Salzburg's loss is not all bad news for Austria

There were a few sad and upset Austrians on Wednesday night after the news of Salzburg’s second consecutive failure to reach the final round of votes for the 2014 Winter Games during the IOC meetings held at Guatemala City. Sochi won the jackpot by four votes against Korea’s Pyeongchang.

{mosimage}
SALZBURG, Austria  — There were a few sad and upset Austrians on Wednesday night after the news of Salzburg’s second consecutive failure to reach the final round of votes for the 2014 Winter Games during the IOC meetings held at Guatemala City. Sochi won the jackpot by four votes against Korea’s Pyeongchang.
    “This has nothing to do with sports — it’s only about money and power,” said an upset supporter who was hoping to see the birth city of Mozart welcoming the rest of the (winter) world in seven years. Toni Sailer, the triple Olympic champion from 1956 and alpine skiing’s first world-class hero, expressed similar thoughts at Guatemala where he was helping the Austrian bid. “We had the best bid and we were ready!” he said. “In Sochi, most of the infrastructure still has to be built.”
    Eventually he was right — and for that same reason, many other Austrian (businessmen) were not disappointed at all to see Sochi becoming the first ever Russian city to host Winter Olympic Games.
    One of them is no other than Sailer’s former teammate, St. Anton’s Karl Schranz, whose international career started with a brilliant Kandahar win at Chamonix in 1957, a year prior to Sailer’s last triumphs at the FIS worlds at Badgastein.
    Schranz considers himself a good friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. They met at the 2001 FIS World Championships in Austria, and Schranz became a technical adviser of Sochi afterward.
    No later than this spring, he declared that Sochi would be the best place to organize the 2014 Winter Olympics, which didn’t make him too popular in his own country.
    Since the late 1970s, when former ski racer and head coach Leonid Tiagacev — now president of the Russian Olympic Committee — started to travel on the World Cup tour with his small but talented young team, there was always a strong connection between the former Soviet Republic and the former Austrian empire.
    The Austrian federation supported the Soviet ski team as well as Austrian technical suppliers – which strongly helped Tiagacev to pay the bills of his teams while traveling around the world before winning many World Cup races thanks to top champions such as the late Aleksander Zhirov or Valery Tsyganov in 1981.
    This partnership helped some of Austria’s winter sports suppliers start a few joint ventures in the USSR and later on in Russia after the 1991 revolution.
    Several famous companies such as Doppelmayer, the world’s leading ski-lift builder, are already established in Sochi’s ski resort of Krasnaja Poljana — and Austrian Airlines is already flying there from Vienna.
    Hans Kausel, in charge of Austria’s foreign business, is strongly hoping for promising trades in coming years. “We have been looking for a while at Sochi. It was already an interesting place prior the Olympic vote,” he told APA, the Austrian News Agency. “It’s certainly a great destination, being located on Black Sea’s seashore and not too far from high peaks always covered with much snow,” he added. “We already sent several delegations there in the past.”
    Strabag, one of Europe’s biggest road and infrastructure builders with a turnover of several billion dollars, also looks forward making huge contracts at Sochi, such as enlarging the airport which belongs to one of his shareholders, multibillionaire Oleg Deripaska (see https://www.russia-ic.com/business_law/in_depth/514/ ) who plans to invest a couple of billion US dollars in the area as his pal Vladimir Potanin, another good friend of President Putin.
    Peter Schroecksnadel, the president of the Austrian Ski Federation and a fierce businessman, is also involved in management of foreign ski areas with some of his companies. He had to publicly deny any involvement with Sochi — at least for the moment.
    Schroecksnadel, who had to resign this spring from his position as the vice president of the Austrian National Olympic Committee following the request of the IOC after the controversial Torino doping scandal with some of Austria’s cross-country skiers, may eventually also gain something from the loss of Salzburg.
    Salzburg’s disappointing fate may now reinforce the position of Schladming to attract the 2013 Alpine FIS worlds. Tiagacev, also a member of the FIS Council, has always supported Austrian bids in recent years. It would be surprising to see him changing his mind now – especially if Schranz supports the friendly resort from Styria mostly famous for its popular night slalom and his spectacular downhill won by “Kaiser” Klammer in December 1973.
    The $12 billion (U.S.) which is supposed to be invested in the Sochi resort will make many other companies and countries happy. Bernhard Russi, the recognized course architecture who designed most of the downhills hosting recent medal events, was already in Sochi, as a personal guest of President Putin. The Swiss spent much time with him at private dinners where he could talk to him in a relaxed atmosphere – and not only about skiing.
    “Mr. Putin speaks fluently German, his mother was a German teacher,” Russi told me last winter. “It was very interesting, he is obviously a powerful person and he loves skiing a lot.”
    Sochi’s triumph is for sure also a great success for President Putin, who addressed a strong and emotional speech to the IOC — speaking for the first time in English in public. It was really impressing to see him standing there — and almost impossible at that time to imagine a defeat for Sochi’s candidature.
    Sochi’s victory represents also a strong warning for future middle-class bids. It’s difficult to envision that small alpine countries such as Switzerland or Austria have a real chance to get back Winter Olympics in the future.
    Korea’s Pyeongchang — a really charming area — may come back a third time — but places such as Munich are already planning to start the race for 2018. Three French towns — Annecy, Grenoble and Gap — are also considering running for 2018. It will surely be again dramatic to watch.