There are places that seem peaceful 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, the framework of exploits that border on the impossible and 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 return to Cortina d’Ampezzo, the slopes not only recover their sporting history, but also one of the wildest and most brutal sequences ever filmed in the snow.
The scene in question turned these mountains into the scene of impossible chases, shootings adrenaline in the middle of descent and suicidal jumps that were recorded in the collective memory long before returning to be at the center of the Olympic calendar, or even before Tom Cruise himself amplified 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 James Bond himself (then played by Roger Moore) to flee skiing from armed assassins, 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 being thrown into the void as if it were a ramp. It was an extreme scene even for the saga, which had just sent the agent into space, but 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 Job, piano cables, cameras mounted on bobsleighs and snow transported in trucks in the middle of a drought.
Not only that. The team continued ahead despite injuries to Roger Moore himself, burning 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 to shoot the action backwards and designed double-tip skis to survive the challenge.
Around them, stuntmen like John Eaves, world 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 key name was Giovanni Dibona, a local specialist recruited to test whether it was possible to enter and exit the ice channel by skiing, a feat that defined the entire final sequence.
Decades later, the Wall Street Journal reported 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 died when his sled 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 James Bond character left the snow behind for other tasks such as hanging from trains and helicopters, but Cortina continued to be a temple of vertigo, one shared by cinema and sport.
There, those who experienced that filming know that the Bond films and the Olympic Games have something essential in common: both seem elegant from the outside, but they hide a hardness that only those who have ever gone downhill (or up) without a net understand.
Imagen | United
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