A generation of Americans knew heart throb French skier Jean Claude Killy as “Chocolate Kitty,” thanks to his syrupy, heavily accented introduction in an American Express commercial. As far as mistaken monikers go, Chocolate Kitty is pretty good. I wish that is what they had called me in high school.
Killy won three World Championships and swept the board in the Alpine skiing events at the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics before retiring from competition at the ripe old age of 26. He went on to become an early pioneer of celebrity sports endorsements, scoring deals with Chevrolet, Schwinn, American Express and Rolex among others. This seems commonplace today as our Olympians shill for just about anything, but for a skier in the 60’s Killy’s deals were something of an anomaly. Enough so that Hunter S. Thompson followed Killy on a Chevrolet marketing tour of the United States for his profile, “The Temptations of Jean Claude Killy,” which appeared in the premiere issue of Scanlan’s Monthly in March 1970.
Killy’s self promotion and individuality made him a style icon. Products he endorsed in the sixties remain cutting edge and cool.
I recently saw a liftie in Aspen wearing a pair of glasses that looked a lot like Killy’s signature Bolle shades but were in fact Nike’s Vintage ’76 sunglasses which are currently on sale and look a lot like the originals.
His Rolex, a triple calendar chronograph, was one of the most complicated watches the company ever made and recently broke a record at auction at Christie’s.
I hadn’t fully comprehended what a thorough bad ass Killy was until the search for that lifties’ shades led me down the internet wormhole of endless discovery. He served as the chief-executive of both the Paris-Dakar rally and the Tour de France, still markets a line of ski-wear bearing his name and was chairman of the board of Coca Cola Enterprises. His home mountain of Val d’Isere renamed the ski area “L’espace Killy” in his honor and he is credited with designing “Cupp Run,” at Snowshoe in West Virginia which I grew up skiing. It is also interesting to note that Killy has giving up skiing in favor of snowboarding.
Killy remains an influential presence in the ski world as he was named the Chairman of the IOC Coordination Committee for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
