The Olympics: King Killy

Of the many heroes at the 1968 Win ter Olympics, the man who stands above all is a moody, onetime consumptive who complains of a nervous stomach and insomnia, and likes to talk in par ables. “When I was a child,” says Jean-Claude Killy, 24, who last week swept three gold medals in Alpine skiing, “I had a friend named Gérard d’Agallier.

He was always the fastest, but he never really believed in skiing; he never thought it could be a whole life. And where is Gérard now? Down in the val ley somewhere, driving a truck.”

Skiing has been Killy’s life ever since his father, descendant of an Irish mercenary who fought for Napoleon (the family name originally was Kelly), opted for the quiet life in 1946 and moved his family from Paris to Val d’Isere, 6,037 ft. up in the French Alps. Jean-Claude was then three; within a year, he was a familiar figure, with baggy pants and a runny nose, on the slopes outside town. “I would carry my skis to school and rest them against the wall so I could ski at lunchtime,” he says. “On Thursday mornings, when we were all supposed to go to catechism, we would go skiing instead. The priest would ski out after us. He was a wonderful sight, in his full robes, as he chased us down the mountain.”

Quite Mad. By the time Killy was eight, he had won his first competition — a jumping contest. A bout with tuberculosis sent him to a sanatorium for four months, but by 14, he was promising enough to be picked for the French team that competed in a junior meet at Cortina d’Ampezzo in Italy. He fell in the slalom at Cortina and suffered the first of two broken legs. “I was quite mad when I was young,” he says. “I took too many chances.” But he was also learning — developing the power, control and techniques that would make him a world champion by 1966.

Power? Killy’s start as so explosive that he once burst right out of his bindings. Control? “This is a sport of millimeters,” he says. “Sometimes it’s worth it to take risks, but sometimes it costs you more than you gain. For example, if you have three turns followed by a right angle at the end, the ideal thing to do is to take the three turns as fast as you can and still make the right angle tightly. But sometimes you are better off taking the first three turns more easily so that you can take the last one very well. You can lose a whole second in one single turn. That is something most skiers still don’t know.”

Killy’s technical superiority starts with his fanatical attention to detail. His bindings must be adjusted just so: feet straightaway for a downhill race, but slightly pigeon-toed for the slaloms —so that he can get more “heel thrust” and acceleration. His choice of skis varies according to the kind of race and snow conditions; he has been known to switch skis between the two runs of a slalom race—a practice followed by few of his competitors.

Shock & Storm. Killy’s two cardinal rules of racing are 1) keep the whole ski on the snow, and 2) always accelerate, never brake in the turn. In a downhill, instead of tucking tightly into the aerodynamic “egg position” favored by most racers, he changes position constantly to compensate for rough spots in the surface. “When you are too low and hit a bump, you have no spring,” he explains. “If you are higher, you can use your legs like shock absorbers.” In the slalom, Killy uses his poles as little as possible and strives for speed by skating through the gates—a technique that requires phenomenal balance. “Others try to do what he does,” says Emile Allais, France’s great champion of the ’30s. “Most of them end up looking silly and fall.”

Before the start of the Olympics downhill, Killy made an almost fatal mistake. Trying to bind the wax to his skis, he took a short preparatory run down the slope but succeeded instead rn stripping off half the wax. There was no time to rewax; the course was rapidly deteriorating; and Killy’s own teammate, Guy Périllat, had taken a commanding lead. Knowing he would be unable to match Périllat’s speed on the lower half of the course—by then his wax would be gone—Killy came down the upper half like an avalanche, plunging wildly through the turns, storming down the schuss on the thinnest razor-edge of control. It worked. Barely. He beat Périllat by 8/100ths of a second.

Compared with that, the giant slalom—a kind of combined downhill and special slalom—was on ice. “In the downhill, there may be something for me to learn,” says Killy. “In the giant slalom, nothing.” And with two swiveling, stooping runs down the mile-long course, he overpowered Runner-Up Willi Favre of Switzerland by the crushing margin of 2.22 sec.

One more victory, in the special slalom, and Killy would match the record of Austria’s Toni Sailer, the only man ever to sweep the Olympics Alpine events—at Cortina in 1956. If anything, the special slalom was the toughest of the three events: there were so many competitors (102) that officials decided to hold two preliminary heats to narrow the field and establish starting positions for the finals. Annoyed (“a stupid expenditure of energy”), Killy nonetheless zipped through the first heat in 40.89 sec., more than a second faster than anybody else. Then fog forced cancellation of the second heat; Jean-Claude was seeded No. 1, and his grimace turned into a grin.

As it turned out, Killy needed the luck of his Irish ancestors to win that third $40 nugget of gold. In heavy fog that reduced visibility to 250 yds. or less, he posted a combined time of 99.73 sec. in two runs down the course —only to be beaten by both Norway’s Haakon Mjoen and Austria’s Karl Schranz. Then Mjoen and Schranz were disqualified—for skipping a few ail-important gates—and Jean-Claude collected his medal after all.

What now for King Killy? He probably will turn pro after the last World Cup race in April, and he has offers for endorsements, movie roles and the like that could make him a millionaire.

Money is only one of Jean-Claude’s concerns. He wants to race a car some day at Le Mans; he also would like to break the world speed record (109.14 m.p.h.) on skis. But first, after those long, monastic months of training, he has some catching up to do. With what? “Fun,” he says simply, “and les petites jeunes filles.”