Jean-Claude Killy

French skier

• Born: August 30, 1943
• Place of Birth: Saint-Cloud, France

Jean-Claude Killy dominated men’s international alpine skiing competitions from 1965 through 1968. He is also remembered as the second skier in Olympic history to sweep the alpine events.

Early Life

Jean-Claude Killy (kee-lee) was born in Saint Cloud, near Paris, while his father was flying as a combat pilot for the Allies in World War II. Killy, whose family name was originally Kelly, was a descendant of an Irish mercenary who fought with Napoleon. Longing for the quiet life following World War II, Killy’s father, along with his wife, son Jean-Claude, and daughter, moved from France to Val d’Isère, 6,037 feet high in the French Alps. For the next fifteen years, Killy’s family struggled while his father operated a sporting goods store and, later, a restaurant. His mother, Madeleine, left the family in 1950, and his father did not remarry until seven years later. In the meantime, Jean-Claude attended a boarding school eight miles away in Chambery.

Killy began skiing at the age of three, and within a year, he became a familiar sight in his baggy pants on the slopes outside town. As a student in the parochial grade school, Killy customarily went skiing with his friends instead of going to catechism. He later said of his childhood in Val d’Isère that anyone who did not ski was thought to be strange: “There was nothing else to do; life was simply going to school, eating and skiing.”

Killy began skiing competitively well before adulthood. He won his first competition, a jumping contest, when he was eight years old. At the age of nine, Killy won his chamois medal, an award that most boys earned at thirteen or fourteen. That same year, he was finishing slalom races only one second behind the instructor. His skiing career was interrupted temporarily by a bout of tuberculosis, which sent him to a sanatorium at the age of fourteen. He displayed enough ability later that year to be picked for the French team that competed at Cortina d’Ampezzo in Italy. By his own admission, Killy took too many chances and suffered the first of two broken legs.

At the age of sixteen, Killy dropped out of school, a decision that he was to regret years later. He spent the next three years competing and training. In 1962, shortly before the world championships, Killy broke his right leg in a downhill race again at Cortina. Shortly thereafter, Killy joined the military and was transferred to Algeria. At the age of twenty, he left the military and came home with hepatitis and amoebic dysentery, which continued to affect him when he resumed his skiing career. Underweight and undertrained, he fell in two races and managed a creditable fifth in the giant slalom. During the 1964 Olympics, Killy began his close friendship with Jimmy Heuga, who encouraged Killy’s unruly behavior and assisted him in committing pranks, such as pushing a Volkswagen into a hotel lobby during a pre-Olympic race stop and disrupting an awards ceremony by shooting seltzer bottles at his fellow recipients.

Life’s Work

The promise that Killy had shown in 1964 was fulfilled the following year. In 1965 he won most of the major competitions in Alpine skiing at Kitzbühel, Megeve, Davos, and Valie, as well as several minor meets known as the Coupe des Pays Alpins. By the end of the year, Killy rated first in slalom, first in giant slalom, and sixth in downhill. Even though he had not yet won the final proof of his ability—an Olympic or Fédération Internationale de Ski (FIS) gold medal—he had fully developed his skiing ability.

Killy continued to dominate slalom competition in Europe and the United States, but the talented Karl Schranz from Austria continued to pace the downhill events. At the beginning of the 1965–66 season, Killy was still known chiefly as a clownish racer with a flair for spectacular saves, even though the American skier Billy Kidd and Killy had traded off victories. Killy gained this reputation from his practice of “psyching out” his competition by performing outrageous acts at exhibition. For example, three nights before the Lauberhorn races began, Killy jumped off a small one-hundred-foot hill and pulled down his pants to make the Austrians think that he did not take skiing seriously. Then, however, Killy injured an ankle at Kitzbühel and was out of the winter competition.

During the summer of 1966, Killy redeemed himself at the world championships, which were held at Portillo, Chile. After Kidd shattered his leg practicing for the downhill, Killy handily won the downhill and placed well enough in the other two races to win the combined title and the championship. At Portillo, Killy perfected his unconventional skiing techniques. Instead of tucking tightly into the aerodynamic “egg position” favored by most skiers on the downhill run, Killy changed position constantly to compensate for rough spots in the surface. In the slalom, Killy used his poles as little as possible and strove for speed by skating through the gates, a technique that requires phenomenal balance.

After Portillo, Killy and his fellow team members trained in the fall at a special center in St. Tropez, where they built up their ankle and calf muscles by running, bicycling, and playing soccer and volleyball. During this lull in the competition, Killy avoided sweets and the legions of fans who shrieked his name at the finish line; instead, he indulged his interest in fast cars. Killy drove the way he skied, recklessly wrecking six different cars by 1966. That summer, he entered Sicily’s Targo Florio sports-car race, his first serious motoring competition, and finished first. He also cultivated an interest in bullfighting, spending a week in Nîmes in the south of France loitering with many of Spain’s finest matadors.

After Portillo, Killy also worked intensely to prepare himself for the 1966–67 season. He became so painstakingly selective about his skis that he tried more than forty pairs before he found a pair that suited him. In addition, his valet, Michel Aprin, spent at least ninety minutes waxing the skis before every Killy race.

In the 1966–67 season, Killy finally began to win world recognition for his talent. After winning all the big races in the Alps of Switzerland, Austria, France, and Italy, he promptly won three more in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He then went to Vail, Colorado, and won the slalom, the giant slalom, and the downhill, leading the French to victory over the competition. His first-place finish in the Vail Trophy giant slalom gave him a perfect score in the World Cup competition. The trophy was awarded by the FIS for finishing most consistently among the leaders in a series of international races. His remarkable box score for the season showed that he had captured seven out of eight downhills, four out of five giant slaloms, and four out of eight slaloms. In the summer of 1967, ski officials from the United States traveled to Europe in a futile attempt to disqualify Killy for having driven with professionals in a car race in Sicily.

As if being world champion were not enough proof of his ability, Killy set out in 1968 to show that he was even better than that by winning the gold at the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble, France. Before the start of the Olympics, Killy almost made a fatal mistake by stripping half the wax off his skis in a preparatory run for the downhill race. Lacking time to rewax, Killy raced wildly down the upper half of the course and barely beat out his teammate, Guy Perillat, by eight one-hundredths of a second. Compared with that, the giant slalom was easy. He overpowered runner-up Willi Fuvre of Switzerland by the crushing margin of 2.22 seconds. To match the record set by Tony Sailer in 1956, Killy had to win the toughest event: the special slalom. In a heavy fog that reduced visibility to 250 yards, Killy came in third behind Norway’s Haakon Mjoen and Austria’s Karl Schranz. Miraculously, though, Mjoen and Schranz were disqualified for skipping a few gates, and Killy won the gold medal after all. Because of changes in the rules, Killy’s triple is considered by many to be far more impressive than that of Tony Sailer.

Killy had no sooner made sports history than his victory was tarnished by scandal. In the first week of March 1968, France’s most exclusive newspaper accused him of selling an exclusive story about himself to the weekly magazine Paris-Match for seven thousand dollars. Other stories circulated later that Killy had paid a ski manufacturer six thousand dollars to keep quiet about an endorsement fee that he had been paid and that he had received as much as seventy-five thousand dollars annually for skiing. Killy responded to these charges by accusing the Olympics itself of hypocritical behavior. By calling the Olympics an “Evian World Cup event,” Killy was referring to the name of the cosponsor, Evian, which sold bottled water. Although the FIS had considered banning him from international competition, it was in full retreat by the end of the week. In spite of the controversy, Killy won the World Cup giant slalom at Meribel, France, and the Roch Cup Races in Aspen, Colorado, later that month.

Having finally realized his lifelong goal, Killy retired from skiing in the closing months of 1968. After driving professionally in a few automobile races, hebranched into acting. In 1971, Killy traveled to the Swiss Alps to star in a motion picture entitled The Great Ski Caper. During the filming, Killy also became engaged to the French film star Danièle Gaubert, who had been married to the youngest son of President Rafael Trujillo Molina of the Dominican Republic. Later that year, Killy also starred in his own television show in France and in 1983 appeared as himself in Copper Mountain: A Club Med Experience, a film starring Jim Carrey and Alan Thicke.

In 1972, Gaubert and Killy were married. (She died of cancer in 1987.) That year, at the age of twenty-nine, Killy briefly came out of retirement. Even though he was by this time a millionaire who owned a splendid villa overlooking Lake Geneva, Killy became a professional skier, racing not for medals but for money. His manager, Mark McCormack, persuaded him to turn professional to regenerate interest from equipment sponsors, a lucrative proposition in addition to the appearance fees he earned for each race. Despite his reputation, Killy did poorly in his first professional race at Aspen, losing to Harold Stuefer, a nonentity who had never won a World Cup race in six years of international competition. Aside from the fact that professional skiing was entirely different from World Cup runs, Killy was out of shape after four years of relative inactivity. He performed better in the following races, but soon retired once again to spend his time racing cars, endorsing products, promoting sports, and making personal appearances.

Killy served as a member of the executive board of the Alpine Skiing Committee of FIS from 1977 to 1995, and from 1992 to 2001, he was president of the Société de Tour de France. However, he is best known in France for his second great Olympic effort: beginning in 1986, as co-president of the Albertville Organizing Committee, he helped bring the Winter Olympics back to France for the first time since his Grenoble triumphs. He also was co-president on the committee overseeing the 1992 Games. His involvement in the Olympic movement continued over the following years. He served as France’s member on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from 1995 to 2014 and was the IOC’s liaison for the 2006 Winter Games at Turin, Italy. Killy also helped lead the coordination commissions for the Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2002 and Sochi, Russia, in 2014. In 2003, he was a member of the sponsorship committee for the Ninth International Association of Athletics Federations World Championships in Athletics in Paris.

Killy's leadership of the IOC Coordinating Commission for the Sochi Olympics did draw controversy in 2013 when the commission allowed Russia to go forward with preparations despite international outcry against the country's "anti–gay propaganda" law. Killy stated that the IOC would be "fully satisfied" if Russia complied with the Olympic Charter, which protects all participants' rights to attend the Games. Nevertheless, some human rights advocates and other critics considered the IOC action to be tacit approval of the controversial law. After Sochi, Kily remained a member of the IOC in an honorary capacity.

Killy’s business ventures began with endorsements of products, such as Coca-Cola and Chevrolet, but soon extended into management and consulting positions. In 1977, he founded Veleda, a ski-apparel company. He was an adviser to Coca-Cola Enterprises and after 1997 was a board member, and he became a director of the Rolex watch company.

Despite back surgery, Killy continued to ski. He began snowboarding as well, both powder and off-piste. In fact, he chided traditional skiers for their reluctance to share the slopes, and he credited snowboarding with reviving the ski industry.

Significance

Like many other great athletes, Killy made a significant contribution to sports by setting records and capturing the public's attention. Although many of his records for speed racing have been broken, his Olympic feats in 1968 continue to be considered an all-time great athletic performance. His career continues to inspire athletes who also would like to become world champion skiers. Moreover, he became an international figure in sports administration; in particular, his work in promoting the Olympic Games made him an influential figure in the IOC.

Aside from setting records, Killy helped to increase the popularity of skiing in the 1960s. Young people who were attracted to his irreverent behavior turned him into one of the many antiheroes who were popular at that time. In a decade weary of war news and counterculture protests, Killy’s achievements were welcomed by many as a breath of fresh air. Consequently, general-interest magazines that had rarely paid much attention to skiers before, such as Life and Saturday Evening Post, ran substantial features on him. Because of Killy’s tremendous sex appeal and boyish good looks, he was also often featured in women’s magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal.

During his brief athletic career, Killy ignited so much nationalistic fervor that he continues to be revered as a hero of France. He was named a grand officer of the Legion of Honor of France in 2000. His flamboyant lifestyle added a spark of glamour, both to his name and to the sport of skiing itself, that has not diminished.

Bibliography

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Jenkins, Dan. “Skiing’s Darling of Derring-Do.” Sports Illustrated 21 Feb. 1966: 20.

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Killy, Jean-Claude, and Al Greenberg. Comeback. New York: Macmillan, 1974.

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