GstaadLife

The Gstaad tennis tournament has a new title sponsor. Crédit Agricole will take the place of Allianz and so the tournament is called Crédit Agricole Suisse Open Gstaad - at least for the next three years.

 
The winter season is now basically over - just the Glacier hangs on as even Saanenmöser had to close before its scheduled date. But already we have the sight of the first spring gondolas running up the mountains for the summer season. Eggli - yes Eggli! is open between April 21 and June 26, Thursday thru Sunday between 9h00 and 16h30. The restaurant will also be open so you can once again enjoy Oberson's cuisine in summer. Gstaad Mountain Rides is also planning to open Eggli in the autumn from October 13 to November 13. The other mountain which is opening for the summer season is the Rellerli (did they even have a winter season?). Between April 23 until May 25 they'll keep a light schedule from Saturday thru Wednesday between 9h00 and 16h30. From May 25 on, the gondola will run daily until October 12.

Good news for horse back riders - the Gruben-Saali winter riding path has been open since January 1 2011.  Let's hope we get a bit more snow to keep it that way.

 
Big news for the tennis fans amongst you - Allianz is not going to be the title sponsor for the Gstaad tennis tournament any more. The insurance company is staying on as a gold sponsor but the search for a new title sponsor for the Suisse Open Gstaad has just begun. 

Temperatures were just above 0 but that did not stop 92 participants from taking up the challenge of the steep road to Arnensee last weekend October 17. The fastest of them, Martin von Känel (Reichenbach) (above) did the 7km, 397m climb in 37 minutes and 6 seconds.

Finally the Grand Hotel Bellevue has realized that it was a big mistake to shut down the spa for the off-season too. So while they will be renovating during this fall off-season, Steffi von Siebenthal SPA manager (above) says that they will also be offering a selection of workouts. From spring the whole spa will be open during the off-season and they are getting back some of the old trainers -- in the hope that some of the old clients will come back with them too. Well, at least it seems that they are listening. Has anyone had an interesting experience at the Bellevue Spa or fitness in the past few months? Hit comments below.

Just in case you saw some people running on the glacier recently - no they were not training for the Glacier 3000 run which takes place on August 6 to 7. The people in the picture above are actually members of the German mountain running team training for the WMRA World Mountain Running Championships. Pardon our ignorance but we did not even know such a thing existed...

Last Saturday July 24 2010 the Allianz Suisse Open Gstaad got underway. Local interest is high with Swiss Alexander Sadecky (above) joining fellow countryman Michael Lammer in the last sixteen after qualifying as wildcards. 

Just a few weeks ago the national team of the Ivory Coast trained for the FIFA 2010 World Cup on this field. At the beginning of July it was a pre-season warm-up game between FC Zurich and FC Basel. Now, as yet another end-result of the devastating flooding in Saanen, the field is completely destroyed and the FC Sarina is looking at damage of around SFr 0.5 million.