If the rest of the Olympic Games bomb; if the residents get sick and tired of not being able to drive in their own mountains; if heavy snows pounce avalanche after avalanche on the Tarenteise Valley, they will still be proclaimed a success in France after Sunday - when the men's downhill went off without a hitch, and a Frenchman won the silver medal.
It may not get any better than it got Sunday afternoon in Val d'Isere, a ski resort/village that lies at the end of a cul de sac in the French Alps.The road winds out and up from Albertville until finally it stops in Val d'Isere, the boyhood home of triple Olympic gold-medalist Jean-Claude Killy and the starting line for 130 lifts and enough runs to keep you skiing nonstop for at least a week. If French skiers are arrogant about their mountains, Val d'Isere is their exhibit A.
On Sunday, as thousands of Olympic spectators spilled outdoors to watch the men's descente, the road to Val d'Isere dead-ended into a windless day of clear blue skies and sunshine.
From the start, France's Olympic organizers, including co-chairman Killy, wanted to make the downhill the crown jewel in their 16-day Olympic run. As proof of that, consider that they searched through the Alps, at Val d'Isere and every one of their magnifique ski resorts, and concluded that they didn't have the downhill course that would do. Even the "Oreiller-Killy" course at Val d'Isere, which had hosted World Cup downhills for 30 years, was given the thumbs-down.
Instead, Bernhard Russi, a 43-year-old Swiss skier who won the gold medal in Sapporo in 1972, was commissioned to design a new downhill course, which he did with the aid of 18 million French francs (about $4.5 million). In the cliffs directly above the village of Val d'Isere, Russi carved a designer downhill, named it "Face du Bellevarde," and handed it over to Killy, the 1968 Olympic downhill champion, who said it was exactly what he and France had in mind.
Belevarde not only featured more turns (22 of them) and jumps (four) than any World Cup downhill course in history, but you could see 80 percent of them from the village center.Stadium racing had come to skiing.
When Downhill Sunday dawned, there wasn't a bad seat in the village.
Some people paid from $20 to $100 to sit in the grandstands that surrounded the finish line - while thousands more wondered why. Everywhere else was free; and if you wanted to pay the 175 francs (about $35) for a Val d'Isere day pass, you could ride the Santel Express quad chairlift that went almost directly over the course.
By race time at 12:15 p.m., virtually every shop in town had a "closed" sign on the door and everyone was in the seat of their choice. At the hotels facing the course, at the LeGrand Paradis and the Brussel's and the Mercure, they sat outside on their decks. At the restaurants fronting the ski runs they sat in specially provided chairs under signs that specified "No pique-nique." (At the chairs in front of "Le Saloon" you could order their special five-course meal, beginning with escargot and ending with chocolate. Downhill all the way).
Skiers not wanting to stop sat and watched while riding half-a-dozen lifts and a gondola, all within the sightlines of the Olympic downhill.
It was a sight to see, and that was before the first skier shot down the opening chute of Face du Bellevarde. As it happened, the first skier on the course, Patrick Ortlieb of Austria, would set a pace that would hold up through two hours of racing. The nearest his time of 1:50.37 came to falling was when Franck Piccard, a French skier born and raised just a few mountain ranges to the north, raced the downhill of his life. He missed the gold medal by just five-hundredths of a second. The ovation he heard from the town square was nonetheless by far the loudest of the day.
Not even criticism of the course - the winner, among others, said it had too many turns - could detract from the moment or from the day. More than anything else, the Olympic downhill at Val d'Isere had panache. For that, it will go down in history. What more could a Frenchman ask?