While the Winter Olympics in Beijing are in full swing, a look back at a significant episode in the preparation for the 1968 Grenoble Olympics in the department.
A few weeks before the 1968 Grenoble Games, panic in the Alps, the snow was not there, impossible to train. “I kept telling Mr. Bonnet (French ski boss at the time) that there was snow at home, in Saint-Lary”, recalls Isabelle Mir, silver medalist from descent to Grenoble.
The latter therefore sends his two faithful lieutenants, Réné Sulpice and Jean Béranger, as a scout to verify the statements of the young Isabelle. And there, amazement on arriving on site! “They call me in the middle of the night to tell me that there is no snow. Only here they were not in Saint-Lary in the Hautes-Pyrénées, but in Ariège (laughs)!”
Once this problem of route settled, it is indeed all the team of France which unloads in the young station at this end of year 1967 after a voyage carried out in military plane. “It was also the Tarbes army that came to groom us on both tracks,” says Isabelle Mir.
For almost a month, the whole band is refining its Olympic preparation where the other nations are falling behind. One of the keys to success, a few weeks later, during the Games. “It’s undeniable, even Jean-Claude (Killy, triple Olympic gold medalist) readily admits it.”
And Marielle Goitschel, star of the tracks of the 60s (double Olympic gold medalist) confirms: “It allowed us all to be efficient in February in Grenoble, I remember that in Saint-Lary, we playing cheats on death by going downhill in the fog with Isabelle, even the boys didn’t venture there, they called us crazy (laughs)!”
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