Olympic introspection… (Part Two)

Today, we’ll explore how financially successful the Olympics (mostly summer) were. We’ll begin with the single Olympic Games that really made money, Los Angeles in 1984, a standout example. These were operated without public funds and still delivered a surplus of over $200 million. Unsurprisingly, they became the model for how to run a lean, privately financed Games. Obviously the example didn’t translate into further success. 

Other Games have occasionally broken even or come close, but 1984 remained the only universally acknowledged major profit-maker. Then there are the many losers. Most Games since the 1960s have run massive deficits. Here are a few notorious examples, starting with Montreal 1976 that was so over budget that it took the city 30 years to pay off the debt. 

That should have been a cautionary tale for future hosts, but Athens also fell in the trap with billions in overruns and many venues abandoned afterward. In the case of Greece these costs overrun were the brick that broke the camel’s back in exacerbating that country’s later financial strain. In Brazil, Rio 2016 also had some severe cost overruns with many venues falling into disuse within months after the Games and long-term economic benefits failed to materialize. 

Even the careful Japanese and Tokyo 2020 (held in 2021) saw the Games’ costs ballooning due to COVID-19 delays, not to mention the fact that the expected tourism benefits evaporated as spectators were banned. As far as Paris 2024 was concerned the outcomes are still being evaluated, but early analysis shows that hosting the Games was “anything but cheap,” with costs around $8.7 billion. This rather negative outcome explains why fewer and fewer cities want to bid for the Olympics. 

The massive cost overruns are the main reason as Olympics routinely exceed their budgets by huge margins. As a result, cities know they’re taking on a huge financial risk with little chance of profit. Then there are the long-term debt and infrastructure maintenance costs. After the Games end, cities must maintain stadiums, arenas, transportation expansions, athlete villages and special infrastructures like bobsleigh runs that often become “white elephants.” 

There’s also growing public resistance as residents increasingly vote against hosting in referendums because they don’t want higher taxes, displacement, construction disruption and long-term debt. The Colorado population stands as an example for vehemently rejecting the 1976 Winter Games in Denver. 

Finally the IOC has gained a really bad reputation with its high demands for expensive new venues, costly adherence to new specifications, strict branding rules, heavy security, thin financial contribution and its nasty habit of grabbing most of the revenue generated. Next, we’ll focus on some of the most successful Winter Olympic venues in recent history and how each one performed in its own ways…

Olympic introspection… (Part One)

Now that the Winter Olympics are behind us, time for some introspection. As I said many times in this blog, the Olympic Games have morphed into a big business that’s not necessarily making money for everyone. 

As we all suspect, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and major corporate sponsors profit most from the Games, with the IOC generating billions from broadcasting (61%) and marketing (30%). Conversely, host cities and national taxpayers bear the majority of the financial burden, often covering massive, frequently over-budget construction, security, and operational costs. 

Talk about an expensive form of entertainment even if you don’t care to watch it, you’ll be guaranteed to pay for it! Yet, the whole enterprise is pushed – as usual - by our dear politicians. Cities or now, regions still bid despite these huge financial risks for a few simple reasons. It represents a super easy political job as it brings prestige and is seen as a global status symbol. In addition, local developers push hard because they profit regardless of the outcome. 

It’s easy to formulate optimistic economic projections and affordable costs, long before the event and bid committees never hesitate to use inflated forecasts in selling the idea to the public. Consider this, every Olympics since 1960 has gone over budget (except for Los Angeles in 1984), often massively with an average cost overrun at 172%. Montreal took 30 years to pay off its Olympic debt while Rio and Athens were left with abandoned venues and long‑term economic strain.

Did I mention that the jumps in Prelegato for Torino 2006 have become white elephants while Milan rebuilt new jumps in Val di Fieme even further away. Finally, there’s the “legacy” narrative as cities and host venues are promised long‑term benefits that rarely materialize. In the next episode we’ll dig deeper into the Olympics’ financial roller-coaster...

One huge benefit of having no afterlife

Are there people on this planet who passed away and whom you could absolutely not stand? Either they were means to you, had wronged you, abused you or simply couldn’t stand seeing you in their presence. I’m sure you’ll find a bunch if you really try.

Of course, you’ve long pardoned these perpetrators, but still are happy and relieved that you don’t have to see them anymore. Now, imagine a life after death is somehow possible and that, upon resurrecting, you would be liable to run into these awful characters. 

Would you enjoy it? Do you think they would have made any amendments and changes in their behavior? Don’t bet on it! In short, your stay in Paradise would be marred and eternally ruined by these tormentors of yours, isn’t it right? 

So, I just feel blessed that, as I found out, there’s no such thing as an after-life!

Park City Mountain’s mid-season grade

Our charming town of Park City has two ski resorts that are competitors. Deer Valley (let’s call it DEAR Valley because it’s outrageously expensive) and the other one I’d call “Fail Valley” for the sake of symmetry. In fact its name is Park City Mountain (PCM) and it’s where I do more of my skiing. 

The nickname “Fail Valley” I gave it is based on three reasons. First, symmetry, ans second, as I first said, “Fail” is the way a German would pronounce “Vail” in Vail Resorts (VR), its parent company, and the meaning of “fail” being not succeeding at anything, except separating customers from their money and giving them “in-mass” disappointment in return. 

That’s right, PCM does everything "too little too late". Its snow making efforts are “reluctant” as Vail Resorts is far too cheap to invest into it. Not only it barely maintains its ski lifts, but it also falls short of maintaining its slopes invaded by bush and new tree growth everywhere and not trimming as regularly as they should because it costs money. 

This is terrible when the snow is so thin like this season, and this vegetation becomes very dangerous. Its lifts are for the most part old and slow (fixed grip) and are more fit to go to a museum (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan buy used detachable lifts from the Alps to equip their ski slopes, they don’t even consider fixed grip systems anymore!

Still, there’s some good news compared to the past, we’ve got The Canyons’ new parking structure that’s both spacious and clean, but there again, VR must have purchased "pot-holes" in bulk, that they had to place strategically on the access and egress roads. Wow! I couldn't miss that one. Once inside the structure, it’s pretty hard to figure out how to exit and some better signage would go a long way in helping users to drive out safely. 

In addition, chairlifts keep on stopping continuously, defeating the purpose of being detachable (now I start to understand VR’s fixation on fixed-grip chairs – pardon the pun) and while I’m on the subject of chairlifts, the 8-chair replacement planned for Silverlode is another bad idea. Given the way VR operates its chairs, having 8 folks in line at loading or unloading time, will result in even more stoppages than is the case now (increased domino effect). 

My idea of a bypass from the base of Silverlode to a relocated base of Motherlode further down in the drainage and going to Puma Ridge would be vastly superior. Finally, I wish VR comes up next year with a more attractive pass for Seniors. Absent this, I might switch from Fail Valley to DEAR Valley! 

Dying doing what we love !

This is an expression I have heard several times about skiers meeting their mortality while skiing. I’m not talking about tragic accident mind you, like avalanche, collisions, slide on slick slopes, etc., but “natural death”, most often than not caused by a timely massive heart failure on the ski slopes, happening to an avid skier. 

Of course the saying “He died doing what he loved”, that’s in fact a coping mechanism, not a literal truth. It perhaps works for the victim, if the assumption is correct (which we generally failed to verify), but tragic for the widow or widower and the next of kin that end up picking the pieces in a moment that end up being a bit awkward given the circumstances. 

When someone collapses on a ski slope from a heart attack, the people around them instinctively reach for a narrative that softens the shock. Saying “he died doing what he loved” is a way to reduce the randomness of the event, give the moment a sense of dignity and reassure everyone that the person wasn’t suffering in a hospital bed. 

There’s also a cultural element as skiing, climbing, sailing, are activities with a built‑in mythology. People who love them often talk about them as a way of life, not just a hobby. So when someone dies in that context, the narrative almost writes itself. It’s not that the sentiment is false; it’s just incomplete. I remember two people that die this way.

One was Max Marolt a ski rep for Look bindings when I came to America in 1977 and an icon of skiing and politics in Aspen who died at 67 after suffering a heart attack while skiing at Las Leñas in Argentina on July 28, 2003. The other was the French ski champion Adrien Duvillard who died while skiing on his native Megève, at Mont d'Arbois, on February 14, 2017 at age 82. 

I too would love to die that way, but I don’t think my wife would be thrilled!

The uncanny nature of skiing… (Part Three)

So now that we’ve looked at so many aspects of skiing that are seldom discussed, I propose that we try to understand why skiing can becomes more dangerous as we age. This could be in large part because of its apparent ease and feeling of freedom, skiing often hides our true physical and mental state until the moment its needed the most. 

There’s the “fresh start illusion” that occurs because the lift offers us an opportunity to rest and resets us, we never feel the gradual fatigue that warns us to stop. We think we’re fine, until you’re not. We all know that reaction time declines with age, so even a tiny delay in correcting one’s balance, edge-control, weight adjustment and response to various terrain and snow conditions can turn a small mistake into a severe fall.

As most of us know, falls are new desirable nor good for old persons! Beyond that aspect, skiing demands instant reactions, but aging slows them down and the fun nature of the sport hides that fact. In addition, our strength declines faster than our confidence. 

Our mind remembers what you used to do, but our body can’t always deliver it, leading to a dangerous mismatch. Adding adrenaline to cold also give us a false sense of capability as we feel sharper, stronger, and more confident than we actually are. High speeds magnify small errors and at 30–40 mph, a 1% lapse quickly becomes a 100% problem. 

Then there’s vision and depth perception that subtly degrade with time, making flat light, snowy conditions, and speed much harder to process visually. Finally, fatigue hits all at once, because skiing masks it so well, so when it’s there, it’s often faster than we have time to react. Our legs give out, our balance collapses, our attention drops and our reflexes are gone. 

This is when most accidents happen, the last run, the last hour, the “one more” moment. In conclusion, it’s so true that skiing feels like a young person’s sport even when we’re older because the sport is so good at hiding the usual signals of aging. 

That’s the big paradox; we never feel out of breath, our muscles don’t burn, we don’t sweat, we don’t feel any pain, don’t suspect the fatigue coming, and still feel 25 until the moment our body reminds us that we’re a tad older than that. 

That’s the danger, try to remember these stark realities and don’t forget them!

The uncanny nature of skiing… (Part Two)

As promised, I wanted to explore why skiing feels so effortless yet intense, later we’ll also see how it can become dangerous as it "masks" one's true physical and mental condition and could have dire consequences in terms of potential accidents. It’s true that skiing is one of the strangest sports in the world because it creates a perfect illusion of feeling effortless, smooth, and almost weightless, yet it demands enormous material, physical and mental resources, all in a variety of amounts.  

As many have said before “It feels as liberating as flying and frees us from the tyranny of gravity...” That mismatch between effortless and thrilling is also why it can become dangerous, especially as people age. The sport can perfectly hide our true physical condition until the moment we need it most. So why does this happen and why is skiing’s “masking effect” so powerful? 

It’s clearly one of the few sports where gravity achieves a critical part of the work. When we ski, we’re not propelling ourselves much, we’re mostly managing our momentum. The ski-lift does the hardest part, we don’t climb the mountain, don’t earn the descent (unlike with Alpine randonnée), but somehow start fresh every run! This means, much less physical fatigue, no cardiovascular warning signs, less gradual buildup of exhaustion as skiers go from “resting” to “high-speed athletic performance” instantly. 

A combination of gravity and muscle work provides the propulsion and that hybrid balance varies vastly, depending on a skier’s experience, the weather, their competitive nature, proficiency on snow and external factors like snow, slope and visibility as one’s body can be working hard to stabilize, absorb shocks, and react as fast as it can. High mileage and old skiers like my rely more and more on gravity as brute force diminishes. Still there are subtle forms of exertion that take place. 

Adrenaline, the result of speed and risk, masks weakness, as it boosts confidence. It also hides pain and fatigue as it temporarily sharpens focus! While skiing feels easy, it can be very intense even when we’re not under the impression of “working hard” in the traditional sense. It demands much concentration as well as high-speed decision-making as we’re making micro-adjustments every fraction of a second and it can be mentally exhausting, but we don’t notice it until later. 

It also requires a constant, eccentric muscle loading as our quads, buttock muscles, and core are absorbing force, not producing it. Eccentric work like this feels easier, but fatigues muscles faster and without being noticed. Up in our brain there’s plenty to do as we’re processing snow quality, terrain difficulties, other users, speed and visibility. All this also drains mental energy without feeling like “effort.” 

Finally, our body is constantly correcting itself, using deep stabilizer muscles that also tire quickly but quietly. So as you can see, a lot of strain is put on the body without us knowing it. We’ll continue tomorrow, with a few darker sides of skiing, so please come back!