PortraitIn 2007, the three-time Olympic champion joined the Kremlin in supervising the 2014 Sochi Games and struck up a close friendship with Vladimir Putin. Since then, Jean-Claude Killy has linked up with oligarchs and has never publicly disavowed the Russian president.
With her usual frankness, Marielle Goitschel recognizes that not so long ago she was rather “for Putin”. “I thought he was putting Russia back on its feet,” admits the 76-year-old former skier. But the invasion of Ukraine at the end of February ” horrified “. Very quickly, an irrepressible urge to make a phone call emerges. So, from her house in Anglet, in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, she dialed the number of the only friend of Vladimir Poutine that she knows. 900 kilometers away, in Switzerland, Jean-Claude Killy dropped out.
Seventy years that Marielle and Jean-Claude rub shoulders. As kids, they grew up a few meters apart, in Val-d’Isère, in Savoie. Skied together for the French team. She became double Olympic champion, in Innsbruck (1964) and Grenoble (1968). He won three gold medals at home (slalom, giant slalom and downhill) at the Grenoble Games, a feat still unequaled in alpine skiing. The two know each other by heart. Not close friends, but related for life. “We will forever be from the same village”, summarizes Marielle Goitschel.
It’s hard to imagine more dissimilar though. Her and her chat, her spontaneous laughter. Him the discreet, cold charisma, always in control. Marielle Goitschel summarizes: “Me, I’m not afraid to go into battle, he doesn’t like it. » They rarely speak to each other, but, at the start of the war in Ukraine, she wants to be clear about it. She therefore calls “Toutoune”, according to the old nickname that she continues to give to Killy.
“So how’s your innocent boyfriend doing?” », she quips. “The first thing he said to me was, ‘But he’s such a nice man.’ I told him that Putin was acting monstrous. And that I was saddened. » And to add: “When I said to him: ‘Wait, that’s scary, that’s a monster!’, he replied: ‘Yeah, that’s not very good.’ Fortunately, he needed more than he didn’t tell me! There, for once, I would have yelled at him. »
A very secretive man
Marielle Goitschel is privileged. Because, when it comes to evoking Vladimir Poutine, Jean-Claude Killy no longer responds. Since the start of the conflict, the Frenchman has battened down the hatches. Even Gérard Depardieu, holder of a Russian passport offered by the master of the Kremlin, publicly distanced himself, at the end of March, from the Russian power and its “crazy unacceptable excesses” ? Killy prefers silence. At 78, always alert, he stays at home, retired in a comfortable house on the heights of Cologny, in the upscale suburb of Geneva, with a view of Lake Geneva. Far from journalists, out of reach. He politely dodged questions from “M Le magazine du Monde” at the end of March: “Circumstances unfortunately force me to decline. »
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