Albertville Games paid off by increasing regional tourism
ALBERTVILLE, France — All that remains of the outdoor celebration plaza where choreographer Philippe Decoufle unleashed his fantastical creations on the world — altering forever the way Olympic organizing committees create opening ceremonies — is a tall metal spire akin to a naked merry-go-round.
Where thousands sat in temporary bleachers to watch Decoufle’s marriage of sport and culture in the opening of the 1992 Albertville Winter Games, there are now trees and grass and not a little concrete.
Across the playing fields are two of the only remaining public pieces that show Albertville was ever an Olympic city; the last outdoor speed skating oval, now a track field, and the skating arena that now plays host to everything from public skates and travelling concerts to horse shows and exhibitions.
It is in the French Alps around Albertville that the real legacy of the 1992 Games exists. High on the reaches of the slopes overlooking Mont Blanc sit ski resorts such as Val D’Isere and Courchevel, whose names now carry weight built from nearly 20 years of directed marketing aimed at both European and international ski markets.
“For Albertville, it was tourism that we were after. France was going through a crisis, tourism was on the decline, and Albertville was the means to fight that,” said Remy Charmetant, executive director of the Savoie-Mont Blanc tourism commission.
Charmetant was the Games’ sport director and right-hand man to Jean-Claude Killy, the French ski star who with politician Michel Barnier organized the bid. He now leads the main tourism promotion agency in the two French counties, Savoie and Haute-Savoie, that encompass the resorts.
This is a region rich in winter sports history: Chamonix, under Mont Blanc, was France’s first ski resort and in 1924 held the first Winter Olympics. Just south of Albertville is Grenoble, host of the 1968 Games where Nancy Greene won her gold medal in downhill skiing.
On this side of the Mont Blanc massif in the Tarentaise Valley, little resorts have been perched on the mountainsides for more than 70 years. But Charmetant said they suffered from access. The 1992 Games changed all that. “Albertville was the door to the Games,” he said.
The Games showed that the area had to market itself not under a single resort’s name, he said, but as a region that could brand itself with a universally-recognized image: Mont Blanc.
The economic might of those resorts, now with 20 million bed-nights a year, is almost completely due to the construction of new roads and a high-speed TGV rail line.
In winter, better than 150 trains a week now power up the valley to Bourg-St. Maurice, delivering thousands of holiday-seekers and a muscular injection to the region’s tourist economy. Where once there were roads more narrow, twisting and dangerous than the Sea to Sky Highway from Vancouver to Whistler, cars and trucks now make easy work.
“It used to be that to get to Val D’Isere would take six or more hours,” said Claire Grange, director of the Maison Des Jeux Olympiques d’Hiver, the Olympic museum in Albertville. “Now it is less than an hour in most cases. There may not be much of the Olympics left in Albertville other than our museum, but it is the gateway to everything else in the area.”
To many people outside of France, the Games are not particularly memorable. In part, that’s because they exist in the shadow of the popular 1994 Lillehammer Games.
They were also a financial bust. Organizers spent just under $1 billion on a combined operating and capital budget and declared a loss of about $67 million. Three-quarters was covered by the French national government. Local government picked up the rest.
Albertville suffered from a lack of cohesion, at least in the eyes of athletes and international media. The resorts were all far apart and difficult to get to, meaning long hours on buses.
“To my mind, Albertville is really just a spot in the valley,” says Dick Pound, Canada’s senior IOC member. “But one thing they did right was they created a celebration plaza for two events, the opening and closing, and after that took it down. That and rebuild the road and put in the TGV.”
Charmetant said it was impossible to build a compact Games, especially when so many far-flung resorts were needed for venues. But don’t ask him if he’d have done anything differently.
“Twenty years after, I wouldn’t change a thing,” he insists. “It is very hard to find a white elephant in Albertville. Every venue had a function then and now.”
Even the high-mountain hockey arenas in Courchevel and Meribel are still used, he said, because the resorts needed ice sheets to compete with German resorts that also offer arenas.
The one spot of trouble is the bobsleigh track in La Plagne, halfway up the valley. It’s a good track, technically difficult and capable of holding major events. The problem, says venue director Andre Broche, is that France has nothing that could approximate a national team.
He blames the French ice sports federation for that, saying they’d rather put their money into figure skating and hockey than into luge and bobsleigh.
“We have no four-man bobsled team in France. We don’t have any drivers, and it is hard to hold a competition when you have no athletes,” Broche said.
As a result, La Plagne sees little competitive use. Of the 10 tracks in Europe, it is the fourth-most expensive to operate. Last year local government covered 36 per cent of its $1.3-million operating cost. The saving grace: more than 40 per cent of its revenues came from tourist runs down the 1,500-metre track.
The track stands at a crossroads, with its future tied to France’s newest Olympic hopes, the bid for 2018 by nearby Annecy. The city and two counties plan for ice sports in Annecy and ski and snowboard events in nearby mountain resorts. The only exception is La Plagne, 90 minutes away, which Annecy wants to use as a symbol of how things must change in the Alps.
“Why would we build a new bobsled track when we have a perfectly good one in La Plagne,” said Antoine Deneriaz, a gold medalist in downhill at the 2006 Turin Games and one of Annecy bid’s four presidents.
“We are at the end of the story of the Olympics if we are not careful,” he said. “Our glaciers are melting and it is our duty to protect what we have. So our bid focuses on being smaller, more responsible. We want to put the Olympics back into the region in a real way.”
Charmetant has a small piece of post-Games advice for Vancouver: protect and invest in the mountain tourism around Whistler.
Charmetant said Vancouver has the economic clout to market itself cleverly, but Whistler is a remarkable concept that marries sophisticated tourism with nature. And that, he says, is worth preserving.
“Every Games has its own personality. If the aim of Vancouver is to develop tourism even more, it needs to find what people like best. But for Whistler, it is my personal point of view that the mountains there are very precious and it is important for you to preserve that way of life.”
[email protected]
Read Jeff Lee’s Olympics blog at
www.vancouversun.com/insidetheolympics
http://www.vancouversun.com/travel/Alber...sing+regional+tourism/2113162/story.html
Linear Mode
