Commentary

Pondering the environmental impact and future of the costly Winter Olympics.

By John Fry

The organization of the recent Sochi Olympics was superb, and it’s no historical exaggeration to say that the staging of the competitions may have been the best of any Winter Games. When it comes to organizing mass events, there’s something to be said for autocracies, or $50-billion kleptocracies like Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

ISHA’s own Jean-Claude Killy, the IOC chief coordinator for the 2014 Winter Games, told the Wall Street Journal that a key to addressing problems was his access to Putin. “We always had the capacity to go to the top man,” said Killy, who first met Putin in Guatemala City seven years ago. “When you become friends with this guy and ask for something and you see it within two hours, that’s impressive.”

“They did a helluva job!” Roger McCarthy told me. McCarthy should know. The re-designer of Breckenridge and Tremblant, he and Ecosign’s Paul Matthews of Whistler, B.C., planned the trails and base for the alpine competitions at Rosa Khutor outside Sochi. More manmade terrain features were built for the 2014 snow competitions, McCarthy estimates, than at all previous Winter Olympics.

If the Russians didn’t achieve success all by themselves, they were smart enough, and had a fat enough wallet, to import experts from around the world to prepare the venues.

While western journalists and politicians criticized the IOC for endorsing a political system lacking civil rights, former Crazy Canuck downhiller Steve Podborski, who headed his country’s Sochi mission, reflected better what was in the minds of the athletes and coaches. “It’s their country,” said Podborski. “If it’s something you don’t agree with, well then the Olympics is really not the place to do it. You’re going to the Olympics to compete.”

“Have the courage to address your disagreements in a peaceful political dialogue, not on the backs of the athletes,” said IOC president Thomas Bach, in reminding critics of the organization’s political agnosticism.

Sochi attracted participation by 88 nations, a striking contrast to the 1980 Moscow Summer Games that were boycotted by 60 nations. And even if they cost an excessive, corruption-padded $50 billion, Russia now has four world-class ski areas, 50,000 hotel rooms, new docks, international airport, and a railway and road between the sea and the gorgeous Caucasus Mountains. Sochi, a traditional summer vacation magnet for Russians, has been dramatically upgraded. 

Mixed Media

If you were sufficiently patient to wait through the incessant bombardment of commercials, Christin Cooper and Steve Porino, aided by excellent graphic overlays, deftly revealed to viewers the reasons for victory and loss in the alpine races. In the New York Times, Bill Pennington wrote some of the best technical descriptions of alpine ski racing ever published in a general newspaper.

The Times also prodded its readers to worry about the future of the Winter Games. In an article “The End of Snow,” Powder Magazine editor and writer Porter Fox deplored the carbon emission-caused global warming likely to lessen the number of potential host cities that are within an hour of the mountain elevations and temperatures needed for ski and snowboard competition.

At several points, Fox struggled with facts. He stated that most American ski areas are struggling financially, when more today are profitable than at any time. Skier and snowboarder visits to U.S. resorts in the period 2003-13 increased by almost 10 percent over the 52-million annual average of the period 1993-2003.

Fox cited statistics that “the winter sports industry contributes $66 billion annually to the U.S. economy, and supports more than 960,000 jobs.” The numbers encompass just about all the infrastructure of tourism—lodging, retail, travel, food service. Tragic as will be the loss to the ski industry from global warming, a warmer climate may increase, not destroy, jobs in tourism.

An Environmental Conundrum

“Of the 19 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics,” Fox reported, “as few as ten may be cold enough by midcentury to host them.” None of the ten, coincidentally, is presently on the ever-fluctuating list of cities that say they want to host the 2022 Games. One candidate, Almaty, is in Kazakhstan, a country ruled by a brutal dictator. Another is in strife-torn Ukraine. Take your pick.

Western nations have become averse. The German and Swiss publics, and now the Swedes and French at Annecy, don’t want to shoulder the huge expense and
environmental impacts. The
burden is heavy: Winter Olympic medal competitions, now at almost a hundred, have doubled in the past 25 years, accompanied by a huge increase in hotel room demand.  

Happy to say, Pyeongchang, the South Korean site of the 2018 Winter Olympics, will put the Games in the setting of a ski resort, with competitions scattered around four locations. Korea is cold in winter. Vast amounts of chemicals shouldn’t be needed to salvage the ski and snowboard events, as happened at the mountain cluster of Rosa Khutor, Laura, and Krasnaya Polyana. Sochi mirrored the IOC choice of another sea-level city, Vancouver, for the 2010 Winter Games, where fog, rain and predictably warm weather on Cypress Mountain and the base of Whistler plagued ski and snowboard competitions. 

The problem has been the IOC’s pursuit of bigger and bigger Games hyped with bigger and bigger money. Ever since Grenoble in 1968, IOC-chosen host cities have spent billions on buildings, highways and facilities, often with meager after-use. The demands of a commercially successful, massive Games have contributed to the global warming that now threatens their future.

John Fry is president of the International Skiing History Association. To learn more, go http://johnfry.net.

BODE: LOOKING BACK TO THE 2006 OLYMPICS

By John Fry

Even before they turned off the gas to the Olympic Winter Games flame at Turin, the celebration of the world’s most famous skier had become a roast. At websites, Bode Miller fans despaired about their zero-for-five hero who didn’t try hard enough. The U.S. Ski Team’s trustees seethed at Miller’s expression of gratitude to them, “unbelievable a-holes, rich, cocky, wicked conceited super-right-wing Republicans.”  Washington Post sports columnist Tony Kornheiser created bodemillersucks.com about "one of the more colossal losers in recent sports history."

But then a remarkable thing happened. After a couple of weeks of playing golf and sightseeing in Paris, the prodigal star showed up at the World Cup finals in Sweden and did what he was supposed to have done in Italy. He won the Super G and placed second in the winter’s last downhill. He was relaxed and focused. Contrary to popular perception, Miller said that at the Olympics he’d been physically prepared and had tried hard. He complimented the Ski Team and its coaches. And his skiing reminded us of his prodigious talent.

Miller is the only American racer to have gold-medaled twice in a single alpine world championships. He is the first American to have won the overall World Cup title in more than 20 years. At his best, he combines Jean-Claude Killy’s natural feel for equipment with Hermann Maier’s colossal strength at his peak.

Along with Maier, he has shone a needed light on the invasive, less than foolproof way that the IOC’s Dick Pound and WADA are dealing with performance-enhancing drugs and blood enhancement.

Contrary to his self-indulgent image, Miller embraces the sport’s heritage. While other racers gobbled up World Cup points and money by specializing, Miller idealistically pursued the historic World Cup title of all-round skier, competing in every event. A purist undertaking.

In suggesting before the Olympics that participation is his main goal, Miller, in fact, echoed the ideal of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the modern Olympics. Participating, not winning, is a good message to send to kids, even though Miller is not every parent’s idea of a role model.

Before the Games, Miller accurately reminded us, as Phil Mahre did 20 years earlier, of the slim chances of winning Olympic gold in alpine skiing, where the difference between winning and losing a two-mile race can be as little as one-hundredth of a second, only a few inches of distance. However, that insight, along with Bode’s weak performance leading up to the Games, was ignored by the national media as they played up the exotic story of a White Mountain Tarzan.

Miller has two personae which resonate with contemporary society and the press: the spectacular athlete and the celebrity bad boy. The squandering bad boy, rebelliously bristling at institutions, was on full display at the Olympics, willing to declare that he was comfortable with not winning a medal. He seemed barely to study the courses. Critics wondered: Why practice and go to Carnegie Hall just to be seen on the stage?

When the U.S. Ski Team was in need of leadership, Miler was AWOL. He lacked the grace to show up at the finish line of the Combined slalom to congratulate teammate Ted Ligety on winning the gold that Bode was expected to win. He failed to shut down the motor on the mouth that quipped it was convenient not to have to motor to Turin to accept a medal.

Not that Bode’s sponsors minded. It is sufficient today for an athlete not to win but to talk about his fantasies of meeting a certain figure skater or to perform a cockamamie stunt before the finish line and miss winning the gold medal. The reward of behaving like an arrested adolescent before or at the Olympics is that magazines and TV shows, which seldom cover winter sports, will play up any color and controversy they find.  Bode perfectly fit their quest. He was the gold medalist of publicity.

It was not the kind of publicity, however, that pleased Bill Marolt, the U.S. Ski Team’s chief executive officer and the architect of its recent successes, who had flown to Europe before the Olympics to give his best racer a verbal spanking. Asked later about athlete deportment during the Games, Marolt stiffened his lip and said that, “We will manage these situations with both short-term action with those involved.”

The truth is that the U.S. Ski Team has never enjoyed much success in keeping its competitors in a state of sober obedience. Marolt’s own earlier governance in the 1980s drew resentment from the Mahre twins and wild Bill Johnson. In the 1970s, Spider Sabich and Tyler Palmer rebelled against alpine chief Willy Schaeffler. Miller is heir to an undistinguished American ski racing heritage.

To succeed the team must create an environment for individuals like Miller to succeed. On the other hand, the racer who is selfish and overweening forgets why he needs the team. He may even move into a motor home.

As a consequence of his stoic, lonely Outward-Bound upbringing as a child, Miller tends to isolate himself in a world-defying solipsism. “I don’t have to be what you want me to be,” he seems to say. Actually, it was Muhammad Ali who said that. Not coincidentally, Miller brings to skiing the kind of wondrous technique that Ali brought to boxing.

Having persuaded myself to forgive his Olympic conduct, I suggest that you do the same. A tad of perspective may aid the act of forgiveness.  Skiing itself has not been without its malingerers, including racers who ignored Olympic rules by taking money under the table. Professional athletes are not models of decorum, as newspaper sports pages sordidly remind us daily. But Bode Miller is not among those who have assaulted coaches and hotel receptionists. He hasn’t Terrell-Owened his teammates, or served prison time. He’s simply an eccentric Yankee who tries people’s patience because he stubbornly persists in learning about life on his own.

After Sochi, and another bronze medal, Bode stands 11th on the men's all-time list of "Most Valuable Racers" in Alpine Olympic events. See Matteo Pacor's statistics here.

An outraged IOC czar, an impenitent ski racer. Their loathing was mutual.

BY JOHN FRY

Prize money in a single World Cup race is now in six figures. Competitors openly negotiate contracts to promote skis and boots and snowboards, and earn mega-buck bonuses for winning Olympic medals. Commercialized racing on this scale didn’t exist under the FIS (Federation Internationale de Ski) 45 years ago, and prize money was forbidden. Nonetheless, at the 1972 Winter Games in Sapporo, Japan, members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) regarded ski racing as so tainted by money that it perhaps no longer belonged in the Winter Games.

At the storm’s center were IOC president Avery Brundage, a wealthy, autocratic American businessman, and Austrian racer Karl Schranz, two-time overall champion of alpine World Cup skiing and a favorite to win the Sapporo downhill. Their loathing was mutual. An outraged Brundage saw Schranz as someone who had to be ejected because he stood for the professionalism that would ruin the Olympic movement. An impenitent Schranz mocked the wealthy Brundage, branding him a hypocrite for denying athletes the opportunity to make money from their sport. Today, surveying the often obscene array of corporate logos smothering clothing and banners at Olympic sports venues, the dispute seems laughable. But it attracted world-wide attention at the time.

For some, the story began in 1968 with another controversy. . . perhaps the greatest surrounding the finish of any ski race ever held. Karl Schranz was again the central character. On the final day of the Winter Olympics above Grenoble, France’s national hero Jean-Claude Killy was poised to win the last of the three alpine skiing gold medals. The conditions for the slalom, however, were atrocious. Fog shrouded the course. Gatekeepers often could not see if a racer had made it around a pole. Racing in the second run,  Schranz claimed a figure crossed the course and interfered with his descent, although no official saw anyone. Climbing back to the top, he received permission to re-start his run, and beat Killy by a full half-second. Within hours, though, the jury disqualified him. The next day, I attended a press conference organized by the Kneissl ski factory for Schranz so he could protest his gold medal loss. It was an act that specially irritated IOC chief Brundage, who had earlier attacked the commercial relations between ski manufacturers and racers.

In the four years between the French and Japanese Winter Olympics, the FIS did little to appease Brundage. Among all the sports federations concerned with finding ways to allow athletes to earn money, the FIS proved itself the most inventive and liberal. It began to permit national ski federations, for example, to organize the present-day manufacturer pools through which sponsors funnel money to racers. In return, it allowed the racers to wear commercial logos.

To Brundage, all this was a clear violation of Olympic standards. At 84, after running the IOC for 20 years, he was determined to end the commercial abuses of skiing. . .if necessary, even by throwing as many as 40 of the leading racers out of the Olympics. Not surprisingly, the skiers kept a low public profile.

Except for Schranz. He attacked Brundage and his wealthy, senescent Olympic Committee members directly.  “How can they understand the situation of top ski racers,” he asked the press, “when these officials have never been poor?” That was enough for Brundage, who easily persuaded the IOC to to expel him from the Olympics.

Back in the Tyrolean Alps, prodded by incendiary newspaper headlines, infuriated Austrians called for their racers to leave Sapporo and come home in sympathy. But they didn’t. The tough, embittered Schranz was not popular with his teammates, despite his ranking as the number one alpine skier of the post-Killy era.

When the racers didn’t return, threats were made to burn down the home of the Ski Federation’s chief. Another official’s children were beaten up at school. Austrians perceived Schranz as a hero from a small country, bullied by bigger nations. Stores were flooded with Schranz T-shirts. When he flew back to a parade in Vienna, a horde of 200,000 people welcomed him home, chanting “Karl is richtig, Brundage is nichtig.” A beaming Schranz raised his arms in vindication.

The ski events at Sapporo took place on schedule. Petite Barbara Ann Cochran won America’s only gold, in the slalom. Brundage died in 1975. Efforts by International Management to market Schranz in America failed . . something of an irony. Today he operates a small hotel in St. Anton. To anyone timorous enough to ask, he will affirm that he was robbed of his gold medal in 1968 and that Brundage was wrong.

The truth? I’m certain he never won the Grenoble slalom.

On the other hand, Schranz-- a leftist with a keen sense of class strife -- won the battle to allow succeeding generations of skiers the right to make money. He also helped open the door for legions of sports marketers, lawyers, athlete agents, product sponsors and manufacturers, to say nothing of conflicted IOC officials, to make millions. Is this progress? No. Despite the influx of big money, ski racing was as exciting without it as with it. 

By John Fry

The recent horrifying injury suffered by Formula One racing champion Michael Schumacher -- not in a speeding race car, but when he was skiing between pistes on ungroomed snow in the French Alps -- is a reminder of the not-always fruitful attempts over the years to create equipment aimed at making skiing safer.

          Schumacher was wearing a helmet when his head hit a rock. Without it, he would likely have been killed instantly. On the other hand his helmet failed to prevent severe skull damage, and would not have prevented rotational neck or spinal injury.

          Notwithstanding the optimism aroused when ski helmet-wearing was adopted by millions of recreational skiers, the incidence of catastrophic head and upper spinal injuries in skiing hasn’t declined. To the contrary, a study last year by the University of Washington has found that the number of snow-sports-related head injuries among youths and adolescents increased 250 percent from 1996 to 2010.

          Perhaps, we shouldn’t be surprised.

          In the 1960s, when football introduced an improved helmet/mask, while it did lessen skull injury, it encouraged players to become more aggressive, and to use their heads as a primary contact point in blocking and tackling. The number of catastrophic neck injuries in football increased.

          Ski helmet use has tripled in the last ten years. It has also coincided with rise of high-risk skiing – cliff-jumping, aerial stunts – celebrated in ski films and in the pages of ski and snowboard magazines, and imitated by young males lacking skill and experience. Wearing a ski helmet made such extreme skiing seem safer, just as better helmets encouraged more aggressive head use in football.

          Over the years, one technological improvement in ski equipment has occasionally canceled out the safety of another.

          Between 1970 and 1985, tibia fractures among skiers fell by 86 percent as a result of the improvement in release bindings. But when boots became higher and more rigid, the injury merely moved up the leg, with a dramatic increase in ACL tears and knee injury.

          Then came a higher binding platform, raising the skier’s boot higher off the snow to increase edging power. That was good. But the power could work in reverse. The feedback from the snow, coupled with the more exaggerated sidecut of the shaped ski, increased the chance of knee injury. The late Toni Sailer, 1956 Olympic triple gold medalist and the chairman of the FIS Alpine Committee, once warned that modern boot and ski design was destroying the knees of a whole generation of young racers.

          “The equipment we have now allows us to do things we really couldn’t do before,” extreme skiing pro Chris Davenport recently told the New York Times. “People’s pushing limits has surpassed people’s ability to control themselves.”

          “There’s this energy drink culture now, a high-level, high-risk culture, that’s being marketed and is impacting the way people ski,” Robb Gaffney, a sports psychiatrist, told reporter Kelley McMillan. “That’s what people see, and that’s what people think skiing is.”

          It is a culture much embraced by the ski industry, and propagated in magazines and dozens of new ski flicks each year.  A new film, The Crash Reel, which ISHA will honor at its annual awards ceremony in Park City, April 3rd, opposes the premise of the typical ski flick. It suggests that the industry should re-evaluate its present manner of imaging snow sports as stunt-filled and  suffused with risk-taking. It’s hard to disagree. 

Also see: Ski Helmets: How We Got Here