The Winter Games were in February 1968
There was no Winter Olympics in 1967. The tenth Winter Games were held at Grenoble, in the French Alps, from 6 to 18 February 1968. The 1967 part of the story is the run-up: venues were finished and tested through that year, and the competitors who would dominate the Games were already making their names on the international circuit.
Grenoble as host
France chose the Games as a showcase. Grenoble was a university and industrial city, and the Olympic project brought new roads and sports venues, with events spread across several mountain resorts around it. President Charles de Gaulle opened the Games, and the French press treated them as proof of the country’s postwar modernity. Only a few months later, the French state would face the unrest known as May 1968 strikes, though nothing about the Games hinted at it.
The Games also carried a few firsts for the Winter programme. Grenoble introduced an official mascot, a stylised skier called Schuss, and was the first Winter Olympics to include drug testing, a development linked to the IOC’s 1967 decisions.
Jean-Claude Killy
The great star was the French skier Jean-Claude Killy. He had already won the first overall alpine World Cup title in the 1966-67 season, the first year the circuit existed, and arrived at Grenoble as the home favourite. He won all three men’s alpine events: the downhill, the giant slalom and the slalom.
The slalom was the most disputed. In a thick fog, the Austrian Karl Schranz, who had been regarded as the main rival, said that a figure had crossed his path on the course and was allowed a rerun. A jury later ruled that he had missed a gate before the interruption and disqualified him, which left Killy the winner. The decision was argued about for years, and Schranz remained a celebrated figure in Austria. Killy’s three golds nonetheless made him one of the best-known athletes of 1968, and he went on to a career in business and sports administration.
Peggy Fleming
For the United States, the Games belonged to figure skater Peggy Fleming, who won the ladies’ title and was the only American gold medallist at Grenoble. She had won the world championship from 1966 to 1968. Her success was also bound up in an earlier tragedy: in 1961 the entire American figure skating team and many of its coaches had died in an airliner crash on the way to the world championships in Prague, and Fleming’s generation was the one that rebuilt American skating afterwards. Her win was seen on television at home as a symbol of that recovery.
Other results
The Soviet pair Lyudmila Belousova and Oleg Protopopov won the pairs title again, an enduring partnership in the sport. In the bobsleigh events, the Italian Eugenio Monti, a veteran of many world championships and Olympics, finally won gold. The Scandinavian nations kept their usual strength in the cross-country and jumping events, with Norway among the top performers in the medal table.
The Cold War setting
The Games were a Cold War contest, as all Olympics of the period were. The Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and the Western powers treated the medal table as a test of national systems, and the Winter Games were no exception. The outside world was also unsettled: the Tet Offensive had begun in Vietnam only a few days before the opening ceremony, and the Prague Spring reform movement was starting in Czechoslovakia that winter.
The most visible Cold War detail was the German team. From 1956 to 1964 East and West Germany had competed as a single combined team. At Grenoble they appeared for the first time as separate teams in a Winter Games, although they still shared the Olympic flag with its rings on a black, red and gold background and the same anthem. Fully separate flags and anthems came later.
Why the dates get confused
Search results and old lists sometimes call this “the 1967-1968 Winter Olympics”, probably because the Games belonged to the 1967-68 winter sports season. The more accurate description is simply the 1968 Winter Olympics, held in February 1968.