Let The Magic Begin

By Margot Hornblower

Snoozing at the mouth of a narrow valley, its air perfumed by nearby steel plants, its riverbank paved for a parking lot, its squat office buildings ringed by mounds of sooty snow, Albertville hardly seems destined for global fame. But raise your eyes above the small-town skyline: the Olympian glory of the French Alps explodes in a pastel sunset, sparkling through pine-serrated glaciers. After Sarajevo's Bosnian backwater and Calgary's urban stampede, the 16th Olympic Winter Games will be a soaring high-wire act: 57 events staged in 10 venues across seven valleys and 620 sq. mi. of the Savoie region's magnificent mountain peaks. Following Albertville's opening ceremony this Saturday, the Olympics will take off into the wild white yonder of Val d'Isere, Courchevel and other mountaintop resorts. "I would like people to go home feeling that they spent a fortnight on another planet," says Jean-Claude Killy, ski-racing legend and co-president of the Games.

But what promises to be a dazzling, otherworldly spectacle could also become a logistical horror show. Over the Christmas holidays, 7,000 people were stranded in cars and trains when avalanches blocked valley roads. A similar disaster struck last February, cutting off several resorts from the outside world for two days. Olympic organizers say they are prepared. "The first flake won't even have time to hit the asphalt," says Killy. "It will land on a snowplow." But a few minor accidents on the two-lane mountain roads that lead up to the ski runs, bobsled course and hockey rink could create gridlock in transporting the 2,300 athletes, 6,000 journalists and 800,000 spectators who are to start arriving this week. "If coordination doesn't improve, the Games will be a sizzling failure," warned Andre Baudin, mayor of Tignes.

No matter the inconvenience for sports fans during the two weeks that the televised world focuses on Albertville, the locals will still be chortling all the way to the bank. "The Games were conceived as a way to bring public investment to the region," says Michel Barnier, president of the Savoie , General Council and co-president of the Games with Killy. And so they did. In the past five years the French state spent $1.1 billion on new roads and high- speed trains into the region and millions more on four sewer plants, three hospitals, 1,240 miles of optic fibers and spotlighting for 20 churches and castles. Albertville, with its 18,200 inhabitants, boasts a grandiose new theater and arcaded plaza (christened Place de l'Europe) and fresh-laid cobblestones, plus a 23-ft.-high slab of granite posing as avant-garde sculpture. "We're no longer a sad little city!" rejoices the municipal magazine.

Such munificence -- on top of $180 million worth of Olympic skating rinks, ski jumps and other sports facilities -- came in the nick of time. For France's alpine resorts, like debutantes after a champagne spree, were suffering from a mountain-size hangover in the wake of two decades of dizzying development. Once a region of cowherds and cheesemakers, the Savoie harnessed its rivers after World War II to provide electricity for chemical and metallurgical plants. But with the decline of its heavy industry, Savoyards turned to what they suddenly realized could be l'or blanc -- white gold -- the snow that permitted the region to become the most intensely built-up skiing domain in the world. In the past 30 years the Savoie mountains have been scored by 900 ski lifts. Clusters of high-rise apartment buildings -- able to house 250,000 tourists in all -- rose helter-skelter on virgin slopes. By the mid-1980s, though, the boom was over.

"We disfigured our mountains with concrete cities -- it was catastrophic," says former ski champion Jean Blanc, now a store owner at the Courchevel resort. Avalanches and mud slides multiplied, the results of building on unstable slopes. Moreover, the valley became renowned for its traffic jams, and several snowless seasons accelerated a steep decline in visitors. Will the Olympics cure the crisis? "The Games saved us from asphyxiation. The new roads are lifelines," says Andre Martzolf, La Plagne's ski director. And planners are more ecologically conscious now, replanting trees that were uprooted to build ski runs and even adjusting one course to avoid a bed of rare wildflowers. Environmentalists, however, fear that the new highway and rapid trains will spur even more growth in the fragile alpine ecosystem, despite a five-year moratorium on new resorts announced by the state last April.

Meanwhile, Olympian extravagance has nearly bankrupted four communities. One / of them, Brides-les-Bains (pop. 600), went $13 million into debt to build a new town hall and cable car and to renovate its casino and thermal baths. But overall, the Games should just about break even.

In the old mining town of La Roche, Charline Robin gazes uneasily from her balcony at the vertiginous bobsled course carved out of her backyard forest. When the mine closed in 1975, the village emptied out. But thanks to the white gold of nearby La Plagne, Robin, 30, got a job waiting tables, and her eight brothers found work as ski-lift operators. "The Olympics bring us jobs," she shrugs. But it worried her when authorities distributed gas masks to protect against possible leaks of the ammonia gas that refrigerates the sled track. And she fears her taxes will go up as a result of a 60% cost overrun on the $41 million course. Although Robin dreams of opening a cafe to serve sledders after the Olympics, on the whole she could have done without the Games. "They destroyed the forest where our children played," she says. "It is not worth it."

Despite such doubts, Olympic boosters are in high gear. Albertville has printed glossy tourist brochures in four languages. Ski resorts are blanketed with garish billboards promoting Coca-Cola's Olympic sponsorship. Farmers' co- ops have stocked up on pine-tree honey in anticipation of record sales. Luxury hotels are booked solid with wealthy businessmen on promotional junkets. And in Albertville's Hall of Ice ("Don't call it a skating rink!"), volunteer tour guide Andre Cabot explains, "There's a grandeur to the Olympics. When it's all over, we'll say, 'How did we do it?' " A little Savoie-faire was all it took.