Dirty athletes' village, sparkling pistes

Alpine skiers competing at the Turin Olympics are finding it hard to reconcile perfectly-prepared pistes with the noise and dirt of an unfinished athletes' village.

"It looks like the Torino organisers have a great piste, everything about this area looks fantastic," said Norwegian Kjetil Andre Aamodt at the downhill finish area after training on Friday.

"But the village is a little bit unfinished and it's a little dirty."

Liechtenstein's Marco Buechel said that was an understatement.

"I was really angry about the way the Olympic village looked," he told reporters.

"Getting out of the car coming here, I stepped into ankle-deep mud. Mud everywhere. My room is not really finished, furnished and it's all dirty.

"But I'm here for some nice races and they did a really good job on the slopes, the slopes are spectacularly good. And I think that's the important thing."

French racer Antoine Deneriaz had more gripes.

"It's really noisy," he said of the village, located in the centre of the Sestriere resort.

"So noisy that I couldn't sleep last night. There was a car running outside my door all night and the noise disturbed me."

A mudbath

Aamodt said he had to take a shower with one foot on the toilet and British downhiller Finlay Mickel, from a team used to spartan accommodation over the years, agreed conditions were more cramped than might have been expected.

"I think there are three buildings that they haven't finished in there so it's quite tight on beds," he said.

"It's a bit of a mudbath in there but it's nice to be in a village and have other athletes around you."

Tight security has also been an issue, more for the photographers and media arriving at venues than for athletes able to ski across the terrain and take chairlifts.

Some photographers complained of having to wait for more than an hour to access the downhill venue on Friday morning, with long queues in the cold to get through security and volunteers given priority.

Buechel said he had also had a brush with authority when he left the village.

"There was a fence about hip high which prevented me from going straight to the ski lift and it would have taken me on a 300 foot detour for nothing at all," he complained.

"I just climbed over the fence, which was not a security fence. A police officer stopped me and yelled at me and wasn't really happy about it."