Annecy 2018

Korea for Winter 2018: emphatically on track

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PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — Think Olympics, and with the Rio 2016 Summer Games coming up in just six months, the headlines are dominated by story after story of bad water, ill government, sick finances and, now, the Zika virus. Just 18 months after the show closes in Rio, the Olympic spotlight will turn with all its intensity to the 2018 Winter Games, here in South Korea. So now for some glad Olympic tidings, the evidence manifest this weekend in the first 2018 test event, a men’s World Cup alpine downhill: Korea is emphatically on track.

Before most every World Cup race, the U.S. Ski Team sends to reporters a sort-of inside-baseball guide to what’s what -- notes, facts, figures, impressions. Here is a snippet from Saturday, before the downhill: “They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression,” adding, “Based on athlete praise this week, it looks like Pyeongchang crushed it with flying colors.”

Norway's Kjetil Jansrud on his way to winning Saturday's downhill // Getty Images

American Steven Nyman took third // photo Getty Images

The Jeongseon downhill podium. From left, Paris, Jansrud, Nyman // Getty Images

Big picture, the 2018 Games are on target to become one of perhaps the most memorable ever, situated in a hamlet where, because of simple geography, there’s going to be a Lillehammer-like village setting — assuming the Koreans can, as they have promised, bring the village to life. Too, because Pyeongchang itself is a ski venue and the skating and other ice venues are down by the coast in Gangneung, maybe a half-hour away, the 2018 vibe is going to be heavy on ski and snowboard — the very disciplines the International Olympic Committee has sought to use to reach out to a younger audience.

To that end, the IOC has approved for 2018 a snowboard event called "big air" that features, naturally enough, huge jumps.

The Jeongseon alpine racing course on Gariwang Mountain, designed by famed designer Bernhard Russi, the 1972 Sapporo Games downhill champion, and set by Hannes Trinkl, the 1998 Nagano Games downhill bronze medalist, runs to about 1.7 miles, with blind jumps and four pucker-inducing, great-for-TV jumps.

For comparison: the downhill track takes about 25 seconds less to get down than the 2:06.23 it took for Austria’s Mattias Meyer to win in Sochi in 2014. Because it's shorter, it places a huge premium on precision and control.

Norway's Kjetil Jansrud, who had been crushing it all season and all week in training, went 1:41.38 to win Saturday's race, his third victory of the season. Italy's Dominik Paris surged to second, two-tenths of a second back, in 1:41.58. American Steven Nyman, also strong in training, placed third, in 1:41.79, 41-hundredths behind. For Paris and Nyman, the race marked their first podium turns of the season.

An aerial view of the Jeongseon runs. "Blue Dragon," the competition course, is to the left, the training run "White Tiger" to the right // photo POCOG

Another aerial shot of the Jeongseon set-up // photo POCOG

Looking out from the start gate over the "Blue Dragon"

Sunday will see a World Cup super-G. The women's World Cup tour comes to Jeongseon in March 2017. In all, Pyeongchang will stage 28 test events over the next two years.

For a long time, it was hugely doubtful that the Koreans could have done what they did this weekend. Pyeongchang won the 2018 Games in 2011; the first three years went by with not enough getting done.

Then, though, Yang Ho Cho, the Korean Air chief who led the winning bid, was brought back — at the urgings of the highest levels of South Korean government — to run the Pyeongchang organizing committee, which goes by the acronym POCOG.

Now:

All major construction projects are on time, including a high-speed Seoul-Pyeongchang rail line and the athlete and media villages. Sponsorship: picking up. Right on schedule, the organizing committee is moving away from planning and toward operations.

Pyeongchang 2018 leader Yang Ho Cho on a midweek Jeongseon snowmobile tour

Gunilla Lindberg of Sweden, the International Olympic Committee 2018 Games coordination commission chair, said Saturday at a post-race briefing, "Today, for example, would not have been possible without the commitment of Korea to keep its promise to the athletes and to the Olympic movement."

There’s a long way to go, of course, before 2018, and any number of things can and probably will happen. After all, running an Olympic Games is nothing if not an exercise in crisis management.

Because this was a test event — the entire purpose of which is to find out what works, and what doesn’t, and get right what’s wrong — there inevitably were some rough edges over the weekend. Transport, parking, venue access — they all need to be reviewed.

No easy task for anyone, much less an elderly woman, getting up the hill before Saturday's downhill

Because it’s the Olympics, questions of legacy — what to do with this run after 2018, say — are bound over the coming months to gain in urgency. It doesn’t take much to figure out that, after the Beijing 2022 Winter Games, the international ski federation, FIS, can put together an Asian circuit, with races in China, Japan and Korea. Typically, though, ski runs are part of mammoth resorts. This is — a ski run. There are no glowing fireplace embers in the lodge because there isn’t a lodge. Or much else.

The view from the sky of the ski jump near Alpensia, the center of the 2018 Games // photo POCOG

That said, the very fact that the races went off, as scheduled long ago, is the most important take-away from the weekend. It makes for a huge momentum blast for 2018.

Before this weekend, the Olympic world was asked to believe, without evidence, that the Koreans could put on not just a world-class winter event but, with the downhill, one of the marquee events of the Games. Now that evidence is indisputable.

"It was a hard work," said Sarah Lewis, the British secretary general of FIS, the international ski federation. "And it was a great work."

If it was an organizational and logistics race to the finish, that is all the more evidence, too, of first-rate leadership and with it the building and sustaining of a winning culture — one where everyone buys in because the boss is right there with them, demanding excellence of himself and everyone around him.

“It’s not about me,” Cho said in an interview. “It’s about the team.”

For sure, and yet it is in some significant measure about him, because over his career he has proven an extraordinary change agent, the business leader who can bring teams to hew to his vision, who can command respect in political and financial circles, who moves easily in eastern culture and, as well, in the west.

The weekend in Korea saw the first-ever meeting of the Beijing 2022, Tokyo 2020 and Pyeongchang 2018 organizing committees. From left: Da Xu, deputy secretary general, Beijing 2022; Gunilla Lindberg, IOC 2018 coordination commission chair; Cho; Yukihiko Nunomura, chief operating officer, Tokyo 2020 // photo POCOG

From the first day he came back to the Olympic scene, in the summer of 2014, Cho understood the symbolic import of bringing this first test event in on time.

It was pretty elemental: Korea had been trusted with the Games. Now, could Korea deliver?

Cho has for many years been one of the world’s leading experts in enterprise culture, that thing that is exceedingly difficult to define and to make real but is so very real, indeed infectiously obvious, when it comes to life.

— As is detailed in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 best-seller “Outliers,” Cho effected a huge cultural change at Korean Air after the 1997 crash in Guam of Korean Air 801, which killed 228 passengers and crew. Afterward, junior pilots were encourage to speak up to senior officers; before, even in the face of potential disaster, that same junior pilot might well have simply shown deference. Too, all pilots had to become proficient in English, the language of international aviation.

Korean Air’s safety record since has been impeccable.

— Pyeongchang bid for the 2010 and 2014 Games, losing both. Those bids were headed by the provincial Gangwon governor, Jin Sun Kim. Cho led the 2018 bid. It not only won but by one of the biggest landslides in Olympic voting history, Pyeongchang getting 63 votes, Munich 25 and Annecy, France, just seven. Those 63 votes marked the highest-ever total for a first-round bid; Salt Lake City had gotten 54 for the 2002 Winter Games.

— Kim, a former provincial Gangwon governor, took over as organizing committee chairman. In July 2014, he unexpectedly resigned, saying new leadership was needed. The South Korean government turned to Cho, who initially turned down the job but then relented, saying it was a matter of duty, conscience and public service. His Olympic work -- which now takes up most of his days -- is without salary.

It took a little time for Cho to figure out who in POCOG was a worker and who, well, not. One of Cho’s first directives, considering that more than half the organization came from government: if you are working for a ministry and you don’t want to stay until 2018, the moment to leave is now. This way he had people who were in, and for the long haul.

It took time for Cho to convince the IOC that he — not the background noise drip-dripping from government — was really in charge.

In March, 2015, South Korean President Geun Hye Park’s chief of education and culture got with Lindberg, the IOC 2018 commission chair. The two-pronged message: the central government was fully supportive of the Games and Cho was indisputably in control.

Time, too, to get the various interests in POCOG — there are over 60 constituencies, including the private sector plus federal and Gangwon provincial government ministries — to learn to talk across the separate silos they had over the first three years constructed.

Then there was the weather. Korea normally goes through a rainy season. But summer 2015 brought a lot of rain. That meant a lot of mud on the mountains. That meant construction delays.

By last December, it was entirely unclear whether the gondola up Gariwang could be done in time to meet the required FIS Jan. 20 check-off, officially called “snow control day.”

Without the gondola, there was no point in seeing whether the other check-off due that day — snow volume and quality — could be met.

The gondola in operation over weekday test runs at Jeongseon // photo courtesy Doppelmayr

Thus the back story to this weekend.

The gondola, and how it got done, would prove hugely emblematic.

Cho had to be in Europe the first week of December for meetings, one of which revolved around his role in international aviation.

By then, POCOG had been told by officials of the gondola maker, a company called Doppelmayr, that the Jeongseon project was unsafe. No way it would be ready by Jan. 20. But that assertion didn’t elaborate.

On Dec. 6, a Sunday, Cho met in the lounge of a private aviation terminal near Vienna with Michael Doppelmayr, the company’s chief executive officer.

Doppelmayr told Cho that the firm’s No. 1 priority was safety. He said it had had 130 ongoing projects around the world.

For his part, Cho said, I have 150 aircraft that fly to more than 100 cities around the world, and Korean Air has the lowest insurance rates in the business.

That did it. At that instant, the two men recognized they were equals — sophisticated international businessmen.

The issue, as it would turn out, was that some of the pillars in the middle station planted on the Jeongseon run were misaligned. Without that alignment, the gondola wires and, obviously, any cable cars wouldn’t work right.

Cho told Doppelmayr the project had to get done.

For his part, Doppelmayr promptly sent a team of senior engineers to Korea. It was one thing to look at photos. It was quite another to be there, on scene.

After that, things swung into action. Crews worked 20-hour days, seven days a week. Christmas and New Year’s holidays? Not a chance. Work.

Meantime, on Dec. 24, Cho attended a POCOG executive board meeting. Hoarse, he could barely scratch out a few introductory remarks.

The important thing was that he was there. If everyone on the hill was working around the clock, he — despite the fact that he actually went to the hospital later that evening, where he was treated with antibiotics and released — was keeping a killer schedule, too. He wasn’t asking anyone to do what he wouldn’t do himself.

It got noticed.

On Christmas, everyone working on the hill enjoyed a traditional Korean barbecue. Cho paid for it himself — that is, himself, not from organizing committee funds.

Intriguingly, the weather in Korea — like in a lot of places now — had been unusually warm. The week before Christmas, as if by some magical confluence of karma, it turned cold, exactly when the Koreans needed it. Now they could make, and store, snow.

The week before the Jan. 20 deadline, the Koreans had made enough snow.

They kept going. By race day Saturday, they had 120 percent of the snow amounts the course requires.

Come deadline day, it was all good. The snow. The gondola, working, got certified.

Then came the raves.

And, come Saturday, the downhill. And more raves.

At that post-race news conference, Lindberg gave the event a score of 100 out of 100, bringing gasps and applause from Korean journalists. In a visit in December, she explained, IOC and other officials assuredly had "some doubts this event would take place." Even so, she said, "We trusted President Cho's promise," adding, "He made the impossible possible."

Echoed Gian Franco Kasper, the FIS president, "President Cho made us a promise and he really kept it," adding, "You have seen it today. We have an excellent downhill course here, according to the athletes and the coaches ... it's a beauty."

Jansrud, calling the mountain "fun," said, "This is more than an acceptable Olympic venue to ski on." Paris: "We can ski and we can have a lot of fun here." Nyman: A "joy to ski."

The FIS technical expert, Günter Hujara, had said earlier in the week, “Nobody believed we could do it but we did it.”

Or, as Cho said in a briefing Friday with a few reporters, “We had promised to deliver, and we delivered. Korea can deliver.”

USOC: no for 2022, go (maybe) for 2024 or 2026

Earlier this year, the U.S. and International Olympic Committees resolved a longstanding dispute over certain broadcasting and marketing revenue shares. That almost immediately prompted speculation that the USOC would get back into the Olympic bid game. Cities across the American West -- Salt Lake City, Denver, Reno and Bozeman, Mont. -- expressed interest in playing host to the 2022 Winter Games. The IOC will select the 2022 site in 2015; a bid for a 2015 Games would be due in the fall of 2013.

The USOC board of directors on Tuesday, however, opted to slow things down, and in a big way, and in so doing it made not only the logical call but the absolute right call.

The board decided not to bid for 2022 but instead to explore the possibility of hosting either the 2024 Summer or 2026 Winter Games.

Translation: It opted to do the right thing, not the fast thing. There's no rush. So why rush?

The smart money here -- there are literally dozens of variables -- is that the working committee the board appointed Tuesday comes back with a push for 2024. The committee is due to make an initial report to the full USOC board in December.

Why Summer? The Winter Games are great but the Summer Games are always going to be the franchise, and the United States can win for 2024.

The IOC will select the Summer Games site in 2017. That's so far out the IOC doesn't even know now where it's going to be meeting in 2017 to be picking the 2024 city.

San Francisco and New York figure to top the list of candidate cities. Chicago will be mentioned again. Dallas is interested, too, but a June Games, which is what they're tentatively talking about down there, would seem to fall outside the IOC window.

San Francisco is a magical name to the Eurocentric IOC.

New York has the advantage of having run a 2005 bid for 2012.

Meanwhile, there doubtlessly will be talk about how South Africa will want to mount a bid for 2024. But that country has a long, long way to go, and all the IOC members who were there for the 2011 session in Durban know that to be the case. And, like those of us in the press, they remember well the warnings not to walk outside the perimeter of the guarded IOC hotel -- even in broad daylight -- for fear of violence.

Paris will be mentioned, too. Sure, 2024 will be the 100th anniversary of Paris' 1924 Games. Big deal. How'd that anniversary work out for Athens in 1896? They held the 1996 Games in Atlanta.

Beyond which, the French are in considerably the same place the Americans were several years ago -- trying to figure out, in the wake of the disastrous single-digit vote for Annecy's 2018 Winter Games campaign, why they keep losing cycle after cycle at the Olympic bid game.

The Americans have now figured it out. It's a relationship business.

And it takes time to build relationships.

That's why Tuesday's decision makes so much sense.

USOC board chairman Larry Probst and chief executive Scott Blackmun have been traveling the world since the start of 2010, working at the relationship thing. Since the United States is not in the bid game, there's no pressure to ask for anything. They are simply trying to be good members of the so-called Olympic family.

The decision Tuesday gives them ample time to keep being just that.

It also allows time, too, for Probst to become an IOC member. That would be enormously helpful for an American bid.

There are other dominoes that need to fall into place. Domestically, for instance, more study needs to be done on the issue of the financial guarantee the IOC demands of host cities. In other countries, the federal government steps up for that guarantee; the nature of American federalism -- a city bids, supported by state and federal governments -- renders that super-complex.

Also, there are political matters at issue. To be candid, the next U.S. Olympic bid has to wait for a new president in the White House.

That didn't come up at Tuesday's USOC meeting. But it's very much the case.

President Obama traveled to Copenhagen in October, 2009, to push for his hometown, Chicago. He was the very first American president to put not only his personal prestige but that of the office on the line before the IOC.

The IOC then sent Chicago packing in the first round with a mere 18 votes.

There simply is no way the USOC can, or would, ask President Obama to appeal again to the IOC.

If he is re-elected -- of course that's a big if -- President Obama's term would end in January, 2017. The IOC vote for 2024 will come later that year.

Another thought:

It will be eight years between the Chicago vote and the 2024 vote; that's a lot of time and distance for feelings to be soothed.

A President Romney would, of course, change the equation considerably. Mitt Romney ran the Salt Lake 2002 organizing committee and he would be welcomed, indeed, at the IOC -- whether lobbying for a Winter or Summer Games.

But not for the notion of déjà vu all over again in Salt Lake City. Amid all the uncertainties ahead, one thing remains a solid bet:

The IOC is not going back to Salt Lake, not after the scandal that shook it in the late 1990s. Not in 2026. No way, no how.

Three bids, 88 members, 49 days to go

LAUSANNE, Switzerland -- Two years ago, Rio de Janeiro's bid team came here and put up a map that showed the Summer Games had never been to South America, a remarkably clever piece of stagecraft that separated Rio from four other contenders and, ultimately, made the case for its stunning win for the 2016 Summer Games. The three cities for the 2018 Winter Games came here Wednesday with movies and charts and Olympic medalists by the score, the two perceived chasers, Munich and Annecy, France, looking for a similar breakout moment to make up ground against the favorite, Pyeongchang, South Korea.

The Koreans came Wednesday with the admittedly "nervous" but nonetheless impressive Yuna Kim, the women's 2010 figure skating gold medalist. And they have their own world map.

That map shows that the Winter Games have been held in Asia only twice, and both times in Japan, in Nagano in 1998 and Sapporo in 1972.

This is the underlying dynamic of this 2018 race, and unless the others wield a compelling argument to the contrary, it's why this arguably is -- and always has been -- the Koreans' race to lose. The IOC will vote July 6 by secret ballot in Durban, South Africa.

The essential 2018 question is whether the forces of history, economics and demographics are -- or are not -- on Korea's side.

To frame it another way: Is the sports world still in the expansionist mode of recent years? Or is 2018 the campaign in which the IOC takes a break and opts for a more traditional locale before venturing forth anew in 2020, 2022 and beyond?

To be clear: The Koreans have a lot going for them. Then again, if they could win, of course they could lose. They have bid twice before for the Winter Games, for 2014 and 2010, and lost both times. Moreover, it's an International Olympic Committee election; by definition, the only thing predictable about an IOC campaign is that it's unpredictable.

Indeed, sometimes it's just flat-out unusual.

One such moment:

At the session Wednesday, held at the Olympic Museum, and formally dubbed a "technical briefing," with each city given a 45-minute presentation window followed by a question-and-answer session, Hicham el Guerrouj, the great Moroccan middle-distance runner who since 2004 has been an IOC member, posed a question during Annecy's time about the arrest in New York on sexual assault charges of French financier Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

IOC president Jacques Rogge promptly ruled the question out of order.

Rogge was not asked about that question at an end-of-the day news conference.

He declared the day a big success: "It was a very good day for the International Olympic Committee because whoever wins will definitely be able to stage very good Games."

He also said, and perhaps he's absolutely right about this, perhaps he's just practicing diplomacy: "It's going to be a close race."

The Koreans, with their tagline about taking the Games to "new horizons," would appear in many regards to be driving the campaign. At the least, the other two bids have felt compelled to respond to the Korean narrative.

"When you choose the Olympic host city, it is about more than just geography," Katarina Witt, the chair of the Munich bid, stunning as ever in a low-cut dress by the Berlin designer Michalsky, told the 88 IOC members on hand, stressing that Munich would deliver full stadiums and "the single greatest experience" of each athlete's life.

It's not just about geography, of course.

Even so, the broad theme of the era in which we are living is writ large.

The nations that through the 1990s played host to major sports events have been giving way in recent years to countries and regions that, logically enough, are saying, it's our turn now.

As a for instance, this is why -- despite what is shaping up to be a comparatively weak field for 2020 -- the U.S. Olympic Committee, even if its revenue and marketing issues with the IOC are resolved, ought to give serious, serious pause before considering an entry.

One theory holds that after ranging afield to new locales -- such as Rio for 2016 -- the IOC needs to park in a safe harbor, such as the U.S., for 2020.

Applying that theory now would deliver 2018 to Germany or France -- after 2014 in Sochi, Russia, where they're building a brand-new Winter Games destination from scratch.

The competing theory is that the Olympic and international sports world is still very much in the midst of turning away from what was and toward what's next.

See, for example: Russia 2014; Brazil 2016 (and soccer's World Cup in 2014.)

Russia, again, for the World Cup in 2018. Qatar, for the World Cup in 2022.

Qatar, again, for the men's team handball world championship in 2015 -- chosen this past January over three European bids, from France, Norway and Poland.

Our world is changing all around us. Just a couple days ago, in an event that went virtually unnoticed in the United States but is big stuff in Europe, with more than 100 million people tuned in to watch the final episode, Azerbaijan, one of the former Soviet republics, won the Eurovision song contest.

Germany was 10th; Britain, 11th. Spain and France finished farther still down the list.

Azerbaijan winning Eurovision -- that underscores a major cultural and economic shift.

Here's another huge economic shift in the making, a point the Koreans have underscored time and again during this 2018 campaign:

By 2030, according to an Asian Development Bank Study, Asia will make up 43 percent of worldwide consumption. From 1990 to 2008, the middle class in Asia grew by 30 percent, and spent an average of an additional $1.7 trillion annually. No other region in the world comes close.

Complicating the 2018 Olympic dynamic, though, is the factor of personality politics.

Thomas Bach, the vice president and presumed IOC presidential candidate in 2013, is leading the Munich bid. He observed Wednesday that "there are cycles of life," a time where "you go to new shores" and another "where you cultivate your foundations."

While the presentations Wednesday were important, the behind-the-scenes politicking now begins in earnest.

"This is a marathon race," Bach said at a news conference. "It's of no importance whether you lead at 22k or 35k or 40k. The only thing that counts is to cross the finish line first, on the 6th of July. After today's presentation and the response, which we can feel, we go into this final stretch of this very special Olympic marathon with full confidence and with all the determination and with all the passion we can have for the Olympic Games in Germany and for winter sports in particular."

Asked where Munich stood at this point in the "marathon," Bach answered, "I don't care. This is, as I said, about winning."

For their part, the French team includes Jean-Claude Killy, the triple 1968 Games ski champion turned sports administrator. Arguably no one within the Olympic movement carries more credibility within winter sports circles. "We think we have nothing to envy the other two propositions," he told reporters after the French had briefed the 88 members.

Later, he said that he supported the bid "very strongly." He also, reading from a paper left over from the German news conference, said, "It says here that 'Munich loves you.' So I just want you to know that we love you, too."

The chairman of the Korean bid, Yang Ho Cho, met reporters immediately after the Pyeongchang presentation ended. In keeping with the Korean message of humility, he said, "The decision is up to the IOC members. We did our best," adding a moment later, "We sent a message of new horizons."

--

A quickie and by no means exhaustive summary of the three bids:

-- Munich: One of the world's great cities. Re-purposed 1972 Summer Games venues. Big crowds. Fantastic guaranteed atmosphere. German business underwrites 50 percent of the revenues of the seven sports on the Winter Games program. Germany hasn't hosted the Winter Games since 1936.

-- Annecy: The IOC has had a penchant for staging recent Winter Games in big cities -- Vancouver, Torino, Salt Lake City. What about the mountains? "Authentic" Annecy, amid the world's most iconic mountain range and with a sustainable development plan in mind, is uniquely positioned to take the Winter Games, and mountain communities worldwide, into a 21st-century future.

-- Pyeongchang: Time is not only ripe but right to go to Asia and South Korea to grow the Winter Games, and in a big way. 87 percent national support for 2018 Games. Major national priority. Two prior bids, spent $1.4 billion to build first-class Alpensia resort in what used to be potato fields. "We are keeping our promises to the IOC," former provincial governor and bid leader Jin Sun Kim stressed at news conference.

Annecy 2018 -- now what?

From the very get-go, it seems, Annecy's bid for the 2018 Winter Games has been missing that certain something. At an introductory news conference at the Vancouver Olympics this past February, there up on the stage appeared a line-up of various French personalities and dignitaries. Except -- Jean-Claude Killy wasn't there.

Within Olympic circles, especially within Winter Games circles, Killy is the man. Not just in France. Worldwide. So for him not to be there -- that wasn't good.

The open secret is that it hasn't gone much better for Annecy ever since, and the resignation Sunday of Edgar Grospiron, the Annecy 2018 chief executive, would seem to threaten to plunge Annecy into thorough disarray -- except "disarray" would seem to assume there was ever "array" in the first instance, and in the case of the Annecy bid that assumption may well be unfounded.

The International Olympic Committee will pick the 2018 site in July. Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Munich, Germany, are also in the race.

It's in the IOC's interest to have as many viable candidates as possible in its bid campaigns. But it has been clear to everyone who knows the Olympic scene that Annecy's viability has always been suspect.

This past June, the IOC criticized Annecy's spread-out venues. The bid scrambled to come up with a new plan centered around Annecy and Chamonix.

Then, a few days ago, Killy and fellow French IOC member Guy Drut said Annecy was still way behind.

Such public criticism from your own country's IOC members is virtually unheard-of.  Especially from the likes of Killy -- 1968 Grenoble Games ski gold medalist, co-chair of the 1992 Albertville Games, IOC point man for the 2006 Torino and now 2014 Sochi Winter Games.

This past week, rumors flew that the Annecy bid was actually considering withdrawing from the race itself.

Imagine that. The founder of the modern Olympic movement, the Baron Pierre de Coubertin, is French. The two languages of the movement? English and French, and in case of dispute French wins. A French bid -- withdrawing? Unthinkable.

Strike that, since the only certainty in Olympic bidding is uncertainty, and there are eight long months to go before the IOC vote next July 6.

For that matter, who knows what kind of grades Annecy will get from the IOC's evaluation commission visit? The IOC team is due to visit in early February.

Clearly, the matter of whether to stay in seems like it was up for serious debate. A news release issued Sunday said that "following a very long session" the Annecy 2018 supervisory board "confirmed its ambition" to pursue a campaign "in view of the tremendous contribution it makes to promoting the region and endorsing Olympic values."

Anyone can see the potential in an Annecy campaign. It's a mature resort in one of the world's most beautiful spots, nestled in the Alps. What if Annecy could be transformed, the Games as catalyst, into a 21st-century resort that relies on cutting-edge and sustainable environmental technologies?

That whole global-warming thing? What's that going to do to the ski and snowboard industry? Shouldn't someone somewhere -- say, an already-developed resort such as Annecy -- be thinking out of the box about how to find a new way forward?

On Friday, the new French sports minister, Chantal Jouano, reportedly affirmed her support for the bid. On Sunday, the bid's budget, it was announced, would be increased from 18 million euros, about $23.7 million, to 20 million euros, about $26.4 million.

Bluntly, that's not enough. That's half, maybe a third, of what it might take.

The debate about whether Olympic bids should run to $50 million or more is a reasonable one, and it's worth having. But not if you're in the game. If you're in -- you're in.

The French, though, have tried to go it in what they might call a "modest" or "authentic" way. It makes you wonder who's really running things there, and whether he, she or they understand what it takes to win, and whether they're committed, or can find such a commitment.

It also makes you wonder whether someone in a position of serious responsibility in France is going to look at what is really a pretty modest increase in that bid budget and ask whether -- to use the American expression -- it's nonetheless a case of throwing good money after bad.

Does it serve the president of the French republic -- who, after all, is up for re-election in 2012, a year after the IOC vote -- for Annecy to get thumped?

How does it play for a potential Paris bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics -- a 100th anniversary bid of the 1924 Games -- if Annecy gets whacked?

What's the dynamic if, ultimately, Annecy withdraws? Can there be such a thing as a graceful withdrawal?

To be explicitly clear on one point: This is not about Grospiron, the 1992 Albertville Games moguls champion. He was fully committed. Grospiron has consistently proved the one bright spot in the bid -- a guy that everyone, and I mean everyone, in particular his rivals, not only liked but respected.

He said in a telephone interview late Sunday night, "I have done what I could do. It's like that."

Growing reflective, he said about his decision to step down, "I decided to be honest to myself and to others. Just to be honest. I learned that from sport. First of all, honesty and integrity. And integrity comes first to yourself. You can lie to everybody but if you lie to yourself that causes damage.

"Again, I learned that through sport. If you cheat yourself, it will have consequences. You can cheat others -- well, it doesn't matter. But when you lie to yourself, you cheat yourself, it's not good. And I wanted to be honest to myself and clear with others. And I took my responsibilities. I think this will help each one of us in the team and those on the [supervisory] board to take their responsibilities. We owe that to the Olympic movement."

He also said, "I did my best and it was not enough. It was not enough to have put us in a good position. I know there are probably guys who can do much better."

It says here -- probably not.

Again, this is not about Grospiron. This is about something much bigger. This is about France.