salomon and Look bindings. French ski resorts and hotel owners also welcomed us with open arms, charging us next to nothing for lodging and meals. The atmosphere in France at the time was incredibly supportive of ski racing. 

“Our athletes are our best ambassadors,” declared France’s President General Charles de Gaulle. All of a sudden we went from the dormitories of a simple UCPA outdoor center to four-star hotels.

It was the beginning of a golden age for the sport. . . a convergence of increased financial resources, the right people, and experienced professionals. Plus, television broadcasting had gone international, transforming athletes into stars.

In 1965, after nine wins and seven second-place finishes, I was voted the Martini Skieur d’Or, and Champion of Champions by the newspaper L’Equipe. One by one, I’d assembled the pieces of the puzzle.

What was the impact of the World Cup’s creation on the outcome of your incredible 1967 season?

The specific formula and name for the World Cup didn’t come from the racers, but the idea—the force for change—did. Racers were exasperated that their entire careers could depend on a single day’s result in the Winter Olympics, or once every four years when a separate FIS World Championships were held. Nothing big happened in odd-numbered years. Careers were short. Few racers enjoyed the chance to ski in two Olympics. We often discussed our frustration, and what could solve the problem. 

We were all fans of Formula 1 car racing, in which the best are determined by accumulated results over a season-long competition. So it was easy for us to embrace the plan for a World Cup of Alpine Skiing formulated in 1966 by journalist Serge Lang, collaborating with   America’s Bob Beattie, France’s Honoré Bonnet, and Austria’s Sepp Sulzberger, supported by the Paris-based sport daily l’Equipe and journalists like Michel Clare—and John Fry, who added the Nations Cup to the mix. 

During the August 1966 World Alpine Championships at Portillo, Chile, FIS President Marc Hodler gave it the green light. It would enable us to accumulate points in a series of races, including the classics of the Kandahar, Kitzbühel and Wengen, as well as races every winter in America. The mineral water company Evian supplied beautiful crystal trophies. 

At Portillo, I remember being in the finish area of the downhill after my gold medal win. Everyone was crying. Serge Lang said to me, “The World Cup is coming. What’s your strategy going to be?”

“I’m going to fly through it,” I answered. “It’s going to be a lot of fun.” In my mind, I was going to get the most out of the new system in order to take my sports career to a new level. From then on, more than just the big classic events in the Alps would be the measure of a successful season.  

How would you describe the relations among members of the French team?

We trained together and we competed against each other every weekend. Even to this day, we’re like brothers. 

In the spring of 1966, we skied run after run together on the Pissaillas glacier at the Col de l’Iseran, preparing for Portillo, Chile—the only FIS World Alpine Championships ever held in the southern hemisphere. Our different strengths and personalities helped us to support each other. There was always a deep feeling of mutual respect and humility. 

Our inspirational leader Bonnet, 47, a year away from retiring, had put in place a system that functioned superbly, both for the men and for our great women’s team at the time. Each member of the team had his own role. Michel Arpin took care of my skis and did timekeeping. I could fully rely on his technical expertise. 

Jules Melquiond brought to the team a calm, serene temperament; we were roommates for seven years, and we never had even the most minor ego clash. Team captain Guy Périllat was listened to and respected. Léo Lacroix contributed his optimism, good humor, and especially his talent. Georges Mauduit, the giant slalom specialist, and Louis Jauffret, the slalom specialist, were magnificent skiers.

All of these talents, plus the combination of our different temperaments, made for a tremendous and cohesive squad.

The 1967 season began in December 1966 at your home resort of Val d’Isère, with the traditional Critérium de la Première Neige . . .

The race was special that year because it was the first time it was held on the new Daille run, called Oreiller-Killy or OK, which I had helped to design. (Editor's note: Henri Oreiller was 1948 Olympic downhill gold medalist.) Léo Lacroix, who won the race, still laughs when he recalls it today. “I’m the only one to have beaten Killy in downhill in the 1967 season,” he says. I remind him that it was in December 1966. The Critérium didn’t yet count for World Cup points. The World Cup didn’t begin until January 5^th at Berchtesgaden, Germany, where I finished third in the GS. 

Your first success came a couple of days later in the GS at Adelboden, Switzerland, the first in a series of eight victories, counting the Combined. You went on to win twice (downhill and slalom) at Wengen, also in Switzerland. What was the importance of this double win?

At Adelboden, I won with the GS with bib number 13. It was no bad luck for me! Adelboden has always been a benchmark for the GS. Winning there confirms a certain level of physical training and technical skill. In any season, too, the first win is significant.

At Wengen, in the downhill on the Lauberhorn, I was 25 hundredths of a second faster than Léo Lacroix. It was the first French victory in the Lauberhorn since Guy Périllat’s win in 1961. It was even sweeter because the Austrians, who maybe thought our triumph in the World Championships five months earlier at Portillo was a fluke, were expecting us to fail. It was an important moment for the whole French team.

At Wengen I also dominated the slalom, which I felt was the steepest and hardest of the year. With this triple victory-—I won the combined—I got the impression that I was finally playing in the big leagues for good. The next week would be the incredible challenge of Kitzbühel.  

In the March-April 2017 issue of Skiing History, we’ll present the second part of this exclusive interview with 1967 World Cup overall men's alpine champion Jean-Claude Killy, plus an interview by journalist Michel Beaudry with Nancy Greene-Raine of Canada, who won the 1967 women’s overall World Cup title. The World Cup is celebrating its 50th anniversary this season.

Interview by Yves Perret
Yves Perret, who heads a sports media agency in Grenoble, is the former sports editor of the Dauphiné Libéré newspaper, and was editor-in-chief of Ski Chrono.

In November 2016, 16,000 fans attended a World Cup alpine ski race in New England, where love of the sport has never waned. By JOHN FRY

Last November was a transformative month. . . not only for politics, but possibly for American skiing. In politics, a neglected bunch of underemployed voters, largely unobserved and resentful of political correctness and diversity, had grown skeptical of the Establishment’s message and mission. The result was an electoral surprise. 

A parallel with skiing may seem remote, but how about this? Two weeks after the election, more than 15,000 enthusiastic fans unexpectedly showed up at an alpine ski race. And as many came back the second day. Those kinds of crowds hadn’t shown up at a World Cup race in 50 years in the United States, since Jean-Claude Killy won all three races on Cannon Mountain, New Hampshire in 1967. 

Who were these forgotten people who jammed the roads leading to the Superstar slope at Killington? Who would have expected such a throng? 

Not the various organizations that have erased the word “ski” from their names, replacing it with the amorphous, somewhat inaccurate “snowsports” as part of a fruitless endeavor to unite skiing with a culture whose mission has been to replace skis with snowboards. Not the advertisers and publishers who have sought to cure anemic participation with images of young men recklessly hucking cliffs, doing aerial flips, in baggy clothing derived from urban street wear.

The thousands who lined the slopes and filled the stands at Killington, including children, came to see another chapter in the hundred-year-old sport of alpine ski racing. In the world’s top women racers they could observe athletic form to which they can relate their own technique, most obviously in giant slalom: carving turns, skis out from under the body, head and shoulders aimed downhill, going fast. 

Nothing else on the slopes—freestyle, aerials, snowboarding—does this, or possesses such a rich history.  

The surprise is where all it happened. Vacated by American skiing’s national organizations, which moved West, the Northeast is a region akin to the neglected industrial heartland, made famous in the recent election. It’s snow country’s Rust Belt. . .at least, figuratively. Over the past 50 years the Northeast has suffered the loss of hundreds of lift and rope-tow-served ski areas—up to 650 across New England and as many as 250 in New York, according to Jeremy Davis of the New England Lost Ski Areas Project (www.nelsap.org). Ski companies and associations headquartered in the East have folded or moved west. 

However, in New England, the historic cradle of American skiing, love of the sport has never waned. The heartbeat is strong. If you include the amount of skiing they do in Colorado in the total, Northeastern skiers account for fully a third of national skier-days. They also purchase about a quarter of alpine equipment. They were the ones who thronged the spectator stands and the roads leading to Killington. 

Credit Powdr Corp.’s Herwig Demschar (Austria) and U.S. Ski Team President Tiger Shaw (Dartmouth, Stowe), among others, for making the risky bet that World Cup racing, after an absence of 25 years, would be a success in the East. The crowds of spectators have also served to remind FIS officials that 56 million people live within a few hours’ drive of Vermont and New Hampshire ski mountains. Tops in TV ratings for ski racing are Boston and New York, the world’s media capital. The FIS should waste no time in putting the U.S. Northeast permanently on the annual calendar of World Cup races. 

Looking ahead, too, ski areas may question why they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars building free-admission terrain parks, while charging guests to compete in NASTAR. An easy open-gated course enables recreational skiers to sense an approximation of what Lindsey Vonn and Bode Miller experience, or what the world’s best women racers were doing at Killington on Thanksgiving weekend, exciting a thrilled public, and reminding us of the path to making a great sport even greater, again.  

  

 

 

 

 

The writer voted the Democratic line in the recent U.S. presidential election. His opinions are his own, and not necessarily those of the International Skiing History Association. Fry is the author of the award-winning Story of Modern Skiing (University Press of New England, 2006).

By Tom Kelly

Over the past decade, Lindsey Vonn has established herself as one of the world's most notable athletes. People on the street know Lindsey Vonn. They recognize her as an accomplished ski racer and cultural hero of her time - a glamorous woman whose image has graced every level of global media.

What they don't see is the Lindsey Vonn who spends six to eight hours in the gym every day -  sweating and toiling to tone her 32-year-old body to accomplish things never before achieved in her sport. And with each painful injury, that work becomes harder.

It was no surprise that last weekend in the Bavarian village of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, she broke down in tears - letting her emotions loose in the finish area, hugging her father, doing a dance with the fans and looking back up at the imposing Kandahar run with a smile.

It was just a broken arm, some would say, that stole the first six weeks of the Audi FIS Ski World Cup season from her. But this wasn't just any broken arm. A downhill training crash at the U.S. Ski Team Speed Center at Copper Mountain, CO in November shattered her humerus. She showcased the x-rays on Instagram, detailing the fragmented bones and the metal plate and screws surgeons in Vail used to put it back together again.

Next came the work. There was pain. There were tears. Then there were pullups - maybe earlier than doctors would have liked. But she had a mission.

A week before Garmisch, after  just a few on-snow days at Vail, Vonn crossed the Atlantic bound for the tiny Austrian mountain village of Zauchensee south of Salzburg. It was a very special place for her. A year ago, the legendary Austrian Annemarie Moeser Proell was in the finish to greet the American star when she matched the record of 36 downhill wins.

A win would have been a fairy tale. But it wasn't in the cards. After days of waiting for weather to break for downhill training, Vonn mustered a 13th on the twisty-turn track that rips its way from the towering peak of the Gamskogel to the charming village below.

She tucked away the experience in Zauchensee and traveled to Garmisch with hope and confidence. The Kandahar is one of those big downhills with broad shoulders and bold, sweeping high-speed turns. Six of Vonn's then 76 World Cup wins had come there (among them a slalom win in 2009) - including a big victory a year ago by 1.51 seconds. Still, she had such little time on snow - and almost nothing at speed - she thought she may need to scale back her expectations.

The Kandahar stands proudly in the shadow of the Zugspitze. The women's course starts high in the Troeglhang, arcing boldly through the Bavarian forest - big sweeping turns. But while the top may be bathed in sunshine, the winding track is dark and bumpy, making it terrifyingly difficult to visualize your line. This was a course you skied with intuition and feel.

Vonn kept her cards close in two training runs, running fifth fastest on her final try but failing to  make one of the final gates. No worries. She knew she could adjust her line on race day.

Standing at the top, she knew what she had to do. German hero Veronika Rebensburg kicked it off with bib number one to take the lead. One by one, no one could match her time. Then came the matchup ski racing fans can expect to see in every speed race this season as Swiss star Lara Gut came into the gate. Gut knifed it down the Kandahar to take the lead. Soon it was Vonn's turn, in the familiar 17th start position.

She charged out onto the course, arcing her way onto the Kandahar and through the chicane turns of the Schussanger. The first intermediate time came up red, a slim gap to make up on Gut. Pointing her skis into the fall line, Vonn took on the look of a champion. This was not the same ski racer with the wide and shaky turns of a week earlier. She rocketed down through the Himmelreich and dropped over Waldeck - the steepest pitch on the course.

Suddenly the 2010 Olympic champion was up by .39 seconds over Gut.

Vonn continued to put down bold turns, skiing a courageous line - taking calculated risks, skiing on a mission. Now it was down to the final turns through the FIS Schneisse and into the Tauber Schuss - time ticking and ticking.

As she crossed the finish line, there a moment of silence. Then there was the roar of the crowd. She saw the scoreboard and it was green. She hugged her hands into her chest, looking into the crowd for her father, before collapsing prone on the snow sobbing uncontrollably.

Sport fans see what takes place in the arena. But sometimes they get a look deeper inside. In Garmisch-Partenkirchen on Saturday, they saw into the heart of one of the world's greatest athletes. Even if you're Lindsey Vonn with 77 World Cup wins, they don't come automatically and they are never easy.

It's one thing to set a goal of winning, it's quite another to achieve it. Lindsey knows she can match Ingemar Stenmark's record of 86 World Cup wins. She knows she can race against the men. But she, and only she, bears the burden of achieving it.

"To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was capable of," she said fighting back tears in the finish. "I tried to risk more and believe in myself. I know people don’t think about how much blood, sweat and tears it took to get here today.

"Words can't describe how happy I am right now. Hard work pays off in the end.

"I did it!!"

By Tom Kelly

Gold comes in many forms. Last weekend on the icy pitch of the fabled O.K. course in Val d’Isere, France, a 15th place World Cup super G result gleamed brighter than an Olympic medal for Ryan Cochran-Siegle.

Cochran-Siegle is a Vermont native who has made Park City his home the last few years, living with his cousin and former U.S. Ski Team racer Jessica Kelley and her husband, well known Park City athlete and coach Adam Cole.

It had been nearly four years since his last major international speed event in February, 2013. On the third gate of the combined downhill at the 2013 World Championships in Schladming, Austria, he crashed, shredding his left knee. Multiple surgeries and hundreds of days in the gym later, he scored a career-best finish on a weekend that could define his pathway leading up to PyeongChang in just 14 months.

The son of 1972 Olympic slalom champion Barbara Ann Cochran, Cochran-Siegle had a textbook career going. He won his first U.S. Championship medal at age 19 in 2011. That next December he scored his first World Cup points in the Birds of Prey super G with a proud mom in the finish. Two months later he captured double gold at 2012 World Junior Championships in Italy.

He was on his way. Until that fateful day in February, 2013.

Standing in the start gate for his return to World Cup speed, his mind was calm and focused. “Starting 61 was super nice because I had no expectations,” he said. “You really have to have a pretty incredible run. There was no pressure – it was a win-win in my eyes.”

Few athletes could have survived what he had endured for nearly four years. At his side was a team of doctors, trainers, coaches and family. His gold medal attitude of patience and perseverance would serve him well.

He planted his poles at the top of the historic O.K. course that bears the initials of Val d’Isere’s most famous sons, Henri Oreiller and Jean-Claude Killy and did what he has always loved to do: he skied.

It was a long road to Val d’Isere. Much of his knee was destroyed from the accident. Initial rehab went well and he was back on snow. But it didn’t last. Another surgery. No go. One option remained – transplant surgery. While not that unusual, it was a procedure that wasn’t ideal for the levels of stress an athlete puts on the knee. But if there were ever a candidate, Ryan Cochran-Siegle was the one.

“We really blazed our own path on this one,” said the team’s medical coordinator Chris Antinori. “There was really no precedent to draw from looking at other college and professional sports for athletes having this procedure and returning to a high level of sport participation. But a lot of good things and good people came together to make this a positive outcome. RCS is the only elite skier and athlete that I am aware of to return and be successful at an elite level.”

He could have given up at any point in time. But he didn’t.

“Having had prior success, I didn’t want that to be my final race – I wasn’t ready to be done,” said Cochran-Siegle. “The amount of energy I put into my rehab – I wanted to do it right. That was the only way to make it out with what I wanted to still achieve.”

Bunkering down at the Center of Excellence and hitting the books at Westminster College, he waited for the call. Finally, it came – a donor had been found. In August, 2014 he underwent a third surgery at the Steadman-Hawkins Clinic in Vail.

Then came the work. At first, eight weeks non-weight bearing but still working every day on his good leg. Then mundane, simple exercises to patiently bring him back to strength. Six months later on February 2, 2015 – when his teammates were parading into the World Championships at Vail/Beaver Creek – Cochran-Siegle was doing his first barbell squats. A milestone day, strength coach Tracy Fober at his side.

He was on snow that summer, carefully undertaking a prolonged return to snow process together with his teammates Tommy Biesemeyer and Resi Stiegler under the watchful eye of coach Bernd Brunner. Patience was his virtue. The 2016 season was a good one mixed with some NorAm podiums, a couple FIS race wins, a pair of medals at U.S. Championships in Sun Valley and a point-scoring finish in a World Cup at Kranjska Gora.

But he wanted to get back to speed.

There’s a certain protocol in a World Cup finish area as the race day wears on. While the winners are already doing their TV interviews, eyes remained glued to the scoreboard watching to see who might make an attack from the back. RCS didn’t win the race. But, boy, did he turn a lot of heads.

Up on the race course, team trainer Antinori felt a deep swelling in his heart. Back home at the Center of Excellence, his strength coach Fober, passionately watched the TV broadcast on her computer – ignoring the meeting she was attending and shouting out loud as he crossed the finish line. As a coach or trainer, it tugs at your heart and brings tears to your eye to see a hard working athlete achieve success.

“When I crossed the finish line it was a huge relief,” he said. “I didn’t know I had that good of a run. It felt like I was on the fine line of skiing well and going out. But when I saw I was 15th
I was surprised, a little overwhelmed and super happy – immediately super happy.”

Cochran-Siegle lives in Park City with his cousin Jess Kelley and her husband, former athlete and team coach Adam Cole. In Ryan’s room, Cole hung a 2002 poster of Norwegian star Lasse Kjus that says: ‘Three-Time Olympic Champion – Inspiration.’

Ryan Cochran-Siegle is an athlete to watch. On his Instagram channel he’s posted a saying: ‘It isn’t the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.’

The gold medal goes to Ryan Cochran-Siegle.

Radical racing invention, or a variation of a long-established technique? By John Fry

Was the Egg (oeuf in French, Ei in German) a radical ski racing invention? Or merely a stage in the steady progress made in streamlining the skier’s body to achieve faster speeds?

In France the question is alive, and afire with controversy. Jean Vuarnet, his son Alain, and his supporters tell of the enormous research he did to achieve his invention. They cite the French newspaper Le Figaro, which once compared the Egg to the Fosbury Flop, a single change in body action that eventually enabled all high jumpers to leap higher. Vuarnet also suggests retaliation—that doubts about his “invention” only began after his involvement in the controversial firing of six racers from the French ski team in 1973. Critics and opponents, like Jean-Claude Killy, say the Egg wasn’t an invention, but merely a variation of what downhill Olympic gold medalists Henri Oreiller and Zeno Colò were already doing a few years earlier.

Experts in the rest of the world appear baffled by why there should be a controversy. They mostly see Vuarnet’s work as part of speed skiing’s changing aerodynamics, going back at least to 1930 and 1931, when Gustav Lantschner and Leo Gasperl set world speed records, and earlier to the 19th century, when California gold miners sat low over their long skis to speed downhill. It’s hard to find anyone outside of Gaul who thinks l’Oeuf is anything but a stage in the evolution of the hocke, crouch, tuck and streamlining of the racer’s body. Vuarnet first exhibited his stance in Ski ABC—Technique Moderne. The 1957 book contains a picture of him in what is clearly the optimal aerodynamic stance of the time—poles and lower arms parallel to the skis, which, however, are not as far apart as in later editions of Joubert’s and Vuarnet’s books. No textual analysis is offered.

The foreword to Ski ABC was written by Ralph Miller, who helped with the first English-language edition, and who set a world speed record at Portillo in 1955. Miller thinks Vuarnet’s stance was simply a further refinement of body positions designed to reduce air friction.

The 1960 edition of Ski Moderne (Arthaud) contains excellent photos, illustrations and text about l’Oeuf. It’s the first detailed description I can find in print. A photo sequence of Vuarnet from the pages of Sports Illustrated is wonderful. That magazine, and others at the time, credited Vuarnet’s Squaw Valley downhill gold medal to his use of metal skis, as well as to his superior aerodynamic stance. The Austrians were the big losers. “We missed the wax,” Anderl Molterer told me recently.

I have a copy of the German Ski Moderne, a translation by Hanspeter Lanig, published in 1963. Via e-mail, Lanig told me that l’Oeuf was an invention (erfindung) of a word, not of a technique. And Dick Dorworth, the American who set a new world speed record at Portillo in 1963, says he knew about Vuarnet’s Egg. He thinks stance is shaped considerably by the racer’s own morphology. In competitive downhill racing, the V-J or Oeuf is a technique mostly limited to shaving seconds on flatter sections of the course. How valuable it is depends on the terrain—the Streif on Hahnenkamm and Birds of Prey at Beaver Creek yield less advantage for l’Oeuf than, say, the Sarajevo Olympic downhill of 1984, or the Squaw Valley downhill of 1960.

Austria’s Stefan Kruckenhauser was said to have invented “wedeln” about the same time as Vuarnet “invented” the egg. Both drew their inspiration from racing technique. Lanig might say that the word, not the act, is the invention.

My own view is that Vuarnet’s writing and photos brought into public view the final ideal stance for attaining the highest speeds on flatter sections of downhill courses and in setting speed records—an evolution that had begun at least 30 years before. Joubert and Vuarnet’s 1966 Comment se Perfectionner à Ski (How to Ski the New French Way) shows a further evolution: the bullet or bolide. It was a super-egg-like streamlining of the body, with legs even more splayed, torso even more compressed between the legs. Here, arguably, was the final form. It hasn’t changed much in the ensuing 50 years.

His Olympic gold was only the beginning. The triumphant, sometimes tumultuous professional and personal life of the 1960 Olympic downhill gold medalist, technique analyst, resort developer, and entrepreneur of eyeglass fame. By Alain Lazard

Today in the Haute Savoie of the French Alps quietly lives Jean Vuarnet, 83, captor of the first Olympic medal ever won on non-wooden skis. Vuarnet’s downhill victory at the Squaw Valley Winter Games signaled the start of the most productive decade for the great French national ski team of the 1960s. At the time of the Games, Vuarnet had already begun to co-author, with Georges Joubert, a best-selling series of influential ski technique books. In the period 1968–1975, he directed major changes in both the Italian and French national ski teams. He spearheaded the development of France’s first car-free ski resort, and then launched an eponymous and très chic line of sunglasses, marketed worldwide. Later in life, he experienced a strange twist of events that had their beginning almost 50 years earlier.

Vuarnet is dividing his time these days between the ski town of Morzine, where he was born, and Sallanches, gateway to the Mont Blanc region, where he resides in a boutique retirement home with two other residents, and his lively companion Hifi, a King Charles Spaniel. Sallanches is where the Dynastar ski company has long been headquartered. Last year, Vuarnet—just as he was recovering from hip replacement surgery—suffered a stroke. Despite this double blow, he’s determined to rebound from the ordeal.

From Law School to the Winter Games
Jean Vuarnet was born on January 18, 1933 in Tunisia, where his father, Dr. Victor Vuarnet, had recently established a medical practice. Originally from Savoie, Dr. Vuarnet soon changed his mind about life in North Africa. He returned with his family to the French Alps in 1934, settling in Morzine, one of few established French ski resorts before World War II.

Little Jean began to ski when he was two-and-a-half years old. When his father bought him his first pair of skis, he threw a fit because he thought they were too short. It was an early indication of his penchant for going straight downhill rather than wasting time with turns.

He was known by everyone in the village as Jean-Jean, the son of Dr. Vuarnet. Like the other kids, he skied and ice-skated whenever possible. He also introduced skijoring to the valley by attaching a harness to Toto, a dog that belonged to his childhood friend Roger Vadim. (Vadim went on to become a movie director and the husband, at various times, of Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda.)

When he finished grammar school at age 11, his father sent him to a private boarding school in Paris. He was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a physician. Dr. Vuarnet exerted an overwhelming influence over his son. He encouraged Jean to pursue excellence in sports, but not to the detriment of his education. The elder Vuarnet had achieved this balance himself by attending medical school while playing soccer at an elite level, including his selection to the French national team for the 1936 Summer Games.

Vuarnet’s mother, overshadowed by Victor, had a lesser influence on him. The couple divorced when Jean was 10. His father remarried quickly, but as soon as Jean began to bond with his stepmother, his father divorced and remarried again.

As a high school student in Lyon and Annemasse, Vuarnet skied mostly during the holidays, dabbled in jumping, and became a competitive swimmer. After graduation, he decided to give ski racing a serious shot while earning a college degree. He enrolled as a law student at the University of Grenoble in 1952.

Around the same time, he became romantically involved with a young French-Canadian woman who, after she discovered she was pregnant, wrote a letter to Jean explaining the situation. The letter arrived at the Vuarnet home in Morzine. Dr. Vuarnet opened it, and then promptly decided not to reveal its contents to his son, who was away at college. Jean discovered nothing of what had happened. The girl returned to Montreal, presumably never to be seen again.

At law school, Jean joined the Grenoble University Club (GUC), where the ski program had recently been taken over by a PE teacher named Georges Joubert. It was a remarkable winter. At the French University Games, Vuarnet won the 1952 national titles in downhill, slalom and combined. He also picked up a lasting reputation as a “city racer” from his future colleagues on the French national team, mountain boys who at the time seldom pursued education beyond the age of 13 or 14.

Schooled in cities, Vuarnet was only partly raised in a ski town. He never became a true “natural” skier by his own admission. To compensate, he observed and analyzed what the best skiers were doing. Olympic bronze and silver medalist Guy Périllat expressed it well in a 2002 interview in l’Équipe Magazine: “Jean wasn’t the most gifted among us, but he always scrutinized everything in depth.”

Vuarnet’s attitude was a perfect fit with what Georges Joubert was doing at the GUC. Their first book, Ski ABC: Technique Moderne, published in the fall of 1956, was praised by 1937 overall world champion of alpine skiing, Émile Allais, who contributed a preface. The purpose of the photos in Ski ABC was to demonstrate that the world’s best racers all used the same basic techniques. That opinion contradicted the narrow nationalism prevalent in ski technique at the time, when French, Austrians and Swiss each were claiming to have the superior method.

For more than a decade, Joubert and Vuarnet analyzed and explained what they observed in elite racers, codifying their findings in five books, translated into multiple languages, which influenced ski coaching and teaching around the world. Joubert tended to focus on turning technique, Vuarnet on speed. From their books emerged inventive technique terms, such as the Jet Turn, the Serpent, Avalement (swallowing terrain irregularities), and l’oeuf.

Vuarnet’s downhill research led him to an enhanced streamlining of the body, with feet farther apart for superior gliding. After he used it to win his Olympic downhill gold medal at Squaw Valley, American media called it the “egg,” which translates to French as l’oeuf. Actually, a cartoonist at the French sports daily l’Équipe, André Caza, in 1946 used the word “oeuf” in a comical way to describe the positions employed by cyclists and skiers to streamline themselves.

For Vuarnet, the correct stance was not natural. It required special physical conditioning to build the stamina necessary to hold the position for sustained periods of time. It combined the two necessities for reaching maximum speed in speed racing: a body profile offering minimal air resistance, and the ability to keep skis flat on the snow and properly loaded for the best possible gliding. The racer could employ it to gain time on the easier sections of downhill courses. Later, Honoré Bonnet, the iconic director of the French Ski Team, wanted to call the position “VJ” (Vuarnet Jean), but it was dropped for l’œuf, or aller tout schuss.

The Path to Olympic Gold
During the period leading up to the 1960 Winter Olympics, Vuarnet rose rapidly through the racing ranks, winning regional and national races and competing on the international circuit. He collected seven national titles in all three existing disciplines—downhill, slalom and giant slalom—from 1957 to 1959.

He made the cut to race the giant slalom and the downhill at the 1956 Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, only to discover at the last minute that his GS spot had been given to another team member. Angry, he declared publicly that James Couttet, the French team coach and 1938 world downhill champion, “…was a great racer but a mediocre coach.” The declaration made the front page of France Soir, a daily newspaper with a print run of 1.2 million copies. Vuarnet didn’t ski in the GS or in the downhill…and Couttet resigned.

At the 1958 World Championships in Bad Gastein, Vuarnet won a bronze medal in the downhill, then added three titles at the French National Championships. That year he married the attractive Edith Bonlieu.

Vuarnet’s new bride had experienced family misfortune. She had grown up among four siblings with three different fathers, without knowing her own. One brother was 1964 Olympic GS gold medalist “Le Petit Prince” François Bonlieu, who was killed tragically in 1973. Notwithstanding these challenges, Edith became a formidable racer in her own right, winning three national titles. A leg fracture prevented her from competing in the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics. She could console herself with the knowledge that, uniquely, she had a brother and husband who were both Olympic gold medalists. (Edith and Jean went on to have three children—Alain, b. 1962; Pierre, b. 1963; and Patrick, b. 1968.)

At the 1960 Winter Games at Squaw Valley, Vuarnet rode a pair of metallic Allais 60s made by Rossignol, designed in collaboration with Emile Allais. At the time, high-performance competition skis were still made of laminated wood. One of the drawbacks of the first metal skis produced was the lack of consistency between the skis in a pair. Vuarnet left France for the Olympics without a pair to his liking. Even with the best pair sent to Squaw Valley, only one ski performed well. He instructed Rossignol to make him a second ski similar to the one he liked… and he received it in California only days before the race! The skis were worth their weight in gold.

A New Life After Racing
On returning from Squaw Valley, Vuarnet was greeted at home by an overwhelming reception in Morzine. He was offered the position of Director of Morzine’s Office du Tourisme, in charge of promoting the resort. He started work immediately. Also, with the aid of ski journalist Serge Lang, he wrote a book, Notre Victoire Olympique. A new life, a new career had begun.

Pouilloux and another eyeglass manufacturer approached him with an offer to develop a new and stylish pair of sunglasses, called the Vuarnet. Sales were slow, but took off in the 1980s after the company was a sponsor of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, where it introduced its catchphrase, “It’s a Vuarnet Day, Today.” Newspapers compared owning a pair of Vuarnets to having an Hermès scarf. Celebrities Mick Jagger and Miles Davis wore Vuarnet glasses, as did world-class sailors and ski instructors at resorts like Cortina, Courchevel and Megève. Annual sales reached 1.4 million pairs worldwide and in the United States, Vuarnets surpassed Bausch & Lomb’s Ray-Bans for a few years in a row. France rewarded the success with the coveted Annual Export Award.

Creation of the Avoriaz Resort
Beginning in the 1960s, new ski-in, ski-out resorts were being developed in France—among them La Plagne, Tignes, Les Menuires, Flaine and Les Arcs. As head of Morzine’s Office du Tourisme, Vuarnet envisioned a grand project—the development on an adjacent plateau of a high-altitude, pedestrian resort.

“I convinced the municipality to imagine a brand new resort above Morzine,” Vuarnet recalls, “free of cars. It would be Avoriaz.” As the possessor of a law degree, an Olympic gold medal, and knowledge of skiing and the local terrain, Vuarnet was seen as having the assets necessary to launch such an ambitious venture. The municipality gave the project 200 acres of developable land for a base village. Avoriaz, the first no-car resort in France, opened in 1966. Later Vuarnet negotiated an agreement to connect Avoriaz to 11 adjacent resorts, including four in Switzerland. Les Portes du Soleil is now the second-largest complex of interconnected ski areas in the world.

Italian and French National Ski Teams
After the launching of Avoriaz, Vuarnet anticipated devoting more time to his growing family, with two boys and a third on the way. But another challenge arose: The president of the Italian Winter Sports Federation asked him to lead the country’s languishing alpine ski team, ranked 8th in the world. The losing status was unacceptable to the proud Italians, who still remembered the great period of Zeno Colò, 1950 world champion in giant slalom and downhill at Aspen and downhill gold medalist at the 1952 Olympic Games.

Vuarnet hesitated, but finally accepted the challenge, with the condition that he be given carte blanche to run the operation as he wished. He led the team from 1968 to 1972, blessed with the arrival of 18-year-old racer Gustavo Thoeni. Success followed. Before his tenure, the Italian alpine team in 17 years had scored only one podium in the classic races. A year after Vuarnet left the team, 1973, Italy had risen to second in the men’s Nations Cup standings, and a year later first, ahead of Austria. The exceptional team was nicknamed The Blue Avalanche. Between them, Thoeni and Piero Gros won the overall crystal globe, symbolic of the best alpine ski racer in the world, consecutively between 1971 and 1975.

In 1972, Vuarnet was petitioned to accept the vice presidency of the French Ski Federation, which perceived the national team to be in trouble. Against his better judgment, he accepted, with the condition that his friend and collaborator Georges Joubert be placed in charge of the team. Despite what the two men brought to the table—Vuarnet’s just-accomplished turnaround of the Italian team, and Joubert’s transformation of an insignificant university ski club into the number-one team in France—the new assignment quickly turned sour. Their reforms were derailed. The fusion of staff, racers and suppliers, which Vuarnet had been able to create in Italy, did not happen. The French Federation, supported by the government’s Secretary of State for Youth and Sports, decided to fire six top racers for intransigence. Joubert resigned.

The mountain community and 1968 Olympic triple gold medalist Jean-Claude Killy unconditionally supported the racers, leading to a split between Killy and Vuarnet that persists to this day. It’s a long, complicated and unpleasant story. (For one version of what happened, visit www.affairevaldisere.fr; a differing interpretation will appear in the July-August 2016 issue of Skiing History.)

Vuarnet quit after two years. By 1974, he had spent almost 15 years working nonstop since his gold-medal win at Squaw Valley, with little time for family life. Edith had borne the brunt of handling the house, running two ski shops in Avoriaz and raising three boys. The only time the family spent together was during extended summer vacations in the South of France, the Costa del Sol in Spain, and aboard Vuarnet’s sailboats, the Eileen and the Tahoe, a 64-foot custom-built schooner.

Vuarnet took advantage of this window of time to try his hand at a lifelong passion: books and reading. For a few years he launched and operated a publishing company, Les Éditions VUARNET, which handled titles as diverse as cinema, history, travel guides, sports and medicine. This semi-dilettante period didn’t last. In 1987, Vuarnet decided to capitalize on the strong brand recognition of his namesake sunglasses by launching a skiwear line with his son, Pierre. Subsequently created was Vuarnet International, which branched out into watches, sportswear, shoes, perfume, cosmetics, pens, luggage, leather goods, jewelry, ski underwear, helmets, ski poles and skis. The company came to oversee luxury Vuarnet shops in Brazil and France, and developed licensees with distribution in 30 different countries. Jean Vuarnet retired in 1998. His son Alain, who succeeded him, stepped down two years ago.

Family Tragedy
The years 1994 and 1995 were horrific ones for Vuarnet and his family. In October 1994, news emerged of a mass suicide in nearby Switzerland. The bodies of 53 members of an obscure apocalyptic cult, the Order of the Solar Temple, were found dead and partially burned. A few days later, two journalists showed up at the door of Vuarnet’s chalet in Morzine. From them Vuarnet learned that his wife Edith and Patrick, the youngest of his three sons, belonged to Solar Temple. Thankfully, they were not among the victims. But the family was devastated. Over the next year, they desperately tried to persuade mother and son to leave the sect.

The effort failed. On Christmas Day 1995, another 14 sect members were found in a remote area of the Vercors range near Grenoble, their bodies shot and partially burned. After a week of waiting, Jean learned that Edith and Patrick were among the dead. It was a terrible tragedy. Despite public outcry and civil lawsuits, a key cult leader—a Swiss musician and orchestra conductor—was inexplicably acquitted.

The funeral of Edith and Patrick in Morzine was a moving tribute to the Vuarnets from the local community and afar. Jean received hundreds of condolences from around the world. One was from a Montreal woman named Christiane. She reminded him that they had known one another in the early 1950s. By coincidence, Jean’s son Pierre was living with his Canadian wife and two children in Montreal at the time, so Jean decided to spend the 1996 Christmas holidays with them. While he was there he looked up Christiane. To his shock and surprise, she told him how she had moved to Canada and given birth to a lovely child, Catherine. In Montreal, for the first time, Vuarnet met his biological daughter, named Catherine.

Three years after re-connecting in Montreal, Jean and Christiane married. Over the next 13 years together, they divided their time between Morzine, the Baleares Islands (where Vuarnet moored his schooner, Tahoe), and a picturesque Cantons de l’Est village in Quebec, Knowlton, which happens to be the longtime home of Canadian two-event world champion Lucile Wheeler Vaughan—who had no idea another gold medalist was living nearby.

In 2012, Christiane died of a heart attack. After her passing, Vuarnet sought a place where he could spend the remainder of his years. He found a retirement home in Sallanches, then recently returned to his home town of Morzine.

Only a handful of French ski champions have accomplished so much after their successes on the slope—notably Émile Allais, Vuarnet, and Jean-Claude Killy. Vuarnet looks back at his career with pride and equanimity. Over his multi-faceted career, he made a good amount of money, “but money-making,” he says, “never drove the decisions that led to my successes.”

The author, the late Alain Lazard, was a longtime ISHA member and frequent Skiing History contributor. His most recent articles included “Rise and Fall of Racing Nations” (May-June 2015) and “Joe Marillac: The Little-Known Frenchman Who Helped Squaw Valley Win the Winter Olympics” (July-August 2013).

Bob Beattie recently shared some thoughts about the state of ski racing in the United States. Here's what Coach has to say:

• Alpine ski racing is too expensive. When a parent calls to tell me she paid $25,000 for her kid to be on the U.S. 'C' Team, or $30,000 when moved to the “B” Team it makes me wonder. This is killing our sport!
• Local programs are our future.  The USST has jumped in after many years away. We need top coaches and leaders at the local level who have leadership capabilities and the ability to keep parents on the sideline! (I could write a book on this).
• Age levels have changed. Many USST racers are 30 years old or more. Maybe we should only support them if they excel, and only spend money on the younger ones!  Many have wanted to bring back Pro Ski Racing, but  we already have it within the USST – older racers have their own coaches, managers, travel etc.
• We have a program in Aspen, in which almost 2,000 kids become skiers at  very low cost. They receive bus transportation up the valley and instruction by the Aspen Ski School instructors. Jeff Gorsuch gave 250 pairs of skis, boots, poles, and bindings last week at no charge. A large percentage are Spanish speaking. They could not be skiing without his support. The Aspen Ski Company gave 150 snowboards. We started this several years ago and it is run through the Aspen Valley Ski Club. I would like to see this number double. We should present this to other ski towns. Then we would truly be Best in The World.
• Formats: Skiing is slow when it comes to new ideas. Let's push team events – with dual racing both at local level and USST.
• College skiing is alive but not well in the West. Only two out of 12 skiers were Americans in last winter's NCAA Championships from University of Colorado, Utah and New Mexico, and only one from the University of Denver. Education is key, with scholarships and coaching. The USST has ignored college skiing.  It should work to bring it back.