Alfred Lord Tennyson at the 2012 Olympic Village

The last line of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem Ulysses -- "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" -- will be engraved on a wall in the 2012 Olympic Village, London authorities announced Monday. How classically British, right?

As Tennyson also wrote, "Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers." So perhaps there is wisdom in the choice. Just for the sake of argument here, however: why a 19th-century British poet laureate when the 21st-century Britain on display now and next summer is surely a far-more multicultural place than when the master himself was exercising his pen and Queen Victoria oversaw an empire on which the sun never set.

Like, couldn't you make the argument that someone or some saying a little more, you know, nowadays would perhaps be more suitable?

But what should I know -- a mere scribbler and, at that, an American? Mine, as Tennyson also wrote, albeit in a very different context, is not to reason why.

Olympic authorities said the lines from Ulysses were chosen "to not only inspire athletes competing in 2012, but also future generations of residents and schoolchildren." The choice was made by a panel that include the current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and author Sebastian Faulks. The village will be converted after the Games into housing with a school, health-care facilities and parks; the plan is for the inscribed wall to stay as is as "part of the lasting legacy," officials said.

U.S. Ski Team's depth -- wow

The stars of the U.S. Ski Team delivered this weekend. So, too, did some up-and-comers, and that's why the U.S. Ski Team is now, truly, one of the best in the world. It's not some advertising slogan anymore or some pumped-up corporate motto or even some "let's get the troops fired up so everyone who works here might one day believe it" kind of deal.

It's fact.

It's one thing to see Lindsey Vonn, Julia Mancuso and Ted Ligety on the podium. Each is a proven talent, a star at the top of the game.

But Nolan Kasper in second place? And -- in the slalom? Only one word will do to describe that: wow.

The good news didn't stop there: Laurenne Ross came in fourth in the super-G, behind Vonn, Mancuso and Germany's Maria Riesch.

Over the course of the past three Olympic Games, Vonn, Mancuso, Ligety and, of course, Bode Miller have firmly established the U.S. team as a genuine force in alpine skiing.

Here, then, is the top line from this weekend, the men racing in Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, the women in Tarvisio, Italy:

Vonn secured three World Cup season titles -- downhill, super-G and super-combined. She also cut the lead that Riesch holds in the overall to 96 points; six races remain.

And this:

Ligety took third in Friday's giant slalom, his speciality. He is now the clear favorite to win the season GS championship.

Mancuso's second in the super-G,  meanwhile, continued her first-rate season.

Of course, the challenge for any program is to move beyond individual excellence -- to develop a pipeline of ongoing talent. The emergence of Andrew Weibrecht, who earned a bronze medal at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, suggested the U.S. team was indeed on the way.

Weibrecht, injured, has missed this season. Now come, among others, Kasper and Ross.

"My god, how cool -- we were all, all the girls were in the hotel lobby watching his run and we were so fired up," Vonn said, referring to Kasper's slalom silver. "I mean -- the whole restaurant was staring at us; we were screaming pretty loud."

Mancuso, referring to Ross, said, "It was awesome .. special … so super-cool."

Ross is 22. She writes a super-interesting and -thoughtful blog.

She said of being fourth: "I'm not disappointed. it would have been nice to have been third but …  this is my first top five, this is my first top 10, this is my first top 15 in a World Cup,."

Noting her 10th-place finish in the downhill at last month's world championships in Germany, she went on to say, "This is my first time being in there, really, at a World Cup. I'm psyched with fourth. At least now I know I can be in there. I'm OK with Lindsey and Julia and Maria beating me. They're really good skiers. I'm psyched to be in there with them."

As for the 21-year-old Kasper -- if you have been following the season closely, you could see this coming.

He has, as he said afterward, been going fast in training. He notched a couple top-15 slalom finishes, then came in 10th last week. A close dissection of the stats shows that the 13th he earned on Jan. 25 in Schladming, Austria, included the second-fastest time on the second run.

Nearly 40 other racers went out Sunday. Kasper, though, turned it on, U.S. men's head coach Sasha Rearick afterward calling Kasper's performance "some of the most impressive skiing of the season by any athlete of the World Cup -- he took some chances, put pressure on the right spots and went really fast."

Austria's Mario Matt won the race, Kasper nine-hundredths back.

Miller was the last American male to finish in the top three in a World Cup slalom race, in 2008.

The last time before that, per the authority, Ski Racing magazine's online edition:

Felix McGrath, in 1988.

Again, from Ski Racing: "Kasper's name now joins those of American legends from the early days of the World Cup, when slalom podiums where more routine:  From '67 to '72 Tyler Palmer, Bob Cochran, Rich Chaffee, Bill Kidd, Spider Sabich and Jimmy Huega all picked up podiums. And, of course, Phil and Steve Mahre got a full share in the late '70s and early '80s, retiring in 1984."

Wow.

Munich's would-be 2018 fairy tale

MUNICH -- Five years ago, Germany played host to a great soccer World Cup. Everything worked; after all, this is Germany. Beyond that, for a month, this nation, capable of such melancholy, came alive with optimism and hope. Just a couple months later, a movie debuted that captured that summer's spirit. The movie, from director and producer Sönke Wortmann, is called Deutschland, Ein Sommermärchen -- "Germany, A Summer's Dream."

The movie instantly became a huge hit. It remains a knowing cultural reference, one that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, used here in briefing the press moments before greeting the members of the International Olympic Committee's 2018 Winter Games evaluation commission.

Referring specifically to the "summer fairy tale," the chancellor -- speaking through a translator -- said she believed Munich's bid for the 2018 Games had a "great chance to plan a winter fairy tale," adding, " I believe that since Germany is such a fantastic host, the world can look forward to the Games here in 2018."

Perhaps.

The challenge now for Munich, as the IOC commission on Friday wrapped up its month-long tour to the three cities in the 2018 derby, is quite simple. As everyone knows, fairy tales rarely come true.

Just ask that 2006 German soccer team. It finished third.

The IOC is due to pick the 2018 site in a vote on July 6; Annecy, France, and Pyeongchang, South Korea, are now in the race.

There is, to be sure, much for supporters to tout in this Munich bid.

For starters, it's Germany. Things do work here, and work incredibly well.

They proved that with the logistics that made the soccer tournament move in 2006. And again with the track and field world championships in Berlin in 2009. And again just last month with the alpine skiing world championships in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, an hour south of here in the Bavarian Alps, where the skiing events would be held if Munich wins in 2018.

Next:

Merkel and the German government at all levels are wholeheartedly behind the bid. For all the blather about landowner and farmer opposition -- there were three lonely protestors standing roadside at one would-be venue here this week. Three protestors isn't even a card game.

Next:

German financial support underpins winter sports -- that is, worldwide. Moreover, German fans have proven time and again they are crazy for winter sports. But Germany hasn't had the privilege of staging the Winter Games since 1936, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

If Munich were to win, it would be the first city to stage both the Summer and Winter Games.

Next:

The IOC -- at least until it went for Sochi in 2014 -- has had an affinity in recent years for Winter Games in big cities. See, for instance, Salt Lake (2002), Torino (2006), Vancouver (2010).

Munich not only fits that pattern -- it arguably might be the best of that pattern. It's an easy hour from Gapa, as the ski area is colloquially known, back down to the city.

This week, the IOC could have checked out the poetry slam at the BMW museum; the Bayern Munich soccer game; or, immediately outside their hotel, a funky shrine to pop star Michael Jackson. Or dozens and dozens of world-class restaurants and interesting cultural events.

Gunilla Lindberg, the evaluation commission chairwoman, said at a news conference here Friday night that the group "absolutely felt the atmosphere and the passion for the Games."

"To put it in a nutshell," Thomas Bach, the German IOC vice president and senior bid leader said at a follow-up press briefing, "this is a bid with no risk but fun."

So why is the Munich bid, which has to date raised 29 million euros, about $40 million, said to be the largest amount ever for a non-American bid, widely perceived to be trailing Pyeongchang, with Annecy a distant third?

While $40 million is indeed a lot of money, this was the news in early January: Samsung Group announced plans to boost investment to a record $38 billion in 2011.

That's not fairy-tale money. That's the real deal, nearly 20 percent of South Korea's gross domestic product.

Samsung is, of course, a leading Olympic sponsor.

If that may yet prove the ultimate factor complicating Munich's drive, there may be others.

The Munich bid is premised on the re-use of many of the iconic venues from the 1972 Summer Games -- re-packaging them, if you will, for Winter Games use.

The gymnastics hall where Olga Korbut tumbled her way to four medals, three of them gold, in 1972? Figure skating and short-track speed skating.

The swim hall where Mark Spitz won a then-record seven gold medals? Curling.

That seems cool, right?

Except that the while the IOC tends to talk a good game about "sustainability," it also in recent years has favored bids with huge construction projects.

Witness the construction booms in Athens (2004), Beijing (2008) and, especially now, the forthcoming sequence of Games -- London (2012), Sochi (2014) and Rio (2016).

All these Games will leave concrete evidence, from the IOC's perspective, of the transformative power of sport on society. And in this race, the Koreans are the ones who have built a brand-new winter resort from scratch, just as they promised the IOC they would do -- and they still have more building to do, including a high-speed rail line from Seoul to Pyeongchang.

Indeed, the Munich 2018 bid bears striking similarities to the campaigns that Great Britain and the United States ran for soccer's 2018 and 2022 World Cups -- in essence, come here, use the venues we already have and make a lot of money.

Didn't work. Russia (major infrastructure boom) and Qatar (immense construction project) won going away.

To be sure, the IOC is not FIFA. At the same time, the IOC has itself shown in the votes for Sochi and Rio its own expansionist tendencies. That's why the Korean tagline is "new horizons."

Will the Munich 2018 bid prove the turning point? Or is it, simply put, up against a relentless geopolitical reality in the international sport bidding scene?

Must it contend as well with distinct IOC politics -- in particular the clear intent of other interests to bring the 2020 Summer and 2022 Winter Games back to Europe? And, as well, another complexity -- Bach's presumed run for the IOC presidency in 2013, and how, if at all, that factors into a 2011 campaign for 2018?

Another potential complication: Munich is promoting a "festival of friendship," and in that regard it's unclear how the use of one more iconic venue, Olympic Stadium, will resonate with the IOC members come July 6.

Everyone knows what happened here in 1972. The stadium is where Avery Brundage, the then-IOC president, declared after the Palestinian terror attack and the deaths of 11 Israelis that the Games "must go on."

Speaking Thursday at the stadium to the evaluation commission, Uli Hoeness, the president of Bayern Munich, noted the "echo of history," and said that coming back in 2018 would offer an "extra dimension" that would be "connecting the past to the future."

If Munich wins, Olympic Stadium is where the 2018 opening and closing ceremonies would take place.

Lindberg, speaking Friday, noted that she and two others on the evaluation commission -- New Zealand's Barry Maister and Japan's Tsunekazu Takeda -- were here in 1972, and came back here this week with "mixed feelings," with "sadness at what happened" but fondness for the "good organization of the Games," adding, "The IOC took a decision to go on with the Games and I think that was the right decision."

As her remarks underscore -- it remains, 40 years later, no simple matter.

In large measure, Munich and Germany have undeniably moved on since 1972, confronting challenges such as the end of the Cold War and reunification. The stadium, meanwhile, has been used for countless numbers of events.

Moreover, the World Cup proved unequivocally that Germany could safely play host to a mega-event and show the world a good time. It doesn't need the 2018 Olympics for that purpose, according to Chris Young, co-author of the 2010 book, "The 1972 Munich Olympics and The Making of Modern Germany," who said it follows that the "vibe of the [2018] bid" is thus not "we have a past we have to deal with" but "we can put on a world-class, great show."

At the same time, the last time much of the world last connected the words "Munich" and "Olympic" was 1972. To think that the 2018 bid will not provoke look-back pieces in the international press, particularly as July 6 approaches, would be naïve.

Charlotte Knobloch, the head of the Munich Jewish community, observed, "The Olympic Games of 1972 are, let there be no doubt, especially for Jews, inextricably linked to the attacks of the time. Both from the point of view of drama and of far-reaching impressions, the events were similar to those of 9/11. If now, 36 years later, Olympia were to return to Munich this would certainly not mean that the past has been cut out. Should the Games of 2018 be awarded to Munich, we would, in my mind, connect them also with the Games of 1972 reflecting them. At the same time it is also a matter of showing the world the Munch of today."

Between now and July, the Munich strategy would seem straightforward -- try to seize momentum at the IOC bid-city meeting in mid-May in Lausanne, Switzerland, with Bach leading the way, then build toward the vote.

Asked at the news conference to assess where Munich is now in the race, Bach demurred: "Where we are is difficult to say. We don't want to lead the race all the way. We want to win at the end."

The back story of the 1936 Winter Games

GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany -- Most everyone knows how Jesse Owens went to Berlin and won four gold medals at the Summer Olympics in 1936. As the legend goes, Owens showed Adolf Hitler a thing or two about the Nazi myth about superiority. Birger Ruud of Norway is also one of the greatest Olympic athletes of all time, a great ski jumper who could also beat you at alpine racing. Moreover, his story is one of incredible personal courage. After his time in the Olympic spotlight, he spent 18 months in a Nazi prison camp and then, upon release, joined the Resistance, where he used his unmatched ski skills to find and hide ammunition dropped from British aircraft.

It is no accident that the photo of Ruud's moment of triumph in the ski jumping event at the 1936 Winter Olympics, here in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, high in the Bavarian Alps, makes for perhaps the emotional centerpiece of an unprecedented exhibition that brings to light not just the story of those Games – but, more importantly, the back story.

Here in the photo are the three Olympic champions: Ruud, the winner, just as he had been four years before, flanked by the bronze medalist, Reidar Andersen, another Norwegian, and the silver medalist, Sven Eriksson of Sweden. Here, too, is the then-president of the International Olympic Committee, the Belgian Count Henri de Baillet-Latour. And over on the right side of the photo -- here is the jarring note that underscores the great lie of the 1936 Winter Games, the notion that sports and politics don't mix: Karl Ritter von Halt, the organizing committee president, snapping a sharp stiff-armed Nazi salute.

It's not a pretty picture. Indeed, it's jarring. But it is an honest photo. It happened. And that is precisely why it's on display, now, after 75 years, along with dozens of other photographs and other materials that confront the ugly history of the 1936 Winter Games, the town's mayor, Thomas Schmid, said.

"We really said that for this 75th anniversary we need to talk about this openly -- the 'dark side of the medal,' he said, referring to the title of the exhibit, which opened here Feb. 15 and which the Museum of Tolerance has already expressed interest in bringing to Los Angeles.

"We can't make it go away," Schmid said. "But we can show how Garmisch-Partenkirchen has changed."

The 1936 Berlin Summer Games have, over the years, been the subject of extensive study. Not so the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Winter Games just months before.

Building upon the success of the 1932 Los Angeles Games, the 1936 Berlin Games announced the emergence of the modern Olympics as a worldwide phenomenon.

A confluence of factors explains why -- the expanding reach of communication technologies, the attempt by the Third Reich to use the Berlin Games as a massive propaganda exercise, the power of the film "Olympia" by Leni Riefenstahl, Jesse Owens' four medals and more.

To this day, of course, the 1936 Berlin Games remain a source of enduring controversy.

Again, the reasons are complex. The Riefenstahl film, for one. Just to pick another, many of the stories from Berlin have remained alive: Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, the only Jews on the U.S. track team, were denied sure gold medals when they didn't run in the 400-meter relay; they were told the day of the race they would not run, for reasons never made clear.

In comparison, the 1936 Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen -- it's as if they hardly happened.

And yet, as Charlotte Knobloch, the leader of the Jewish community in Munich and Bavaria, put it, those Winter Games hold significance that deserves to be fully, deeply understood:

"People have, of course, gladly glossed over the fact that this was a most revolting show of propaganda, a nasty deception of public opinion worldwide, under whose guise the very first signs of the Shoah," the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, "could already be detected."

Why look back now at 1936?

Munich is bidding for the 2018 Winter Olympics. An IOC inspection team is in Germany this week; the full IOC will pick the 2018 site in a vote on July 6. Annecy, France, and Pyeongchang, South Korea, are also in the 2018 race.

The Munich candidacy proposes to hold ice events -- skating and curling -- in the city. The snow events -- skiing and so on -- would be in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

Thus the impetus to re-visit 1936, the mayor and others stressing that the 2018 process affords the opportunity for reflection, perhaps even healing.

In February, meanwhile, the 2011 world alpine ski racing championships were held here in "Gapa," as Garmisch-Partenkirchen is colloquially known on the ski circuit. Some 100,000 euros, roughly $138,000, from the championships' cultural budget -- supported by the German federal ministry of the interior -- was allocated to fund the exhibition.

That took care of the logistics.

As for the will to get it done:

This exhibition is the first of its kind in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Not once in 75 years has there been anything like it, according to Alois Schwarzmuller, a retired local high-school teacher, long-time community activist and one of the exhibit's primary curators.

For decades, he said, most of the archives were locked away in communist East Germany. It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that one could even get at the files, he said.

Then more time had to pass. It just did, he said.

"The first generation -- they were the Nazis ... They did not allow us to go behind the wall.

"The second generation -- in community politics, they told me it was only a sports event," Schwarzmuller said, meaning the 1936 Winter Games. "There was nothing else.

"Now I think it's time. We have a generation that wants to be informed."

The way the story has been largely understood for the past 75 years, Schwarzmuller said, is that the 1936 Winter Games offered near-perfect organization, an array of new buildings and impressive competition venues.

Reality check:

The Games served as cover for a brutal dictatorship that oppressed political opponents and that harassed, humiliated and disenfranchised Germany's Jews. That is "the dark side of the medal":

-- A photo depicts Gapa-area road signs above another announcing, "Jews not welcome."  Such "not welcome" signs disappeared by the Feb. 6, 1936, opening ceremony. They came right back after the Games.

Baillet-Latour, the IOC president, had encountered numerous such signs on a visit to the area just four months before the Games. He was "especially horrified," historian David Clay Large writes in the sole chapter devoted to the 1936 Winter Olympics in his first-rate book "Nazi Games," to see too that "the speed-limit markers on dangerous turns included explicit exemptions for Jews, thereby encouraging them to kill themselves."

-- A photo shows Hitler at the 1936 Winter Games opening ceremony. Some number of the Austrian team "unmistakably" shouted out, "Heil Hitler!"  as they left the stadium at the end of the ceremony, Large writes, causing Hitler to "gaze wistfully" across the border. Innsbruck is just a few kilometers away.

-- A photo of von Halt, the Winter Games organizing committee chief, is accompanied by a striking caption. It says, in part, that von Halt took part in 1936 and 1939 in visiting concentration camps in Dachau and Sachsenhausen. "As a convinced national socialist," it says, "he approved suppression of political opponents and the destructive anti-Semitism that was done by the brown dictatorship since 1941. At the collapse of Berlin he sent in the last hours very young soldiers and old men to fight hopelessly against the Red Army."

"We need to tell people what happened," said Christian Neureuther, who having grown up in Gapa is something of local ski royalty and whose voice thus carries locally, nationally and even abroad. He raced at three Winter Games. So did his wife, Rosi Mittermaier, and she won three medals, two  of them gold, skiing in 1976 in Innsbruck. Their son, Felix, skied at the 2006 and 2010 Winter Games.

"Everyone thinks the 1936 [Winter] Games were fantastic and beautiful," Christian Neureuther said. "The truth comes out here -- the two sides of the medal."

Thomas Bach: it's not all about Thomas Bach

Thomas Bach is, by any account, one of the most accomplished and experienced senior figures now moving on the Olympic stage. The 57-year-old International Olympic Committee vice-president is also head of the German Olympic sports confederation and plays a leading role in the Munich 2018 Winter Games bid. It is a measure of Bach's range of experience that, as the IOC Evaluation Commission on Tuesday began its inspection this week of the Munich bid, Bach's resume says he has twice before -- in the 1990s -- led such IOC inspection teams. Will Bach run for the IOC presidency in 2013? Would the IOC award the Games to Germany and then two years later grant the presidency as well to a German? Or is that two-fer just too much? These sorts of questions frame the backdrop against which most close IOC observers believe the 2018 race is taking shape. The IOC will pick the 2018 winner on July 6; Annecy, France, and Pyeongchang, South Korea, are also in the race.

Bach sat for a Q&A with 3 Wire Sports during the recent world alpine ski championships in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany -- where, if Munich wins the 2018 derby, the ski events would be staged. He had to hold the tape-recorder microphone close to ensure that he could be heard over the enthusiastic, standing room-only crowd.

3 Wire: Munich is now running for the 2018 Winter Games. The first, and most obvious, questions: Why Munich, and why now?

Bach: Because with Munich we could show that winter sports can be organized in a modern way in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way, and it could be organized with great passion and by a really excited public, which is very much appealing to the athletes -- who like to do winter sports in Germany, in Munich and in Garmisch. Even the last skier coming in has been greeted with standing ovations, celebrated in a unique way in full stadia. This is one part of the reason.

The other one, [why] we think now it's the right time for Olympic Games in Munich and in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, [is] because it is important that the Games from time to time are re-loading the batteries, that they are coming back to their roots, enjoying Olympic atmosphere and Olympic tradition, and then from there on you can take it again to new shores. It may be a little bit like the situation with the [soccer] World Cup, where we had this great atmosphere in the 2006 World Cup here in Germany and then handed it over to the new territory, South Africa -- [a] kind of cycle which makes it the right time for Munich now.

3 Wire: On the way down here, on the drive down the autobahn from Munich to Garmisch, it's so obvious -- the first thing that comes to mind, the BMWs and the Audis moving at 180 kilometers per hour, the way those cars move, is their reliability and dependability. That's a stereotype and a cliche, I know. But there's good reason that's a stereotype and a cliche. It's true - that's why. Maybe those words fit the 2018 German bid as well -- "reliability" and "dependability." Would you agree?

Bach: Yes. I definitely agree. And again this is not something we can just promise. This is something we can guarantee, we can show. We have been organizing in the first three months of this year three world championships in Olympic winter sports plus 12 World Cups. Plus, we have always been a very reliable partner of the respective international federations. This of course would even apply more for our partnership with the IOC. And given, you know, the environment we are enjoying here in Germany, I think the IOC could really trust us and would have a very smooth preparation time for an Olympic Winter Games.

3 Wire: To me, the Number One variable in this race is you. How do you feel about that?

Bach: To me, this I can not see. Of course, I am supporting this bid. And the DOSB, the German Olympic sports confederation, with its 28 million members, has voted twice, unanimously, in favor of the bid, at the beginning, to start it, and now to approve the bid book. And I support this bid wholeheartedly because I think it would be good for Germany and it would be good for winter sports and the Olympic movement. But the difference at the end will be the concept, will be the guarantees, will be the unity we can show here in Germany with the world of politics, with the world of business -- and so there are many, always many factors which have to come together to make a bid successful.

3 Wire: So it's not all about Thomas Bach?

Bach: For sure not. If it would be, we could not succeed.

3 Wire: This is surely not the time, this is not the place, to say, yes, Thomas Bach is going to run for the IOC presidency in 2013 or, no, Thomas Bach is not going to run for the presidency in 2013. What can you say, now, in 2011, about your interests, ambitions, aspirations for the IOC presidency in 2013?

Bach: What I can say is that I was a candidate for re-election as vice president in 2010 with the intention to support the IOC president in his term. This is what I'm doing. I think it would be unfair to the IOC and it would be unfair to the president to start now a discussion about candidatures yes or no. There is so much to do in the Olympic movement that we should concentrate on issues rather than on persons.

3 Wire: One of the interesting things, especially as an American, to be in Europe, and to be in places such as Garmisch, is to feel history, and in this context Olympic history. The Winter Games were here in 1936. To come back here in 2018 would be an interesting return. What would it mean to come back here so many, many years later?

Bach: It's very difficult to compare. It's a different Germany you see here and now. You see here [now] an Olympic bid which is driven by sports and by athletes. At the time, it was a political issue. The Nazis used it -- tried to use it -- for their purposes. It's completely different. There is one thing, however, which has not changed, and that is the enthusiasm of the people for winter sports. They just love winter sports. They practice winter sports themselves. This is why they really can value the athletes' performances and the performances of all the athletes. In one way or the other, the message may be how much the world has changed since then, how much Germany has changed since then and how much winter sport has changed -- but the passion is still there.

3 Wire: You mentioned the [2006] World Cup a few moments ago. There is an argument to be made, and a good one, that in many ways Germany has moved on since 1972, and since the Summer Games. The fact is, though, that the last time the words "Munich" and "Olympic" were in the same sentence was in 1972. There's an enormous symbolism to see those words in the same sentence again. What would it mean symbolically to turn the page, to turn the corner, were Munich to be awarded the [2018] Games -- not only because you'd have Winter Games in a place where the Summer Games were but of course because of what happened here?

Bach: I think it could be a great symbol of conciliation, to see Munich organize peaceful and friendly and open Games after the tragedy of '72. This is I think how many people feel it. They realize that Munich has been struck at the time by the rise of international terrorism -- that this has hurt the Games at the time and the Olympic ideal very much, and they still are upset at how the Olympic ideal could be misused in such a way. The symbol, really, could be that some wounds are healing. You will not forget but you can show to the world that it can be done in a very different, peaceful Olympic way.

Woo: 'Yes, Pyeongchang!'

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea --  Precisely 2,018 people rose as one here amid the International Olympic Committee's visit to what would be the curling rink should this be the winning entry for the 2018 Winter Games and, on cue, started belting out a song called, "I Believe in Angels." The lyrics veered from, "I'll cross the stream/I have a dream," to, "I believe in angels/something good in everything I see/when I know the time is right for me/woo/I have a dream/a song to sing/to help me cope with anything."

Anywhere else in the world you might not say woo but -- what? This, though, is South Korea, and they really, really, really want the Winter Olympic Games here. So, woo.

Woo here isn't cheesy. Woo here is genuine and heartfelt. Woo is the sound of a bid roaring toward the election for 2018, and woo frames the question of the moment: can this third straight Pyeongchang bid for the Winter Games, after unsuccessful campaigns for 2010 and 2014, be the one that fulfills the earnest longing of the Korean people?

"We have seen great progress in the bid from the previous two bids. We have also seen very strong governmental support for this bid," the chairwoman of the evaluation commission, Sweden's Gunilla Lindberg, said at the first of two news conferences Saturday, adding a moment later, "We have seen also progress for Korean winter sport for these last years."

The evaluation commission, which spent last week in Annecy, France, takes a break now for a week. It goes to Munich, the third and final candidate in the 2018 derby, from March 1-4.

The commission will produce a report to be published May 10. The IOC will gather a week later in Lausanne, Switzerland, for a conference that will likely attract most of the roughly 115 members; only then will the 2018 race begin to take real shape.

The IOC will pick the 2018 city on July 6 in a vote in Durban, South Africa.

At this preliminary stage, most everyone -- even the Koreans' rivals -- ventures that the Koreans are the ones to beat, most everyone also mindful that, one, IOC elections are notoriously unpredictable and, two, the Germans and the French are in their separate ways likely to prove formidable competitors.

The perception of being the front-runner carries, of course, advantage and disadvantage.

Most bids furiously shy away from the label. Paris, for instance, was thought to be in front for the 2012 Summer Games -- for months and months, indeed all the way up to the final round of voting. London won.

Here, for instance, tensions with North Korea could erupt. Or some sort of internal bickering could derail the bid. Or some Mystery X Factor could surface.

In an Olympic bid campaign, literally anything is possible.

Then again, being the front-runner allows you to tell your story -- if you have a good one -- and to run the race the way you want to run it. The trick is to not be complacent, and to exhibit humility, and those are the mantras of the Pyeongchang campaign.

"We are ready to listen to what the IOC has to say about our weaknesses and work to resolve them," the bid chairman, Yang Ho Cho, said at the second of Saturday's news conferences.

Meanwhile, this bid has a ready-made story, arguably the most compelling narrative among the three cities in the race, one seemingly in line with the IOC's expansionist trend in recent votes (Sochi in 2014, Rio in 2016) -- a Korean Winter Games to grow winter sports in Asia.

It's a no-brainer, really. The demographics and the money are pointing toward this part of the world. It's inevitable the IOC is coming this way. The Winter Games have been held in Asia only twice, both times in Japan, in Nagano in 1998 and Sapporo in 1972.

The open question is whether the IOC is going to make the leap to Korea in 2018 or some other country in Asia (China? Kazakhstan?) in some other year (2022? 2026? 2030?).

As Won Ho Park, a professor at Seoul National University, explained in a briefing Friday, a 2009 bank study suggests that by 2030 development in Asia will underpin about 43 percent of annual worldwide consumption.

The consequence of that is simple and powerful:

Asian consumers are "likely to assume the traditional role of the U.S. and Europe's middle-class," he said, adding a moment later, "We're going to have a lot of potential consumers of winter sports with disposable incomes."

He also said, "No other region in the world even comes close."

That's why this Pyeongchang bid is tag-lined "New Horizons."

That's why there are now new Intercontinental and Holiday Inn hotels in Pyeongchang.

Four years ago, what is now called the Alpensia complex here, with the hotels and shops, was a series of potato fields.  When the IOC evaluation team was here four years ago, the Koreans had to say, this is where we're planning to build those hotels and shops and sports venues. Now they say, look, we got it done.

Not everything is built yet. For instance, the real game-changer would be the bullet-train yet to be built from Seoul. Getting down here from the Korean capital can still take as long as three hours-plus. The train, to be done by 2017, would reduce travel time to roughly an hour.

The 2010 and 2014 bids were seen to be provincial campaigns; for 2018, that train and everything about the Pyeongchang bid is a leading national priority, as the presence of South Korean President Myung Bak Lee on hand here this week made plain.

The downside of Alpensia is that it is, in essence, a self-contained village in southeast South Korea. That's why the plan here would be to create a "Best of Korea" experience during the 2018 Games and why completion of the bullet train -- to allow for the possibility of getting easily back and forth to the big city -- would be so vital.

The upside of Alpensia is that it is a self-contained village. Here the IOC could re-create that village experience that so many people say they loved so much in Lillehammer in 1994.

With a bonus that has clearly been downplayed but is patently obvious -- there's a 27-hole golf course here designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr.

The weather this week perhaps would not have allowed for golf -- they got record snow here, all of it cleared away in record time -- but if the Games went here in 2018 and you could play 18 (showing support for that new Summer Games sport) and then watch a little snowboarding or figure skating at night, that would make for an outstanding double dip, wouldn't it? Where else could you do that?

All it would take is the sort of under-course heating that's common already in certain golf courses as well as soccer and rugby pitches. It might be expensive but it assuredly could be done, leading golf officials said.

Again, they say that's not in the near-term planning. But you can't miss that golf course when you're standing on top of the ski jump, looking out at what has been built here over the past four years.

And you can't miss the enthusiasm of the Korean people, either.

"Yes, Pyeongchang!" they shouted time and again at a beachfront rally here Friday, many of them wearing masks they had made up reflecting the faces of the members of the IOC commission. Now that took initiative.

You'd think that everyone had just been put up to this by some local ward captain. Except that public opinion surveys tell you otherwise.

In journalism school, they teach you that nine of 10 people won't even tell a pollster they like their mommies. Here, 91 percent want the Olympics. 91 percent!

Another sign: the IOC commission was greeted like royalty by an outrageous number of Korean reporters here to chronicle the panel's every more -- 162 reporters and camera people, the Korea Times reported. 162!

The bid committee issued a release Saturday that said it had collected 1.4 million signatures of support,  roughly 2.8% of the South Korean populace. That's enormous. To put that into perspective -- if a similar campaign produced similar results in the United States, it would be like collecting a signature from every single person in New Jersey.

It's like this all the time, everywhere, in South Korea. A couple of months ago, during a casual chat at the national training center near Seoul with long-track speed skater Mo Tae Beom, winner of gold in the 500 and silver in the 1000 last year in Vancouver, the subject of Pyeongchang's campaign came up.

His eyes brightened. "It would be such a rare experience to be able to skate in an Olympics hosted in your own nation," he said. "If It happens in Pyeongchang, it would be a life experience I would never forget. It would be a dream come true."

Woo.

--

A clarification: The name of the song is "I Have a Dream," and it's by ABBA.

Pyeongchang 2018's conductor: Yang Ho Cho

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea -- Nine years ago, Yang Ho Cho, who is the chairman and chief executive officer of Korean Air but who is really a regular guy, got five of his buddies together and they did one of those bucket-list things. They drove across the United States, Los Angeles to New York. Yang Ho Cho is not, after an extraordinary career in business, lacking for means. He could have arranged the trip so that he and the crew stayed at the most upscale of hotels and ate only the finest meals. Not the point. They wanted to feel the United States, to have a genuine experience, to talk along the way with real Americans.

They did have two big cars, a Lincoln and a Lexus, for all six guys and their bags. But for most of the trip they stayed at $30 per night Best Western motels. They ate with near-religious fervor at McDonald's for breakfast; at Kentucky Fried Chicken, Subway or (again) McDonald's for lunch; and, always, at a Chinese joint for dinner.

"No matter how small the town was," he said, laughing, remembering the adventure, "there was always a Chinese restaurant."

This third straight Korean bid for the Winter Olympic Games brings with it an almost-entirely new set of characters. Perhaps no one embodies that fact more than Yang Ho Cho, and that holds significant consequence should the International Olympic Committee chose Pyeongchang in its July 6 vote for 2018. Munich and Annecy, France, are also in the race.

The IOC's 2018 Evaluation Commission, after visiting Annecy last week, turned this week to Pyeongchang. It travels March 1-4 to Munich.

With the exception of a very few notable personalities, among them the former provincial governor here, Kim Jun Sun, the prior two Korean bids -- both unsuccessful, for the 2010 and 2014 Winter Games -- left a remarkably unremarkable impression. The image that lingers: packs of men, almost all men, dressed alike in dark suits, smoking a lot of cigarettes, speaking the Korean language almost exclusively, obviously giving off the impression of competence in their spheres but just as obviously not resolving to the IOC's satisfaction one of the most elemental questions any bid campaign presents:

Do I want to do business with these people?

In any enterprise, the wanting-to-do-business factor depends on the getting-to-know-you factor -- and all the more so in the Olympic sphere, where bids cost tens of millions of dollars and Games run to billions. The IOC has a franchise not only to extend but to protect.

The IOC thus moves with prudence and common sense.

So does Yang Ho Cho.

This is a man who oversaw nothing less than a thorough transformation of his airline's corporate culture. He took over after a series of accidents in the 1990s; he instituted changes that turned Korean Air into one of the world's safest carriers.

This is a man who moves easily now at the highest levels of Korean and western business, government and politics.

At the same time, this is a man who moves comfortably in any environment -- having seen pretty much everything along the way, including the Vietnam War, the Korean DMZ, gritty downtown Los Angeles and a lot of McDonald's menu boards.

He is a genuine human being. He is accessible and real. "I want not just to shake the hands of the IOC members," he said here Thursday night, one of a series of conversations in various locales around the world over the past several months. "Instead, I want them to say, 'This is a guy I can work with for the next eight years.' This is what we want to show."

Real people, even important businessmen, sometimes make mistakes -- that's life. Yang Ho Cho accepts responsibility and asks to move on. Last year, Korean Air signed a sponsorship deal with the International Skating Union. The ISU's president, Ottavio Cinquanta, is a ranking IOC personality. The IOC thereupon issued a warning to the Pyeongchang bid committee, and the airline agreed to postpone its sponsorship of the skating federation until after the July 6 vote.

"We had good intentions," Yang Ho Cho said. "There wasn't any hanky-panky. I had to learn.

"... If you're talking about transport -- I'm an expert. Sports -- I'm learning."

This Korean 2018 crew is -- like Yang Ho Cho -- entirely, indeed profoundly, different. They move, many of them, effortlessly in English -- like communications director Theresa Rah.

They invite you to sit with them in the hotel bars. If that doesn't sound like such a big deal -- it's a huge change from the prior two bid cycles.

Early on, it was decided that the 2018 strategy would be to reach out, early, to non-Koreans who could help -- among them, the English communications and strategy advisor Mike Lee, who played a key role in Rio de Janeiro's winning 2016 Games bid, as well as the American counterpart Terrence Burns, who helped Sochi win for 2014.

Most intriguingly, Yang Ho Cho is not the emotional center of the campaign. Nor is he aiming to be. In that regard, the German and Korean campaigns make for a vivid contrast. Munich puts forward a star: Katarina Witt, a two-time Olympic figure skating champion. Yang Ho Cho is more orchestra conductor than star.

It is perhaps illuminating that though Yang Ho Cho of course speaks English -- he went to high school in the United States -- he had no trouble a few months back acknowledging a succession of 2018 advisers who suggested that with a little bit of practice he could sound just that much better.

How many chief executives are truly willing to accept such coaching?

"Why not?" he said Thursday. "I can learn from anyone who can teach me."

If you know Yang Ho Cho's back story, though, that's hardly surprising.

Korean Air is the family business. So he didn't exactly grow up in poverty.

But he didn't exactly wallow in privilege.

Yang Ho Cho's passions have always been travel and photography. After high school, he went to go see the sights in Europe. His father sent him to the continent with $3,000.

"I spent only $2,000. I gave him back $1,000. After that," he said, "my father never questioned my spending."

Next:  boot camp in the Korean Army. When that was finished, he was sent to the DMZ:  "We had no electricity. We had to use kerosene lamps just to see. For me, it was just too much of a shock."

Anything, he reasoned, had to be better.

So he volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Again -- he volunteered to go to a war zone. "At least in Vietnam," he said, "they had electricity."

He spent 11 months there. "After that -- it was back to the DMZ." And after that, he had learned something about himself: "If I can live at the DMZ, I can do anything."

When his military service ended, he went to college in Korea, then moved to Los Angeles, to learn the family business in earnest.

He and his wife lived downtown. He was getting paid $800 per month. Their rent was $300. It was a big treat to take the kids out for French fries.

While in Los Angeles, he earned a master's degree at USC -- where he now serves on the board of trustees.

He still has the California driver's license he got all those years ago. It came in handy on that road trip to New York.

He and his crew saw the national parks in Utah; then took in Santa Fe, New Mexico; went back up to Oklahoma; headed down to New Orleans; east to Savannah, Georgia; then made their way up through Washington, D.C., to New York.

Oh, they did make one other important stop along the way. They went to Memphis, and for one very important reason.

That's where you can find Graceland and, as Yang Ho Cho said with a laugh, "I like Elvis."

Lindsey Vonn's epic silver

GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany -- Second place? That's just the first loser, right? You don't win silver; you lose gold. So went the tag line from that insufferable shoe commercial.

It's all how you define winning. And how you measure a champion.

Lindsey Vonn threw down an epic run here Sunday, a courageous performance on the Kandahar course to win silver at alpine skiing's 2011 world championships.

"Today," she said afterward, "feels like a gold medal."

It should, and it goes down as one more chapter in the growing legend of one of the great American athletes of our time, because just 11 days ago Lindsey Vonn smacked her head on an icy mountain in a fall on a training run and suffered a concussion.

Austria's Elisabeth Goergl won Sunday's downhill; German's Maria Riesch, skiing before her hometown fans, took third.

Goergl's victory marked the first time that someone other than Vonn or Reisch had won a World Cup level downhill in nearly two years -- 15 races dating back to Feb. 28, 2009.

The American team finished with three skiers in the top 10 -- something not seen in a downhill in 15 years. Julia Mancuso took sixth and Laurenne Ross tenth, a career-best.

One day, meanwhile, when Lindsey Vonn's career is over and done, they will look back and surely some of what she has accomplished will seem almost unreal.

Like somebody had to make this stuff up.

Except it has all been real, and she deserves enormous credit for just how competitive and mentally strong she has proven herself to be, time and again.

"She," Markus Wasmeier, the 1994 Lillehammer Games gold medalist in both super-G and giant slalom, said Sunday, "is a racer made for pressure."

Five years ago, at the 2006 Torino Games, there was the horrifying crash she suffered in training before the downhill. She was hospitalized overnight. She finished eighth.

Two years ago, there was the slashed-up thumb on the champagne bottle at the world championships. She nonetheless went on to win the World Cup overall title.

Last year, there was the badly bruised arm and then the banged-up shin, and saying the shin was banged up really doesn't even begin to describe how badly it was hurt. She nonetheless won the Olympic downhill, took bronze in the Olympic super-G and won the World Cup overall title.

Last week, she suffered the concussion in a training run. She pulled out of Friday's slalom portion of the super-combined. She had made the one training run she had needed to compete in Sunday's downhill but had done so in a puffy sort of warmup jacket, to keep her speed under control.

The Kandahar downhill runs for about 1.8 miles. Alpine skiing is conducted on  "snow" that runs to "ice." You wear a skin-tight suit to reduce aerodynamic drag as well as a helmet. Lindsey Vonn's top speed Sunday ran to about 72 miles per hour.

There's nothing, really, to compare what being an elite ski racer is like. The best anyone can come up with is this:

Imagine what it's like driving at night, down a country road. You're depending on your headlights to see where you're going. You feel incredibly alive, keenly aware of everything around you. At the same time, you need every bit of everything you've got -- all of your senses -- just to keep the car on the road.

Now imagine you're driving just a little bit faster than the range of your headlights. That's the description offered of trying to do the downhill still suffering the effects of a concussion.

To be blunt, and obvious, about it: people can, and do, get seriously hurt in ski racing.

Antoine Deneriaz, the Torino 2006 Winter Games downhill champion, stressing that he was not expressing any opinion about whether Lindsey should or should not race Sunday, said about the downhill, "It's not something  you just do. You have to be 100 percent, and beyond."

Sweden's Pernilla Wiberg, winner of three medals at four Olympics, including a silver at the 1998 Nagano downhill, also emphasizing that she was not offering an opinion about whether Lindsey ought to be racing, said of the downhill itself, "The most important thing is to have 100 percent concentration at the start.

"If you have any doubt when you put your poles outside that start gate, you should not start. You should have respect for the mountain. You should not be afraid. But if you have doubt -- you should not start."

Dr. William Sterett, the U.S. team doctor, tested Lindsey every day to see if she was ready to compete. He said she could. She decided she would.

Somehow, she managed to pick up speed when nearly everyone else tired, at the bottom of the course. That's how she slipped into second, ahead of Riesch, who had run three spots ahead.

No one was going to catch Goergl this day. Goergl skied beautifully, to the sounds of "Eye of the Tiger" blaring over the mountain loudspeakers. It should have been "Rocking the Free World," or the official song of these championships, "You Are the Hero," which Goergl herself sang last week in front of 11,000 fans, including German chancellor Angela Merkl at the opening ceremony.

Again, you can't make some of this stuff up. You couldn't if you tried.

"I could feel the speed today," Lindsey Vonn said afterward. "I think I made some really good turns today and I was happy with my skiing. There were great conditions out there.

"It was a fun downhill and I enjoyed racing it today."

Fun. She said it was fun.

Annecy -- it's a French thing

ANNECY, France -- The International Olympic Committee's 2018 evaluation commission headed out of town Saturday after declaring that this alpine town was indeed very pretty. "The International Olympic Committee's 2018 evaluation commission has been very pleased to spend time in this beautiful lakeside city, situated in a region where winter sports are so popular," the commission chairwoman, Sweden's Gunilla Lindberg, said at a news conference early Saturday evening as streaks of pink from a lovely sunset lit the western sky.

That is really what happened. And that is really what Lindberg said. It was masterful.

Anyone expecting substance in this context has never been to one of these evaluation commission news conferences, where it is spelled out early and repeatedly that the IOC discussion from the dais will revolve around matters technical, not political. Platitudes are both perfunctory and expected.

Beyond which -- in this case, it's fully in the IOC's interest to be as bland as possible to ensure that Annecy is depicted as a legitimate contender.

The IOC has had no trouble in recent years attracting Summer Games bids from all over the world. But Winter Games bids have been fewer. So a 2018 two-horse contest -- with only Munich and Pyeongchang, South Korea, remaining -- would ill serve the IOC.

Even so, the reality of Annecy's legitimacy is both far more complex and far more subtle, as France's sports minister, Chantal Jouanno, made clear in a wide-ranging roundtable conversation earlier Saturday with reporters.

To be plain:

The minister asserted emphatically that Annecy is in the race to win.

"What I think is we are now on the same line as the other candidatures," she said after a series of make-overs in recent months that have seen Charles Beigbeder take over for Edgar Grospiron as bid leader, a thorough revamping of the technical plan and other significant moves.

At the same time, she acknowledged the obvious: the Annecy bid has been grappling with any number of structural, cultural, political, financial, story-telling and other challenges.

In other words -- it's French.

There are obviously so many lovely things about France. Too, it is so easy to like being in the French Alps, and especially in Chamonix, one of the main hubs of the Annecy bid. And of course Chamonix is the site of the first Winter Games, in 1924.

At the same time, the whole France thing wasn't so great for the unsuccessful Paris Summer Games bid for 2008, or the unsuccessful Paris Summer Games bid for 2012. And now the Annecy 2018 bid has spotlighted again some of the very same problematic issues.

The Olympic movement, for instance, moves increasingly in English, in some ways almost exclusively in English. You can understand why the French would want to speak French. But if you have a message you want to communicate, wouldn't it make more sense to do so in a way that people hear you in the way you want -- indeed, need -- to be heard?

The Olympic bid process now runs to more than $50 million per campaign. If you're going to throw yourself into the game, why get in for $25 million? That's roughly the announced Annecy budget. Bluntly, that's just not enough, and that's what caused Grospiron to get out in December,  and Jean-Claude Killy to note here Friday -- unprompted -- that Grospiron had done a great job under the circumstances.

The bid process now relies heavily on international consultants. Admittedly, they are expensive. Are they worth it? Just to name two: Mike Lee helped Rio win the 2016 Summer Games. Jon Tibbs helped Sochi win the 2014 Winter Games.  Lee is working now for Pyeongchang, Tibbs for Munich. But Annecy went for long months without any international consultant, either to save money or on the belief that the French could surely figure out a French way to run a French campaign, or both.

"To a certain extent, what you're seeing with Annecy is these [French] institutions that are intelligent and well-meaning but there's so little space for some pushing out of the old and incorporating of the new," said Laurent Dubois, a Duke University professor and author of the recent book, Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France.

"The solution is going to have to be some French solution," Dubois said. "There's no reason to think they can't think of one. That's not to think they are going to have to accept what the U.S. or the British are doing. But the only way is for the younger generation to have a way in shaping what's going on."

Jouanno, who is among other things a 12-time French karate champion, took over as sports minister just last November. She is 41 years old.

Asked if she believed institutional issues were at the root of the ups and downs of Annecy's bid, she said, "This is just French character. We just like to have drama in what we are doing."

Even so, last month, she announced the formation of an "Assemblee du Sport" to review and develop French policy going forward, saying it would include representatives of the state, municipalities, business and sport. "One must admit that while society has changed, the organization of sport has changed very little," she was quoted as saying in the newspaper Le Monde.

Granted, the minister is new to her job -- but perhaps that marks the sort of smart thinking that should have been done well in advance of an Olympic campaign, not smack-dab in the middle of one.

Jouanno acknowledged serious thought was given late last year to withdrawing Annecy from the 2018 campaign. But millions of euros had already been spent. And, she said, "We would have been the only country resigning just six months before the end. This is not the sport spirit."

So now several changes have been made.

Beigbeder is on board. The technical plan has been re-worked. A number of Olympic athletes now play leadership roles on the Annecy 2018 team. Several key Annecy leaders move easily in English; Jouanno spoke mostly Saturday in English. A veteran international consultant, Andrew Craig, has been retained.

The budget, Jouanno said, still needs more cash.

Craig said, "Although there has been much talk about the Annecy bid being under-budgeted and so forth, the reality is it's human capital that wins bids and the human capital in the Annecy bid is now very, very strong."

As the IOC commission moves on -- next week to Pyeongchang, to Munich the first week in March -- the task in Annecy would now seem to be to figure out what story to tell, and how to tell it.

"We are not trying to put flash in your eyes, put stars in your eyes. We just want to show you our mountains," the minister said.

So simple, right?

As ever, though, this is France, so it gets made more complex and subtle. Perhaps the task is also to convince the voters that in fact the Annecy 2018 bid is not -- as some have suspected all along -- merely a stalking horse for the big prize, another Summer Games bid from Paris, or another French city.

Paris played host to the 1924 Summer Games. A bid to commemorate the 100th anniversary of those Games would be so very French, wouldn't it?

The minister was asked Saturday whether France would bid for the Summer Games if Annecy doesn't win out. Such an easy question to answer with a simple, "I don't know," or a, "We'll see." But this is France. Commend the minister at least her honesty:

"If we win the Winter Games of 2018 we won't be a candidate," she said. "If we don't win, probably.

"Because it has been too many times France didn't organize the Olympic Games."

Jean-Claude Killy meets the press

ANNECY, France -- Jean-Claude Killy met the press here Friday night, about 10 writers, most international reporters, a few locals. "We have come a long way," Killy said, referring to the Annecy bid for the 2018 Winter Games. To be emphatic: There is still a long way to go.

Indeed, perhaps a long, long way to go for Annecy, which by virtually all accounts started the International Olympic Committee's visit here this week in third place in a three-city race and almost surely ends the visit still looking up.

There are still five months to go before the IOC picks the 2018 site; Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Munich are the other two cities in the contest.

"I would say Annecy is back in the race," Killy asserted, and it's true: in five months anything can happen.

Now the question for the next five months: can Annecy 2018 make something happen?

Killy's comments late Friday capped a day of enormous symbolism that highlighted both the opportunity here and the real-world challenges the Annecy campaign must confront.

The opportunity:

The countryside is, in a word, magnificent. To see Mont Blanc and Chamonix on a day like Friday, when the sun was shining and there wasn't a cloud in the brilliant blue sky, is to be reminded of a simple truth: it can be spectacular here.

The skiing is great. The food is great. The wine is great. The cheese -- it may well have been made by the gentleman standing behind the counter himself and he can tell you which cow you ought to thank.

Where else in the world do you find that combination?

Killy, at ease, penciled in for 20 minutes with the press, stayed for 30, the last couple devoted to the reading of a quote he attributed to the artist Paul Cézanne, the great 19th-century French post-impressionist, about the beauty of Lake Annecy, Killy saying he intends to read the words Saturday to the IOC committee as they prepare to depart:

"It is a temperate area. The surrounding hills are of a reasonable height, the lake, narrowed at this spot by two gorges, seems to lend itself to the linear exercises of young ladies."

"See," Killy said, letting the words settle, laughing, "everything in France ends with the love."

If only the Annecy 2018 bid committee could count on the IOC to be so tender.

To paraphrase the more modern American artist Bruce Springsteen -- the French had better start working harder for the IOC's love.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, flew down to this part of the country Friday to meet with the IOC commission. Sarkozy did not meet with reporters covering the IOC's visit.

But, according to an Associated Press account of a tourism and economics conference in La Clusaz, the proposed venue for the cross-country and Nordic combined events, Sarkozy said it would be tough to overcome Annecy's "extremely powerful" rivals.

Sarkozy said, "You have got a very good bid book. Your region is absolutely beautiful. You want to host those games. We are going to fight together to have them."

On the one hand, it's imperative for the bid that Sarkozy make his manners with the IOC over lunch and stump for Annecy 2018 at such conferences.

The IOC demands unqualified support from national governments. It wants to know, reasonably enough, if something goes wrong that the government -- of whatever country it is -- stands ready to guarantee the Olympic project's finances.

"Whether it's a plus or not it's a disaster if it doesn't happen," Killy observed later in the day, referring to such guarantees, which France has emphatically offered, adding, "It's going to happen in Korea, heavily, and in Germany, I am sure."

The challenge with Sarkozy may well be -- Sarkozy.

It is hardly forgotten within the IOC that in late March 2008 Sarkozy became the first world leader to suggest he might boycott the Beijing Olympics as a means of ratcheting up pressure on China over Tibet.

Ultimately, Sarkozy relented. He attended the epic ceremony.

Also not forgotten within the IOC: the tortured path the Beijing torch relay took through Paris in April, 2008, when the flame was extinguished several times, Chinese organizers canceling the last leg through the French capital as well as a stop at City Hall where a banner read, "Paris Defends Human Rights Everywhere in the World."

If it seems unfair to conflate free speech in Paris in 2008 with a bid in Annecy in 2011 for the Winter Games in the mountains in 2018 -- well, c'est la vie, right?

Which had to have been -- or surely should have been -- evident to anyone and everyone in France when the subject of an Annecy bid was undertaken in the first instance.

Compounding the challenge was the way the bid was initially drawn up, with way too many venues.

This past June, the IOC said, no, that's way too many venues. Come back with a different plan. A "black eye," Killy said, adding a moment later, "The bid started very poorly."

The new plan, centered on Annecy and Chamonix with the sliding sports at La Plagne, is better, he said. Credit for that, he said, is due Edgar Grospiron, the then-bid leader who resigned in December amid concerns the project was under-funded.

Killy said of Grospiron: "He did a wonderful job."

Such comments from Killy are powerful, indeed. Killy is not only a French ski legend but arguably the single most important winter-sports figure within Olympic circles, co-chair of the 1992 Albertville Games, the IOC's link to the 2006 Torino and 2014 Sochi Games. He knows sports, politics, business. He knows real when he sees it, and when he doesn't.

So his distance from the Annecy 2018 bid over the past months had been thoroughly obvious.

What, then, to read into his meeting Friday with the press? A rapprochement of sorts, certainly, with the 2018 effort.

But read into this what you will, Killy saying of Charles Beigbeder, the new bid leader, "I don't know him very well, I have seen him two days -- that's all."

Or this, Killy asked how much he expects to pitch in from here on in and answering, "I have my own business. I have Sochi for fun," laughing and adding, "I'm choosing my words properly. And I will help Annecy as much as I can, as much as I can, because I am from this region."

It will be spring soon, and the linear exercises of young ladies will commence in earnest along lovely Lake Annecy. And then summer, and an IOC vote July 6.

"There is no perfect bid," Killy said. "I have been in this business for 30 years.

"There is no perfect bid," he repeated. "The outcome is not known to no one."