Word: skying
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Though the world Alpine ski championship is nominally an amateur affair, the spectacle staged in Val Gardena, Italy, last month looked more like the world ski-trade fair. With their equipment splashily plastered with brand names, contestants paraded before the TV cameras like walking commercials. For a $400-a-month payoff, one entrant sported the badge of a resort he has never even seen. After winning the special slalom, France's Jean-Noel Augert shouted "Vive Le Courbier!"-a hard-sell pitch for a ski resort in which, as he put it, "I am investing all my savings...
Under-the-Table Pay. The newly organized pro circuit is the creation of ABC-TV and Bob Beattie, former coach of the U.S. ski team, who sees it as one alternative to the "shamateurism" that plagues skiing. The problem stems from the archaic Olympic Committee rule, which states that an amateur athlete may not spend more than six weeks a year pursuing his sport. For skiers like Kidd-and indeed athletes in any sport -the rule is patently ridiculous. "In order to compete at the top nowadays," explains Kidd, "you have to spend at least ten months skiing." The amateur...
...result, says America's Amos ("Bud") Little, a vice president of the Federation Internationale de Ski, the governing body of amateur ski racing, is that "we're in a mess. If the Olympic rules were policed, the whole U.S. men's ski team would have to be changed." Even so, when it comes to payola, Europeans are way ahead. They regard their skiers as natural resources vital to the promotion of winter tourism. Thus European ski groups maintain cash "pools" to keep their racers in ski wax and maybe a sports car or two. France...
...topflight "amateur" like Austria's Karl Schranz, 31, for example, reportedly rakes in close to $50,000 a year. At today's rates, each victory nets him a total bonus of $4,000 from the grateful makers of his skis, boots, bindings, poles and gloves. In addition, he earns a salary as a "technical adviser" for an Austrian ski manufacturer...
...much success. Raw opium is converted into so-called morphine base; much of the U.S. supply is refined into heroin at simple clandestine laboratories in southern France. It has come into the U.S. concealed in the toilets of international jets, in cans carrying Spanish fish labels, in hollowed-out ski poles, in automobiles, in false-bottomed wine bottles and crates, in shipments of electronic equipment?the smugglers' ingenuity is inexhaustible, and the supply of lawmen to deal with it is not large. The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has 850 agents. They have not always been above temptation...