World Cup boost for Alps
Thursday May 27, 2010 - Email this article to a friend

England's World Cup footballers are back in their training ground in the Austrian Alps after their victory against Mexico on Monday.

At the moment The Ivory Coast, managed by the former England Manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, is in Montreux before moving up the mountains to Saanenmöser, near Gstaad, in Switzerland. It is at an altitude of 1,400m

There has been stiff competition between countries, and ski resorts, to host the World Cup teams and their accompanying entourage.

Others in The Alps include Spain, France, Germany, Greece, North Korea, Cameroon, Holland and many others.  Each has an accompanying entourage and a pack of journalists.

They are there for altitude training as many of the venues in South Africa are well above sea level.

Football at altitude5 out of the 9 host cities are above 1,300m. The final will be held in Johannesburg at 1,750m.

The Alps are obvious location for the teams to acclimatise especially as they are also within the same time zone.

David Graefen, the marketing manager of Saas-Fee said it has been quite a battle to host the Japanese.  Five other Swiss resorts were trying to get them.

Saas-Fee has published several press releases and released photos of the training facilities.

As well as talking about the Japanese coming they have extolled the virtues of the resort in the summer and hope media coverage will bring other visitors to the resort. 

Japan has 80 journalists travelling with them.

The resort has 3,500 overnight stays from Japan while neighbouring Zermatt and other Swiss resorts like Wengen has more.

Sass-Fee wants to change this.

The Japanese Ambassador to Switzerland, Ichiro Komatsu, has agreed to travel from Bern to greet the Japanese team in Saas-Fee on 26 May.

It will boost media coverage of the team's arrival and thus gain Saas-Fee extra publicity.

Saas-Fee Training pitch

"It's very intensive competition," says Thomas Bieger, a tourism professor at St Gallen University. He was speaking to swissinfo.

"Investing in attracting or hosting important people has become a new dimension of marketing."

Michel Zen-Ruffinen is head of the Matchworld Group, that negotiated the deals between teams and resorts.

"The teams are more and more demanding," he told Le Matin Dimanche newspaper. "Whereas one training pitch used to be enough, now they need two, ideally next to a hotel. These are the kind of conditions you can often find in Austria, but not in Swiss resorts."

Austria is hosting more than Switzerland.

More than a dozen teams are in Austria ahead of the World Cup that starts on June 11^th and half that number in the Swiss Alps.

England's training pitch in Irdning

We have reported on the teams in Austria here on PlanetSKI, but what about the Swiss Alps?

North Korea and Algeria are also there and soon they will be joined by Greece, Japan and of course the Swiss Team.

Switzerland will be in the ski resort of Crans-Montana from may 25^th. We reported on it earlier within this story.  They will be sharing it with Algeria who will also be there.

Greece meanwhile will be based at Bad Ragaz in Eastern Switzerland.

Elsewhere North Korea has been training in Anzère in preparation for big games against Brazil and Portugal,

Many ski resorts are not only empty at this time of year, but also turning their efforts to summer tourism.

In 2006 the Brazil trained in a small village near Lucerne ahead of the World Cup in Germany and it has been reported that the number of Brazilian visitors to the town double over the following years.

Football, even football training, is big business.

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