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Crowned in Super-G in Calgary in 1988
“Piccard, 20 years after Killy! »
In Calgary, yesterday, the Savoyard realized his dream: to obtain an Olympic gold medal. In a very difficult super-giant, can we read on the front page of “Sud Ouest” on February 22, 1988.
South West Archives
1982 is the year of success: at the age of 18, he gets his baccalaureate and obtains the title of Junior World Downhill Champion. After obtaining the title of French super giant champion in 1987, he distinguished himself the following year at the Canadian Olympic Games in Calgary in 1988.
Franck Piccard in Calgary, in 1988.
AFP Archives
He first won the bronze medal in the downhill, behind the Swiss Pirmin Zurbriggen and Peter Müller, then became the first Olympic champion in the Super-G, an event entered for the first time in history, with more than a second of ahead of the Austrian Helmut Mayer. With its fine style, it fits perfectly with the philosophy and technique of this new discipline of alpine skiing.
It is the first French Olympic title in alpine skiing since Jean-Claude Killy in 1968.
Money downhill in Albertville
During the world championships in Saalbach in Austria in 1991, it was a bronze medal in Super-G that he added to his list. Once again selected for the Olympic team for the Albertville Games, he won a silver medal in the downhill, failing only a few hundredths behind the Austrian Patrick Oertlieb. Again victorious in the French giant slalom championship, he won the following year the third place on the podium of the world slalom championships.
With a total of four victories in the Alpine Skiing World Cup, he decided to hang up his skis but to indulge in another of his passions, which also involves sliding: sailing. Converted into a mountain entrepreneur, he manages in Les Saisies where he was born, a hotel and the family sports store: Piccard sports. In the basement of the store are stored precious objects, his gold and bronze medals of the Olympic championship of the time.
Commitment to ecology
At 57, Franck Piccard, one of the four heroes of the “TOP gun” team at the end of the 80s with Luc Alphand, Jean-Luc Crétier and Denis Rey, is still today the only French Olympic champion. in this discipline. The one who remains a legend of tricolor alpine skiing, signed in 2021 an ecological forum “to live in harmony with the mountains”. A rare position in the middle.