text: Rather like Paul Newman and Steve McQueen with their racing car movies this has all the appearance of a "jollies" project for Robert Redford, as he gets to ski up hill and down dale in the Alpine sunshine.<br /><br />The story is as light as powdered snow with Redford's small-town boy David Chappellet (what kind of lead name is that?) who with his eyes on the prize of Olympic glory, gets up the nose of, in no particular order, his coach, father and team-mates. Women are a mere side-show in his insular world as evidenced by a fairly distasteful pick-up scene with an old girlfriend in his hometown and then his selfishly petulant pursuit of, heavens above, a free-thinking, independent woman, played by Camilla Sparv. The ski-ing sequences are fine with some good stunt-work involving numerous bumps and scrapes on the piste but their effectiveness is dimmed by our subsequent familiarity with top TV coverage of skiing events down to the present day. Plus I'm not convinced that the Winter Olympics has the same mass identification with the general public as the summer games so that when Redford eventually wins his gold medal in the final reel, I couldn't really be that excited for him one way or another.<br /><br />Of the actors, Redford, best profile forward, doesn't need to do much and indeed doesn't, while Gene Hackman does better with equally meagre material. Ms Sparv does well as the chief female interest well who treats Redford the way he's doubtless treated every other woman in his chauvinistic way.<br /><br />In truth though, there's a lack of dramatic tension throughout for which the action sequences don't fully compensate and you don't care a fig for any of the leading characters. One of those films where the actors probably enjoyed making it more than the viewers did watching it.