The wildest race ever held in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, began with a man in a blue jacket flinging himself off the Trampolino Olimpico ski jump, dodging the bullets of a champion biathlete and ripping down the mountain and through trees while being chased by assassins on motorcycles.
To elude them, he skis directly onto an Olympic bobsled track. He careens down the sheet of ice at 50 miles per hour, uses one of the final turns as a launchpad, flies out of the bob run and over a ski chalet to safety.
He was neither shaken nor stirred.
Once again, James Bond had escaped certain death. But this time, 007 unclipped his skis and found himself at the bottom of a mountain that is now the site of the Milan Cortina Games.
As the Olympics come back to Cortina, which hosted the Winter Games in 1956, the world’s best skiers are returning to slopes immortalised by another blockbuster production.
Back in 1981, the production team on “For Your Eyes Only,” the 12th film in the Bond franchise, trekked up the mountains to shoot a chase scene that was unhinged even for an MI6 agent who had recently traveled on a mission to outer space with Dr. Holly Goodhead.
The whole thing took six weeks, a fleet of motorcycles piloted by the maniac drivers from “The Italian Job,” spools of piano wire, a bobsled that briefly caught fire and one uber-energetic German ex-Olympic skier turned stuntkameramann.
When the crew arrived in the middle of a drought, fresh snow was trucked in from nearby mountains. When Roger Moore injured his shoulder shooting a hockey scene, the Bond actor checked himself out of the hospital and got back to work. When his ski double learned to slalom down a bobsled track, the stuntman kept doing it long after the film wrapped.
“I became a bit of a connoisseur of bob runs,” said John Eaves, a world-champion freestyle skier.
Eaves, now 72, was one of half a dozen skiers roped into the chase scene at the request of Willy Bogner Jr., a former Olympian and fashion designer who had turned himself into the world’s foremost ski cinematographer. By then, Bogner had experience on several Bond films. But to capture the ski chase in “For Your Eyes Only,” he realized he would have to shoot the action backwards, and he prepared for such a harrowing job by designing a pair of twin-tipped skis and whooshing down the run over and over.
“I was wearing the protective gear of an ice hockey player that we rented in Cortina,” he once told American Cinematographer magazine. “Fortunately, I only fell once.”
The actor who played the East German assassin on Bond’s tail wasn’t so fortunate. He spent most of the shoot trying not to fall over.
“He had a real problem playing the part of an experienced cross-country skier,” director John Glen wrote in his memoir. “This was largely due to the fact that he couldn’t ski.”
One person on set who could ski—and still does at age 83—was an Italian named Giovanni Dibona.
A stuntman on “For Your Eyes Only,” he was dragged into the project after receiving a phone call from Bogner in Monaco. He needed someone to test the feasibility of skiing on and off the bob run—and he thought of the Cortina native. Nearly a half-century later, Dibona keeps fond memories of his weeks hanging out with James Bond. The details of precisely why 007 was in the Dolomites are fuzzier.
“I don’t remember why the bad men were trying to kill Roger Moore,” he says.
Not that it really mattered. By the time Bond found himself skiing away from those bad men in the Italian alps, the franchise was pumping out hit movies with the same reliable formula.
“Put James Bond in a situation from which he just gets out,” Glen once said, “and then throw him straight into another—and then another and another.”
And if you can, put him on skis. But make sure he’s tethered to a bobsled with piano wire. Also, that the nuts and bolts for the on-board camera are screwed tight.
On set, the crew understood the risks of stunt-bobbing. During a pause in filming while Cortina hosted the 1981 bobsled world championships, one American athlete died in competition. On the final day of production, a young Italian stuntman was killed when the bobsled overturned.
When the film was released later that year, the world premiere was attended by Prince Charles and Lady Diana only a month before their wedding. All eyes were on the soon-to-be princess as she stepped out of a Rolls-Royce in a glittering red chiffon gown. Her date was so mad for Bond that the future King of England once exercised his royal privilege and requested an early peek at the iconic ski-parachute sequence in “The Spy Who Loved Me.”
As for the spy who skied down a bob run, Bond would spend less time practicing winter sports. Over the next few decades, the secret agent opted for the security of running atop moving trains and hanging off the side of helicopters
But back in Cortina, one man is still watching visitors hurtle down racecourses, ski jumps and bobsled tracks. He knows better than anyone that Bond films have one thing in common with the Winter Olympics.
“I never thought,” Dibona said, “that making movies was so difficult.”
Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com and Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
