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Such munificence -- on top of $180 million worth of Olympic skating rinks, ski jumps and other sports facilities -- came in the nick of time. For France's alpine resorts, like debutantes after a champagne spree, were suffering from a mountain-size hangover in the wake of two decades of dizzying development. Once a region of cowherds and cheesemakers, the Savoie harnessed its rivers after World War II to provide electricity for chemical and metallurgical plants. But with the decline of its heavy industry, Savoyards turned to what they suddenly realized could be l'or blanc -- white gold -- the snow that permitted the region to become the most intensely built-up skiing domain in the world. In the past 30 years the Savoie mountains have been scored by 900 ski lifts. Clusters of high-rise apartment buildings -- able to house 250,000 tourists in all -- rose helter-skelter on virgin slopes. By the mid-1980s, though, the boom was over.
"We disfigured our mountains with concrete cities -- it was catastrophic," says former ski champion Jean Blanc, now a store owner at the Courchevel resort. Avalanches and mud slides multiplied, the results of building on unstable slopes. Moreover, the valley became renowned for its traffic jams, and several snowless seasons accelerated a steep decline in visitors. Will the Olympics cure the crisis? "The Games saved us from asphyxiation. The new roads are lifelines," says Andre Martzolf, La Plagne's ski director. And planners are more ecologically conscious now, replanting trees that were uprooted to build ski runs and even adjusting one course to avoid a bed of rare wildflowers. Environmentalists, however, fear that the new highway and rapid trains will spur even more growth in the fragile alpine ecosystem, despite a five-year moratorium on new resorts announced by the state last April.
Meanwhile, Olympian extravagance has nearly bankrupted four communities. One / of them, Brides-les-Bains (pop. 600), went $13 million into debt to build a new town hall and cable car and to renovate its casino and thermal baths. But overall, the Games should just about break even.
In the old mining town of La Roche, Charline Robin gazes uneasily from her balcony at the vertiginous bobsled course carved out of her backyard forest. When the mine closed in 1975, the village emptied out. But thanks to the white gold of nearby La Plagne, Robin, 30, got a job waiting tables, and her eight brothers found work as ski-lift operators. "The Olympics bring us jobs," she shrugs. But it worried her when authorities distributed gas masks to protect against possible leaks of the ammonia gas that refrigerates the sled track. And she fears her taxes will go up as a result of a 60% cost overrun on the $41 million course. Although Robin dreams of opening a cafe to serve sledders after the Olympics, on the whole she could have done without the Games. "They destroyed the forest where our children played," she says. "It is not worth it."