The Man to Beat

When the flame is lit this week for the 10th Winter Olympics at Grenoble, France, TV will carry the Games to 200 million people around the world. One sport and one athlete will dominate everyone's attention. The sport is Alpine skiing--with its hurtling downhill races and snow-spraying slaloms. The athlete is France's Jean-Claude Killy, an innkeeper's son from Val d'Isere in the French Alps, whose elan and ebullience have made him an almost legendary figure at the age of 24.

For kicks, Killy races fast cars and jumps from airplanes; he has tried his hand at bullfighting, and he has a well-deserved reputation as something of a flake. During an exhibition ski jump in Switzerland, Jean-Claude shocked spectators by dropping his trousers in midair. He once left a Volkswagen parked in the middle of an Italian hotel lobby, and three years ago, just for laughs, he and some buddies fired off revolvers on the main street of Vail, Colo.

Supreme Trophy. But when Killy straps on his skis for competition, all is business. In four years, he has scored a total of 48 major international victories, including ten special slaloms, 16 giant slaloms, ten downhill races and twelve combined championships. Last year he shattered all previous records by entering 32 races and winning 23. In a sport where victory or defeat is usually a matter of split seconds, his winning margins were all but incredible: almost two seconds in the special slalom at Kitzbuehel, Austria, three seconds in the downhill at Megeve, France. With the maximum possible score of 225 points, he skied off with the World Cup, the supreme trophy of the sport.

It was a supreme trophy for France as well. A relatively new sport, Alpine skiing only acquired Olympic recognition in 1936, and it has become virtually a private French preserve since Coach Honore Bonnet, 48, a feisty little ex-army officer, took over the team in 1959. Bonnet taught his racers the aerodynamic "oeuf" position that won a gold medal in the downhill for Jean Vuarnet at Squaw Valley in 1960. He dressed them in slick nylon stretch suits instead of baggy trousers and tops, switched them from wood to more maneuverable metal skis, made training an intensive, year-round proposition, stressed strength and speed over the niceties of technique.

To all that, Jean-Claude Killy has added a superb disdain for danger and an almost superhuman capacity for concentration. Nobody takes a slalom gate quite the way he does--hurtling round the pole with his body slung out sideways, almost parallel to the snow. Nobody else has quite mastered his avalement technique of accelerating on the downhill turns--rocking back on his haunches and thrusting his skis so far forward that he seems certain to fall. Few have the courage to ski, as he puts it, "toujours `a mort." And few can match his mental approach to a race. "When I ski, I ski," he says. "I am all alone with the mountain. I leave everything else aside."

Three Quick Races. At Grenoble, Killy will need all his skills. The U.S.'s Billy Kidd, fully recovered from a broken leg that kept him out of action last year, is once again skiing with the methodical precision that won him a silver medal in the special slalom at Innsbruck in 1964. Austria's Gerhard Nenning, 27, is going into the Olympics with two straight major downhill victories behind him; Switzerland's Du-meng Giovanoli, 24, and Edi Bruggmann, 24, have both defeated Jean-Claude twice in pre-Olympic slaloms. Yet those were merely warmups. For the French, the Olympics are everything, and they remain totally confident in Killy. President de Gaulle is expected to attend the award ceremony following the special slalom race--so that he can personally hand Jean-Claude his third gold medal of the games.

"Let's face it," says Killy. "I am risking my whole reputation on three quick races. If I win, everybody will say, 'Well, of course, he was supposed to win.' If I lose, they will say I let them down. I don't want to make alibis, but I tell you that in skiing, it takes nothing to lose. The wrong wax oh the skis, a spot of soft snow, a slight miscalculation and--poof!--the race is over. I can only do my best. That is all any man can do."

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