Mountain Town News

By Allen Best

Olympics broke even … or didn’t

WHISTLER, B.C. – The organizers of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games say the Games broke even. Critics, however, question the bookkeeping.

John Furlong, former chief executive of the Vancouver Organizing Committee, the sponsoring agency, reported that the Olympics cost $1.9 billion to put on. About a third of that was invested directly in creating venues.

That figure left out plenty of investments that may have been needed anyway but were specifically justified by the Olympics. For example, three- and four-laning the Sea to Sky Highway, between Vancouver and Whistler, cost $600 million. The new Vancouver Convention Centre cost $883 million. And the Canada Line, a new electric train in Vancouver, cost $2 billion.

And then security cost $854 million, most of which was picked up by Canada’s federal government. Other costs were picked up by the provincial government in British Columbia.

“I don’t know which kind of math they used to break even, but I know it involved a large number of unexpected subsidies,” said David Eby, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

Eby told Whistler’s Pique Newsmagazine that the organizing committee was exempt from Freedom of Information rules that normally govern federal and provincial affairs.

Olympic organizers had expected to make money from the games, but the economic recession dashed cold water on that notion.

But then, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which conducted the economic impact studies, estimates the Games resulted in $500 million in additional tourism – with more to come in additional years.

“Canada’s tourism brand is now No.1 in the world,” claimed Furlong.

Lots of smarminess in T’ride novel

TELLURIDE, Colo. – Now comes a new novel set in Telluride, one of many over the decades that has skewered the culture of ski towns. The book, called Gatsby’s Last Resort, by Bob Rubadeu, is peopled by such characters as bar denizen Rasta Joey, one-eyed bartender Digger; and a fabulously successful real estate broker named Patsy Susie Blaze.

The plot somehow involves the Valley Floor, the open space parcel at the entrance to Telluride, and greed inspired by the region’s considerably inspiring landscape. There is, of course, a murder involved, and a mystery surrounding it.

But The Telluride Watch’s Seth Cagin, in reviewing the book, says what gives the book energy and should give local readers pleasure will be the off-handed observations; the representations of the real Telluride; and “a plot that pays off.

Ski teacher annoys Aspen Skiing

ASPEN, Colo. – Is the Aspen Skiing Co. a benevolent and quietly malicious monopolist when it comes to ski instruction? Arguments have been waged both ways in Aspen since a ski instructor named Lee Mulcahy leveled charges that the company was a corporate bum for paying its instructors $69 per day for lessons for which it charges $625 per day.

Mulcahy has now created an organization called People for a Living Wage.

“Corporations rarely enjoy transparency. Skico (the Aspen shorthand for the Aspen Skiing Co.) is no different,” Mulcahy wrote in his Dec. 15 letter published in local newspapers.

The Aspen Times reports a flurry of letters in response, including one from the ski company, which seems to object as much to what Mulcahy failed to mention as to what he did say.

Jim Laing, vice president of human resources, said Mulcahy focused on the lowest of 396 pay grades for the 1,200 ski instructors, and those making $69 per day are less than two-tenths of 1 percent, he said. Laing also said that the Mulcahy’s presentation fails to acknowledge the entire compensation package.

Ski instructors have no union, although an effort was made to unionize in 1993.

In a filing with the National Labor Relations Board, Mulcahy claims that the company retaliated to his public letters and communications with other ski instructor by picking him out of an illustrious club of upper-level ski pros and by trying to muzzle him.

Mountain folks leanest in the land

PARK CITY, Utah – Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most slender of them all?

According to the Park Record, Utah’s Summit County – where Park City is located – has that distinction, according to a new survey. It has the nation’s lowest rate of obesity.

The website for the U.S. Center for Disease Control, however, reports that Colorado’s Boulder County has both the lowest rate of diabetes and the lowest rate of obesity. The two are correlated, both positively and negatively.

Other ski counties also are found in the top-5 rankings. In obesity, Boulder County is followed by Colorado’s Routt County (Steamboat Springs), New Mexico’s Santa Fe County, and then Summit County, Colorado (Breckenridge) and Summit County, Utah (Park City).

For counties having the nation’s lowest diabetes rates, the results are much the same: Boulder County, followed by Montana’s Gallatin County (Big Sky Resort); New Mexico’s Los Alamos and Santa Fe counties; and then Utah’s Summit County.

And a late addition from Geisel …

Nightmare at Sugarloaf

Dream ski conditions turned into a nightmare at Sugarloaf Ski Resort in Maine Tuesday morning when a chairlift accident injured at least six and left dozens more stranded in frozen conditions, according to the New York Daily News.

Five chairs were thrown to the ground beneath the Spillway East chairlift at the Sugarloaf USA ski resort after the cable supporting the chairs derailed, dropping an estimated 25 to 30 feet.

“All injured guests have been treated and are being transported to area hospitals,” a press release issued by the resort’s management said. “At this point none of the injuries are believed to be life threatening.”

Approximately 220 passengers were on the lift at the time of the accident.

“The chairlift was going slow and the winds started picking up,” Robb Atkinson, a CNN employee who was trapped on the lift told the network. “It was stopping and starting, stopping and starting. One of the times where it started again, all of a sudden there was a bump and we could feel a jerk. And we heard screams from skiers down below yelling ‘the chairs are off the lift’.”

The Spillway East lift rises more than 1,000 vertical feet, depositing hundreds of skiers and snowboarders every hour to the top of Sugarloaf, one of the premiere snow-sport destinations in Maine.

Sugarloaf is home to Carrabassett Valley Academy, the prestigious ski school that produced Bode Miller and other Olympic athletes. Like many other ski resorts, the week after Christmas is peak season for the mountain, which had received more than 20 inches of fresh snow in the storm that blanketed the east coast the day before. At press time, the exact cause of cable derailment was still being determined.