There are places that seem calm until someone decides to take them beyond reason. Scenarios conceived for precision and discipline that end up becoming, through a combination of ambition and audacity, within the framework of feats that border on the impossible and they leave a mark that is difficult to erase. The slopes of Cortina, in Italy, have seen all kinds of sporting feats, but few like the one that occurred in 1981.
Return with the aroma of cinema. When the Winter Games They return to Cortina d’Ampezzothe tracks not only recover their sporting history, but also one of the sequences more wild and brutal never shot in the snow.
The scene in question turned these mountains into the scene of impossible chases, shootings adrenaline in full descent and suicidal jumps that were etched in the collective memory long before he was once again at the center of the Olympic calendar, or even before Tom Cruise himself will amplify the scene in his Mission Impossible saga.
The wildest chase. The story took place in 1981, during the filming of For Your Eyes Only which led to James Bond himself (then played by Roger Moore) to flee skiing of armed killers, motorcycles and even a biathlete who shot him while he was descending at full speed.
In fact, the brutal sequence culminated with a maneuver as absurd as it was legendary: sliding down an Olympic bobsleigh track at more than 80 kilometers per hour and be thrown into the void as if it were a ramp. It was an extreme scene even for the saga, which came from sending the agent into spacebut which found in the Italian Alps a new limit for its formula of constant danger.
Six weeks on the brink of disaster. The sequence in question required more than a month of filming, expert drivers inherited from The Italian Jobpiano wires, cameras mounted on bobsleighs and snow transported by trucks in the middle of the drought.
Not only that. The team continued despite injuries from Roger Moore himselfburning bobsleighs and a level of risk so extreme that it was necessary to check every screw on the cameras before launching across the ice.
Bogner and the men who did know how to ski. Behind the camera was Willy Bogner Jr.former Olympian and pioneer of ski filming, who decided roll the action back and designed double-tip skis to survive the challenge.
Around them, specialists as John Eavesworld champion freestyle skier, learned to bobsled down the slopes again and again, while some actors struggled simply to stay upright on skis.
Curtain, specialists and memory. Another of the key names was in the figure by Giovanni Dibonaa local specialist recruited to test whether it was possible to ski in and out of the ice channel, a feat that defined the entire final sequence.
Decades later, The Wall Street Journal said that Dibona barely remembers why they were chasing Bond, but he remembers the titanic effort involved in filming in those conditions, an experience that made him understand that action cinema was not very different from extreme sports.
Between glamor and tragedy. Plus: the filming was also marked by death. During a break for the 1981 world bobsleigh championships, an American athlete died in competition and, on the last day of filming, a young Italian stuntman He died when his sleigh overturned.
All of this contrasted with the glamorous premiere of the film, a grand premiere attended by the then Prince Charles and Diana of Wales.
Bond got off his skis, Cortina didn’t. The truth is that, over the years, the character of James Bond left the snow behind for other purposes such as hanging of trains and helicoptersbut Cortina remained a temple of vertigo, one shared by cinema and sport.
There, those who lived through that filming know that the Bond films and the Olympic Games have something essential in common: they both look elegant from the outside, but they hide a hardness that only those who have ever gone downhill understand (or above) without network.
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