Tue, Aug 10, 2010 page19

• FEATURE : Farmers look to shatter German town’s Olympic dream

  • AFP, GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany
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  Garmisch-Partenkirchen seems to have everything going for it in its bid to become the first town to stage its second Winter Olympics, but a group of farmers may shatter the dream.

  An hour-and-a-half’s drive or train ride through idyllic Alpine scenery from Munich, the town’s partner in the bid for the 2018 Games, Garmisch seems like a winning combination of German efficiency and winter sports paradise.

  In June, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) indicated that Pyeongchang, South Korea, was its only rival — unless Annecy in France, the third candidate, can improve its bid ahead of a final decision in July next year.

  

  Bavarian farmer Josef Glatz attempts to move a cow on a meadow near the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, on Thursday last week.

  PHOTO: AFP

  All ice competitions would be held in Munich, using the stadium built for the 1972 summer Games, while all snow events would be in Garmisch, 90km to the south.

  Bobsleigh and luge would be 150km southeast of Munich at Lake Koenigssee in the picture-postcard Berchtesgadener Land district.

  Garmisch already boasts the infrastructure, including transport links and accommodation, to be able to host the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in February next year, but critics say the Winter Olympics, last held in Garmisch under the Nazis in 1936 — Adolf Hitler opened the Games, anti-Jewish signs were hastily removed — have grown so big that 26,000-strong Garmisch is too small to handle it.

  A “snow village” would have to be built for 2,500 athletes and officials, plus a media center for the 10,000 journalists covering all the skiing, snowboarding, ski jumping and other events. More car parks would also be needed, but planners have come up against stiff opposition from a group of about 80 farmers who are refusing to let their Alpine meadows on the outskirts of the town, which they have tended for generations, be used for the facilities.

  Organizers say that many will be of long-term benefit to the town and that those that are not will simply be removed after the Games. In two or three years everything will be back to normal, but it is not only the town that needs work.

  According to the “NOlympia” campaign group created to oppose the bid, major construction is needed on the slopes to prepare for the Olympic snowboarding and ski cross events.

  Ironically, campaigners say global warming means that it is unlikely that Garmisch will have enough snow, meaning it will need snow machines or to bring some in by truck from elsewhere in the Alps.

  “We can just about handle the World Championships, but the Olympics is a whole different dimension,” said Josef Glatz, 50, chairman of a group representing the meadow owners, outside his wooden chalet in Garmisch. “I only have a few cows, and do farming in the evenings after my day job and at weekends ... The land will be kaput. It will never be the same again.”

  The farmers’ plight has aroused considerable sympathy in the town, said Alexander Schwer, 30, a reporter at local paper Garmisch-Partenkirchner Tagblatt.

  “It’s always the case that people opposing something make more noise than people in favor, but overall, my impression is that sentiment is starting to turn against [the Games],” Schwer said.

  Inhabitants have also been rankled by the impression that they are being told what to do by people in Munich — the “big city.”

  “They have come out saying: ‘We are the greatest, we know what is best for you and this is how things are going to be done.’ This has gone down very badly,” Schwer said.

  “In the past mistakes were made, it is true. The plans were presented before the owners of the land were consulted, but we’re on the right path, we are talking to each other and the talks are constructive,” said Hannes Kraetz, 47, the deputy mayor. “We only need a few more [of the landowners] to agree.”

  Matthias Schoener from architects Albert Speer and Partner, which have been commissioned to draw up plans for the Games, said that “certain aspects” might have to be changed if the farmers refuse to budge.

  “However, it [the concept] won’t fall apart,” Schoener said.

  Garmisch forester Axel Doering, 62, who is spearheading the “NOlympia” campaign and whose Web site nolympia.de gets almost 1,000 visitors per day, hopes otherwise.

  “There is going to be a huge hangover if the Games go ahead,” Doering said.

  For other hosting cities, not least Vancouver and Sochi in Russia, the venue for 2014, the Winter Olympics have proven to be a financial and ecological disaster, he says, and it is no different for the summer Games.

  “I started out as a critic of the Olympics and now I am an enemy of the Olympics. The Games have become too big and the IOC is corrupt, completely corrupt,” he said. “I don’t think that the Winter Olympics should be held again. You can’t have a different place ravaged as if by locusts every four years, like is happening in Sochi, which is exceeding every worst nightmare.”

  All the infrastructure in the Black Sea port city of Sochi and the mountains above needed to be built from scratch and the UN in March said authorities had been slow to address the environmental impact.

  Helen Lenskyj, a professor emerita at Toronto University, who has written several books on the negative social impact of the Olympics, including those in Sydney in 2000 in her native Australia, is similarly scathing.

  “It is largely driven by the sponsors. It’s about delivering the television audience via the Olympics for the advertisers,” she said by phone from Canada. “Politicians hope they will get some kudos ... but a real audit shows that there is never a profit.”

  Glatz, admiring the view of the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain, from his house, agrees.

  “Everyone says ‘yes’ to the Olympics until it actually affects them personally ... If you did a survey in the whole of Germany most people would say ‘yes,’ but that’s because it doesn’t concern them,” he said.
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