Word: skis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Erma has been called a champion of the Great Silent Majority. That upsets her. For one thing, she is a staunch Democrat. Worse, "it sounds like I'm totally uninvolved-like being a ski instructor in Berlin during World War II." She has been criticized for not championing the feminist revolution. That suits her fine. Most of the revolutionaries, she says, "are just like roller-derby dropouts, or Russian pole-vaulting types." The uncharacteristic club is quickly replaced by a tickling feather. She adds: "When I make speeches I'm always asked, 'Have you burned your...
THROUGHOUT the late 1960s, the increasingly popular sport of alpine skiing was almost totally dominated by the French. Led by the incomparable Jean-Claude Killy and the Goitschel sisters, French ski teams demonstrated their superiority on nearly every snowcapped peak in Europe and the U.S. So it stands to reason that France would also want to capture national honors in the race for the growing ski-resort trade. That is precisely what it is doing. Splashy, audaciously conceived resorts are sprouting all along the French Alpine timberline and drawing thousands of snow worshipers away from the established ski enclaves...
With typical Gallic shrewdness, the French calculated that the best way to outdraw the Swiss and Austrian ski resorts was to make a radical departure from the traditional cowbell and cuckoo-clock-village style. They have succeeded in doing just that by carving bold, ultramodern, eminently convenient resorts out of empty mountain space. The most popular resorts-Flaine, Avoriaz, Les Arcs and La Plagne -are located in the Savoie region; generally, the slopes they offer are every bit as formidable as the more famous runs at Kitzbühel and St. Moritz. Crisscrossed with the latest...
Learning from Mistakes. The upsurge in French-resort skiing is part of a carefully designed plan. After World War II it became apparent that, as far as ski areas were concerned, Austria and Switzerland had been exploited to near capacity. Also, by the 1960s the French economy was in difficult straits and the country's tourist industry had tailed off sharply. Then someone in the French Ministry of Tourism finally noticed the Alps just sitting there, beautiful, capacious and unproductive. The rush for white gold...
...government granted longterm, low-interest mortgages to resort builders, and now there is hardly a bank in France that is not involved in the ski-resort industry. The French also had the benefit of learning from the mistakes of resort owners in other countries. All the new resorts are built high on the mountain so that skiers can stay on the slopes into summer. Since the areas were simply created rather than built around existing towns, the promoters have been able to avoid becoming entangled in the confusing web of village politics and expropriation laws. Finally, they were able...