Val d'Isere worlds GM Pierrat to step down

Two months after the resignation of Executive President Jean-Claude Killy, fed up with internal intrigues involving the local municipality, the organizing committee of the 2009 FIS Alpine Ski World Championships is facing more problems with the departure of General Manager Jean-Paul Pierrat, named to that position last year by Killy and the mayor of Val d’Isère, Bernard Catelan, also the president of the Organizing Committee.

TWO MONTHS AFTER the resignation of Executive President Jean-Claude Killy, fed up with internal intrigues involving the local municipality, the organizing committee of the 2009 FIS Alpine Ski World Championships is facing more problems with the departure of General Manager Jean-Paul Pierrat, named to that position last year by Killy and the mayor of Val d’Isère, Bernard Catelan, also the president of the organizing committee.
    Pierrat, a former cross-country champion who won the famous Vasaloppet event in Sweden in the 1970s, decided to step down from his job this week after realizing he could not move forward to resolve some major infrastructural problems.
    “This is pretty irrational, far from any basic logic,” he said to French Sportspaper “l’Equipe” on Thursday. “We rang the alarm clock for a long time now, but instead of looking for solutions, people here are always creating new problems and controversies. There is no way for me to achieve a good job in those conditions.”
    “The ski World Championships can take place without me. I’m not the right person for this position anymore, I don’t have any competence and motivation left,” Pierrat added. “The technical works on the course is going on, but there is too much delay now on other items such as the underground conference center planned to host the press center and the race office. There is just too much hassle with members of the municipality who all want to interfere and who are permanently setting on fires.”
    The French Minister of Youth and Sports, Roselyne Bachelot, has already tried to look for new solutions after Killy resigned this summer. She also invited Catelan in her office in Paris and plans a trip to Val d’Isère in October. Sophie Dion, a sports adviser to the French State President Nicolas Sarkozy and a great fan of skiing, also works on this touchy issue with some experts.
    Pierrat will take care of current business until the date of his official departure early January 2008. He doesn’t plan to stay longer. “My decision is irrevocable,” he said.
    Val d’Isère is supposed to host two World Cup events for women and men in December 2007 and February 2008 on the new courses.
    FIS has never faced such a tough problem with an official organizing committee. In recent years, Sierra Nevada postponed the alpine worlds from 1995 to 1996 because of lack of snow at the Spanish resort. There were also a few problems in 2004 with constructions delays of a new ski lift at Santa Caterina, in Italy, on the women’s courses of the 2005 FIS worlds at Bormio, but difficulties were finally resolved in time.
    Only a single race, in fact, has had to be definitively canceled in the history of the FIS alpine World Championships — a men super G race could not take place as scheduled in 1993 at Morioka, Japan, where bad weather created huge problems and major headaches to the local and international officials.
    France has not hosted any (senior) FIS alpine World Championships since 1962, when Chamonix hosted that event. Yet it was almost canceled a few days before beginning because of huge political problems that the French government had to resolve regarding entrance visas for the athletes of former East Germany. Only a last-minute agreement saved those events from being cancelled.