Entente cordiale cools on French ski slopes

French ski instructors are giving the cold shoulder to British counterparts thanks to looming EU legislation they fear will take away jobs and dumb down their standards.

Franco-British rivalry on slopes in France – the second biggest ski destination after the US – is nothing new.

For years British ski buffs have crossed the Channel to indulge their passion and make money doing so, catering to tens of thousands of Britons from the slope-deprived isles who flock to French resorts each winter.

But the edgy entente cordiale chilled with a recent proposal for a European Professional Card “enabling professionals to take full advantage of the potential of the Single Market”, as the European Commission website put it.

A headline in the Liberation daily said it all: “After the Polish plumber, the English ski instructor” – recalling France’s fear of invasion by job-hungry residents from Eastern European states admitted in the 2004 EU “big bang” enlargement.

“Everything is done to discourage us from settling in here,” said Andrew Parker, a 34-year-old originally from a village outside London.

Parker works as a certified ‘moniteur’, or ski instructor, at the posh Alpine resort of La Tania, part of France’s vast Trois Vallees network where an estimated 70 per cent of skiers are English-speaking.

But getting there wasn’t easy. It took him six years to earn full ‘moniteur’ status. The key was passing the tough, technical ‘Eurotest’, Europe’s top ski instruction qualification.

“I took the test more than 20 times before I passed, whereas in England I had the highest certification,” complained Parker in fluent French.

In 2009, all 52 foreigners who took the Eurotest in France failed.

“In New Zealand, America, Australia and Canada I was more than qualified. But here I was considered only an apprentice and had to pass more exams to be able to work,” he groaned.

Of some 16,000 ski instructors certified in France, only 10 per cent are foreign, many from neighbouring Italy, according to ski officials.

Their gripe is more with British instructors hired by British tour operators and paid in Britain, or their ‘freelance’ compatriots who go door-to-door to drum up clients at French resorts.

“To prosecute an uncertified ski instructor, you have to prove there was a monetary transaction and catch them in the act,” said police lieutenant Gilles Chessel in the mountain station of Bourg-Saint-Maurice.