Jean-Claude Killy

Jean-Claude Killy: Three Golds and a Second Career

On 17 February 1968 the men's Olympic slalom was run at Chamrousse in fog thick enough that the racers could not reliably see the gates. They asked for a postponement. The officials said no. What followed — a stopped run, a mystery man in black, a disqualification and a jury vote of three to one decided by two Frenchmen and a Swiss — handed a Frenchman on French snow the third gold medal of a clean sweep of the alpine events. Jean-Claude Killy has spent the fifty-odd years since being both the most complete alpine racer of his era and the man with the most argued-about medal in it.

The Boy Who Left School at Fifteen

He was born on 30 August 1943 in Saint-Cloud, outside Paris, under German occupation. In 1945 the family moved to Val-d'Isère, where his father Robert — a former Free French Spitfire pilot — opened a ski shop and later ran a hotel in the Savoie. In 1950, when Jean-Claude was seven, his mother Madeline left; Robert raised the three children alone. Killy was sent to boarding school in Chambéry, hated every hour of it, and walked out at fifteen to ski.

Algeria, and a Broken Body

The early career was a catalogue of interruptions. He won his first international race, a giant slalom at Val-d'Isère in December 1961, from the thirty-ninth start position — a result that should have announced him. In 1962 he broke his leg trying to qualify for a downhill at Cortina d'Ampezzo and watched the World Championships on crutches. That same year, doing compulsory military service with the French Army in Algeria, he contracted amoebic dysentery and hepatitis, which kept recurring and left him competing at the 1964 Olympics in no condition to win anything.

The Best Skier Alive

The recovery, when it came, was total. At the 1966 World Championships in Portillo, Chile, he won his first international downhill and took gold in the combined. Then came 1967 and the inauguration of the World Cup, which he won — the first man ever to do so — with twelve victories from seventeen races, season titles in all three alpine disciplines, all five downhills and four of the five giant slaloms.

That is the statistic that should define him, and it is the one most often forgotten in favour of the medals. Alpine skiing splits into disciplines that reward opposite virtues: the downhill demands nerve and aerodynamic commitment at speed; the slalom demands rhythm and edge control at low speed through tight gates. Racers specialise because the two are close to incompatible. Killy won both in the same season.

Grenoble, February 1968

At the Grenoble Winter Olympics he took the downhill, the giant slalom and the slalom, adding the FIS world combined title. He beat his own teammate Guy Périllat in the downhill by a margin narrow enough that Omega's new electrical timing was doing real work; Killy's upper-body strength let him strike the start bar while already moving forward, buying a fraction a slower start would have cost.

The Fog at Chamrousse

The slalom is the part that will not settle. Karl Schranz of Austria appeared to have beaten Killy — but on his first run he had stopped at the twenty-first gate, saying a man in black had walked onto the course in front of him. The officials granted him a restart. He skied it perfectly and bettered Killy's time.

Then he was disqualified: on the original run, before the interruption, he had apparently missed the nineteenth gate. Schranz argued the interloper had distracted him into the error. Austria alleged a French policeman had interfered deliberately. France replied that Schranz had invented the man in black to cover a missed gate. The Jury of Appeal found for Killy three votes to one, and the three were two Frenchmen and a Swiss. Killy's winning combined time was 1:39.73.

He defended his World Cup title that season and retired, aged twenty-four.

The Business of Being Killy

Grenoble was the first Winter Games with extensive colour television coverage, and Killy walked out of it into a commercial career that had no real precedent for a skier. He signed with Mark McCormack's IMG in May 1968 and by that autumn had his name on Head's Killy 800 ski. He endorsed American Express, Schwinn, United Airlines and Chevrolet. Hunter S. Thompson wrote him up in 1970 under the title "The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy."

There were films — *Snow Job* in 1972, a 1983 Club Med picture alongside a young Jim Carrey — and two television series. A motor racing sideline between 1967 and 1970 took in the 1969 Le Mans 24 Hours and seventh overall at the 1967 Targa Florio. In 1974, sponsored by Moët & Chandon, he skied the previously unskied eastern face of New Zealand's Mount Ngauruhoe, averaging thirty-five degrees, clocked by radar at over 100 mph, and had to do it twice because cloud spoiled the first take. He returned to the professional circuit in November 1972, won the 1973 title with $28,625 in winnings and a $40,000 bonus, then lost 1974 to illness and 1975 to injuries.

Why Jean-Claude Is Called a Genius

The word does not appear in the sources, and it would be lazy to import it. What is defensible is a claim about range and about a specific kind of physical intelligence — the constant reading of a surface at speed.

The 1967 World Cup season is the evidence. Winning twelve of seventeen races, and taking all three discipline titles in a sport whose disciplines pull in opposite directions, requires an unusually fine ability to recalibrate technique from run to run: the same body producing a tucked, committed line at 80 mph on Saturday and a short, high-frequency rhythm through fifty-odd gates on Sunday. Most great skiers can do one. Killy's second, less obvious gift was for marginal gains — the start-bar trick in the Grenoble downhill is a small, cold piece of thinking that most racers never bothered with, and it was decisive.

The counter-case is genuinely strong. His absolute dominance lasted two seasons; he retired at twenty-four, so it was never tested over time, and when he returned professionally in the 1970s he won one title and was then beaten by illness and injury. The triple crown that made him famous is permanently shadowed by the Schranz disqualification, adjudicated on French soil by a panel of two Frenchmen and a Swiss — a fact no admirer should skate past. And the great post-Grenoble transformation was commercial as much as athletic: Thompson's "Temptations" piece and the Chevrolet advertisements describe a product being managed as much as an athlete being celebrated. A ski journalist who watched him running the slopes at Shawnee Mountain in Pennsylvania in the mid-1970s caught something of the double register: he was fast and smooth, and he kept stopping to check the time on his Rolex.

Legacy

The unusual thing about Killy is that the second career outweighed the first in institutional terms, which is rare enough to be its own argument for his intelligence. He sat on the FIS Alpine Skiing Committee's executive board from 1977 to 1994, co-presided over the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics, ran the Société du Tour de France from 1992 to 2001, was an IOC member from 1995 to 2014, and chaired the coordination commissions for both Turin 2006 and Sochi 2014 before becoming an Honorary Member. He was made a Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur in 2000. Val-d'Isère and Tignes combined their ski areas under the name l'Espace Killy. Elvis Presley, asked in 1972 to name his favourite skier, named him — which, for a boy who quit school at fifteen in a French mountain village, is a fair index of how far the 1968 season carried.

Achievements

• Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour
• Silver Olympic Order — 1987
• Worked as alpine skier, actor and customs officer