He frequently gets lost riding the Metro in Moscow, which is an easy thing to do for a Westerner given that all the signs are written in the Cyrillic alphabet. His wife speaks five languages, and she is not sure she’s ever going to master Russian.
But Roger McCarthy is enjoying the challenge of his professional life. The former Breckenridge executive is the chief strategist behind a $360 million ski area being built from scratch in Russia’s Caucasus Mountains, one which just happened to be awarded the alpine events for the 2014 Olympics two months after he took the job.
McCarthy was Breckenridge’s chief operating officer for seven years. Now he’s director for strategy and operations for the Rosa Khutor ski area. Spending 70 percent to 80 percent of his time in Moscow — until construction at the area can resume this spring — his typical workday includes working on design plans for a snowcat shop, a mountaintop restaurant and base area construction.
“I’ll finish the day and my head is just pulsating,” McCarthy said. “But at the same time I’m just loving it because that’s exactly why I went. That’s the stuff I love to do.”
Rosa Khutor is about 30 miles from Sochi, a town in the “Russian Riviera” on the Black Sea where the Olympics will be based. Sochi is situated in the world’s northernmost tropical climate, complete with palm trees and a Mediterranean feel, but Rosa Khutor will boast an insane 5,000-plus feet of vertical skiing with all sorts of avalanche issues.
“The vertical is just massive, it’s 500 (feet) more vertical than Whistler,” said McCarthy, who worked at Whistler in British Columbia for two decades. “The climate looks to me like it’s quite similar. You get these big wet storms coming off the Black Sea, and they run into these really steep mountains. You’ve got this cold outflow coming out of central Russia, so you’ve got sort of the perfect storm. It’s a place that gets between 12 and 14 meters (470-550 inches) of snowfall a year.”
McCarthy started on the job in May, with initial tree clearing commencing in June. On July 4, the IOC chose Sochi over Pyeong- Chang, South Korea, and Salzburg, Austria.
“I thought Korea would win, because they came within two votes on the previous vote, and everything is built (there),” McCarthy said. “We don’t have anything built. The thing that was clear to me when I went to the FIS meetings in Slovenia in May was that the FIS didn’t really want to go to Korea. The mountain didn’t have a downhill that was worthy of an Olympic downhill. My sense was that they liked the idea of going to Russia.”
As usual, former Swiss downhill great Bernhard Russi will design the Olympic downhills, with separate courses for the men and women sharing a common finish area.
“It’s a very well-balanced terrain, very interesting,” Russi said. “I’m sure you can make a good downhill there.”
McCarthy was in Beaver Creek for the men’s World Cup races in December to learn what it takes to manage ski races.
“The Olympics is a curse, but it’s also a blessing,” McCarthy said. “The curse is, you have to build this thing completely around a 17-day event, but you have to design for life after. That’s the stuff that I love doing, on the design end and the logistics of how this whole thing’s going to fit together.”
McCarthy said Russian president Vladimir Putin, an avid skier, has been “very involved” in the process and has ensured the full support of the government. Viktor Potanin, the oligarch who is behind the Rosa Khutor project, wants the area to rank in the top 10 in the world.
“We have the mountain to do it,” McCarthy said. “We can put everything else together, in terms of design and construction.”
New ski areas aren’t being built in North America, so McCarthy has been given a rare opportunity — to take what he calls a “blank canvas” and turn it into a destination worthy of the Olympics in a mere seven years.
“It’s so all encompassing,” McCarthy said. “My 35-year knowledge of the industry is being taxed to the maximum, because this place is so big — huge snowfall, big avalanches, big lifts. There’s going to be a very, very steep learning curve.”
