Tennis, basketball, soccer, road cycling, but also track and field and… winter sports: Gianni Clerici covered every discipline, and he always did so with the wit and ease that set him apart.

As the 2026 Milan/Cortina Winter Olympics approach, we thought we’d take a step back in time and revisit the 10th edition of the Games, held in Grenoble from February 6 to 18, 1968: during those Winter Olympics, Gianni Clerici was sent to France as a correspondent for the Milanese daily Il Giorno. His reports brought stories of legendary athletes into readers’ homes, as well as behind-the-scenes insights and glimpses of daily life, all told from the privileged vantage point of the games’ backstage.

While today’s starting gates feature athletes of the caliber of Sofia Goggia, Federica Brignone, Mikaela Shiffrin, and Lindsey Vonn, in 1968 the undisputed star of the event was undoubtedly French skiing champion Jean-Claude Killy, who did not disappoint in the slightest, winning the gold medal in all three disciplines on the program: downhill, giant slalom, and slalom. A few days before the start of the Games, on January 30, 1968, Clerici had dedicated a special article to the troubled champion from across the Alps, haunted by misfortunes in his private life, emblematically titling it, “He flees from life at breakneck speed”:

Jean-Claude Killy is desperately, blindly searching for something that lies beyond risk; something absolute, which may be impossible to attain with the means that life has, so far, offered him. […] And so he presses on. Onward toward the steepest slopes, seeking out the most impossible passages, those where no one has ever gone before. […] Onward at any cost, Jean-Claude Killy, in a dizzying escape, so that that vulture of a life can never catch up to you again.

On February 6, 1968, exactly 58 years ago, Gianni Clerici launched a scathing and sarcastic attack on the opening ceremony of the Games, which he described as “excessively lavish,” held in the presence of the President of the Republic Charles de Gaulle:

It was a spectacle of depressing length and banality, a sort of provincial performance by the Comédie Française: broadcast over the loudspeakers, the voices of the announcers and speakers took on the rounded sound of poorly executed alexandrines. Amid all that rolling of the “r”s, the only one who came out unscathed was De Gaulle, who spoke a total of six words, as required by protocol.