Next-Door Neighbors Prepare for Olympics

Tiny Sestriere Awaits Big Crowds

SESTRIERE, Italy, Feb. 7 -- The towers, striped with swipes of orange and pink and yellow, didn't stand on the mountainside two years ago. They were neither necessary nor desired. Yet by this weekend, they will be teeming with people, home to a thousand athletes and coaches and staff members who are invading this tiny hillside village -- both peaceful and picturesque -- and making it, on some of the next 19 days, the center of the athletic world.

Part of the trick in pulling off an Olympic Winter Games, as the people of Sestriere have discovered, is boasting not only a city that can support an onslaught of hundreds of thousands of people, but also a mountainous region with slopes steep enough and high enough to challenge the world's best Alpine skiers. And that puts Sestriere, a tiny town that approaches the French border roughly two hours west of the host city of Turin, in an interesting spot when the Games begin on Friday. The town will have to balance its quaint and quiet past with the throngs of people who will overrun it beginning this weekend. It's not 218 B.C., when Hannibal stormed over the very same slopes en route to taking Turin. But there are some who are preparing as such.

"This is something different for us," said Andrea Maria Coarelli, the town's mayor. "This is not a very big place. It's a little village."

The numbers are striking. Sestriere has 876 year-round residents. On Sunday, when Americans Bode Miller and Daron Rahlves will be among the favorites in the men's downhill, as many as 30,000 people could find their way into town, filling not only the bleachers at the base of the hill but the hotels, the bars, the streets. The number of police and security officers on hand -- roughly 2,000 -- more than doubles the town's population.

"It's like hosting the Olympic Games in both New York and Vermont," said Andrea Parodi, a native of Turin who first learned to ski the slopes here. "Torino is a big city with art, with culture, with technology. Here is much different, almost like for a cowboy."

That disparity can create some measure of tension between the two venues. Though tourist traffic will be cut off long before it reaches Sestriere -- spectators will be led onto buses -- all the activity has taken some getting used to.

"In Sestriere, we don't need to have the Olympic Games," said Dario Gasperin, a 50-year-old shopkeeper, as he stood behind his register Tuesday at the Jolly Market. Gasperin was born here, and he speaks with what townspeople refer to as a reserved pride. "We are already famous, already well-known. We are not ready. We should wait for the places to park the cars. We should wait for the roads. We don't need it."

Such an attitude, officials and other townspeople say, is in the minority. "There are many people who are excited," said Alessandro Guiot, the manager of the Hotel Savoy Edelweiss just a short walk from the base of the slopes. "Some were indifferent. Some were maybe a little negative. But not many. A small number."

But the town's officials admit the whole affair has been a bit of a sales job. There has been constant construction. Signs that things still are being finished were everywhere Tuesday, with painters and trucks and workers scurrying about. The most obvious project was the construction of the Olympic Village, where towers stand on the hill on the way into town. At the completion of the Games, they will be part hotel, part residences if they can be sold. There is a new gondola, new snowmakers, some new roads.

"People were a little worried," said Coarelli, the mayor. "But it's normal, I think. It's in the right way and at the right level. They are very curious now to look at this big event."

Most townspeople are quick to point out that Sestriere has hosted big events before, most notably the 1997 Alpine Ski World Championships. Ten years earlier a young Italian named Alberto Tomba, not yet a national icon, began his career of winning World Cup races here. At the height of the ski season, Christmas week, officials said maybe 20,000 people filter into town on a given day, though there are just 3,000 hotel beds.

"People were a little worried," said Andrea Maria Coarelli, the mayor of Sestriere, a small town west of Turin. "But it's normal, I think. It's in the right way and at the right level. They are very curious now to look at this big event."

"All the people here are used to the crowds, the tourists," said Luca Marcellin in between pouring drinks at the Bar Aldo, where the lounge chairs out front bear Budweiser logos. "It will be busy, but it will be a good busy."

By the weekend, the focus will turn toward the mountains, where there has already been some controversy. The men's downhill will be held on the steep slopes in Borgata, a section of mountain up the road from where most of the Alpine events will be held, on a course that is expected to be extremely technically demanding. The women's downhill, which will take place on Feb. 15, will be at San Sicario Fraiteve on a course some of the women found too easy during World Cup races here last year.

German veteran Hilde Gerg led a protest to try to move the races to the men's course, but instead organizers responded by adjusting the landscape over the summer in an attempt to make the course more challenging. The women's reviews will begin Sunday when they take the first of three training runs.

As he sat in his office early Tuesday afternoon, those issues were far from Coarelli's mind. He is now hard at work preparing his town for the coming weeks. Once, growing up, he raced against the great Tomba. Now, he is an architect and a ski instructor who has been mayor for only 20 months. The job, with the Olympics days away, is filled with meetings and engagements that can be both tiresome and exhilarating. Wednesday, he will travel to a castle near Turin for a reception with first lady Laura Bush.

"It's very exciting, very exciting," he said. "People from Sestriere are hardworking. They will be excited and ready."

Behind him in his office, a white drape blocked both the sun and the view of the town's three peaks. Down the hill, one of the town's landmarks, the Saint Eduardo church, sat empty, its two-ton bronze door closed. Inside, it was silent. Outside, a truck began backing up, the unmistakable sound of work being done, the sound of this simple village preparing for the world's most elaborate sporting event.