Competition

The first American to win a World Cup cross-country race, this pioneer has remained an advocate for women for five decades.

Photo above: Alison at the U.S. Nationals in 1977. Courtesy Alison Owen Bradley.

Trivia question: Who is the first U.S. racer to win a FIS cross-country World Cup?

Kikkan Randall, or maybe Jessie Diggins? Nope. The answer is Alison Bradley (née Owen), who won the first-ever women’s FIS World Cup in December 1978. A member of the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame Class of 2020—to be officially inducted at some point in a post-pandemic world—Bradley is only the second female cross-country skier to be inducted into the Hall of Fame (her former teammate Martha Rockwell was in the HOF Class of 1986).

“Having spent so much of my life devoted to excellence in the sport of cross-country skiing, and then to be recognized and honored for it by the Hall of Fame, is icing on the cake!” Bradley said by phone from her winter home in Bozeman, Montana. She lives with her husband, Phil Bradley, on a small hobby farm near Boise, Idaho, during the summer months.

It’s been a long time coming for Bradley, a pioneer of women’s cross-country skiing in the United States. Since retiring from competition in 1981, Bradley has coached and promoted women’s cross-country skiing. Most recently, Bradley, Randall, and 1984 Olympian Sue Wemyss started U.S. NOW—U.S. Nordic Olympic Women—a group of all the American women who have competed in cross-country skiing at an Olympic Winter Games.

“There are 53 of us, and we’re all still alive,” Bradley, 68, said. “How can we pass on what we learned to upcoming skiers?”

As a way to support current skiers, U.S. NOW has a “grit and grace” award.

First called the Inga Award—named after the unheralded mother of Crown Prince Haakon Haakonsson who was carried to safety by Norwegian Birkebeiners in 1206—Bradley presented it to Rosie Brennan at U.S. NOW’s first reunion in 2019.

“You always see the two Viking guys carrying the prince,” said Bradley, explaining the birth of the award. “You never hear about the boy’s mother. That’s kind of like women’s skiing. It really spoke to me that she would be a good example for us to persevere and be strong.”

Bradley’s aim is that U.S. NOW continues to inspire upcoming generations of female cross-country skiers. “We have a lot of passion for skiing and ski racing, but there hasn’t been a real big way to put ourselves back in,” she said. “Now we have a structure to work within.”

The Early Days

Bradley had no female role models when she began cross-country skiing in the mid-1960s. Born in Kalispell, Montana, and raised in Wenatchee, Washington, Bradley was the second of five children in the Owen family, and like her father, she loved the outdoors.

One day, her father saw an ad in the Wenatchee World newspaper for a cross-country ski club. Herb Thomas, a Middlebury graduate and biathlete, had moved back to Wenatchee to work in his family’s apple business and wanted to teach area youth how to cross-country ski. Bradley, the only girl on the team, loved it. The next year, she beat several boys and qualified for a meet in Minnesota. But she was not allowed to compete.

“I couldn’t go because I was a girl,” she recalled, recounting an era in which female athletes were often ridiculed for competing, which was considered unattractive and even dangerous. “I was devastated.”

The next year, when she was 13, Bradley was one of nine Pacific Northwest Division skiers to qualify for the 1966 junior nationals in Winter Park, Colorado. This time, they let her go. But once she arrived, officials were not sure what to do with her. They finally allowed her to compete, but an ambulance was ready in case she succumbed to the effort (she didn’t).

Bradley does not remember the hoopla (she made laps on alpine skis at Winter Park while the race jury was deciding her fate), nor much about the race itself. For a 13-year-old, it was “just fun to be out of school and to have made the team.”

But Bradley had opened officials’ eyes. The following year, 17 girls qualified to compete at junior nationals, and they had their own race. By 1969, 40 girls participated in junior nationals, and the first senior national cross-country championships for women were held that year. Bradley had shattered her first glass ceiling.

‘First’ World Championships and Olympics

In 1970, the U.S. Ski Team sent its first women’s team to a FIS Nordic World Championship. A junior in high school, Bradley qualified for the team and left school for several weeks to travel behind the Iron Curtain to Czechoslovakia. Again, she remembers little from the 5k race, just that she was wide-eyed at the sights, so different than rural Washington.

American women made their Olympic debut in cross-country skiing at the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games. Galina Kulakova, a 29-year-old Soviet skier, swept the 5k and 10k individual races and anchored the Soviets to the relay gold medal—finishing more than five minutes ahead of the Americans, who crossed the line in last place. Bradley had just graduated from high school the previous spring and finished far back in both races.

Bradley asked U.S. women’s coach Marty Hall if she could just go home and taste success at junior nationals. “He would say, ‘Do you want to be a big fish in a little pond, or do you want to be a little fish in a big pond?’ I was getting eaten by the bigger fish, but it did wake me up to what I was working towards.”

Hall gave Bradley a training journal with Kulakova’s picture on the cover. “Someday you’re going to be right there with her,” he assured her.

But after 1974 world championships, Bradley had had enough. She was only 21 but felt as if her progress had stalled. She earned a scholarship to Alaska Methodist University (now Alaska Pacific University) and moved to Anchorage. She continued to compete domestically. But she was done with racing in Europe.

Then in 1978, the national championships were held in Anchorage. After winning the 7.5k and 20k races and finishing second in the 10k, Bradley found herself on another world championship team. “I’m not going back into that, I’m going to get my education,” she firmly told Jim Mahaffey, AMU’s ski coach.

Mahaffey persuaded her to try international competition again. She was good, he assured her. “Kochie had won an [Olympic] medal, ‘You know, maybe Americans can do well in this sport,’” she recalled thinking.

Physically and mentally more mature, Bradley was finally skiing near the front. In Europe, she finished top 10 in four races, including seventh at Holmekollen. It was like catching a touchdown pass in the Super Bowl.

In December 1978, Bradley made her mark. She had a good feeling at the Gitchi Gami Games in Telemark, Wisconsin—considered as the first FIS Cross-Country World Cup won by an American woman or man, though the FIS classifies it as a “test” event. “I knew in my heart I could win it,” she said. She just had to convince her body to go through the pain of racing. At that moment, Marty Hall walked into the lodge where Bradley was sitting. Hall was no longer the U.S. coach, but he looked across the room and pointed at Bradley. She looked back and thought, “Yes! I’m ready.”

Bradley won the women’s 5k that day and the 10k as well. With a handful of other top 10 finishes that season, she finished the World Cup ranked seventh overall. It was the best result by a U.S. woman until Kikkan Randall finished fifth overall 33 years later, in 2012.

The 1980 Olympic year was the best yet for Bradley. She won the Gitchi Gami Games again and finished on the podium in several World Cup races. In all, she made $35,000 in prize money—unheard of riches in a relatively unknown sport in the United States at that time. But at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, she fell ill and finished 22nd in both races (5k and 10).

A year later, she won the last of her 10 national titles, then retired. “I was so discouraged by how up and down results would be,” she explained. “I could be right in there for some races, then people I had beaten were beating me at the big events. We wondered why our coaches couldn’t get us to peak.” She now recognizes the impact of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) on the sport. In 1979, five of the six women ahead of Bradley in the World Cup rankings were Soviets and are strongly suspected of PED use.

“In hindsight, I give myself a lot more credit,” she said. “The doping scenario was confusing for racers like us because we had this attitude that we weren’t that good. But we friggin’ were that good!”

After Racing

Bradley moved to McCall, Idaho, after she retired and started a family. Her son, Jess Kiesel, helped the University of Utah ski team win an NCAA title as a freshman in 2003. Daughter Kaelin Kiesel was a two-time All-American and student athlete of the year at Montana State University (class of 2011).

After moving to Sun Valley in the mid-1980s, Bradley coached both Jess and Kaelin with the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation, where for 14 years she helped several young skiers reach the world junior championships. Coaching at the world juniors, she once again confronted dominating males who weren’t good listeners. She knew more than most about training, ski prep, technique and, unlike her peers, had an impressive World Cup record. But she liked to concentrate on the mental approach to competition, and all the complex factors that lead to speed. “My style was very much about the person,” she said.

Then in the late 1990s, she saw a need for a program to help collegiate women make the national team. She founded WIND—Women In Nordic Development. Several WIND skiers competed in the world championships and made Olympic teams. But balancing the burden of fundraising, coaching, and raising her own kids, Bradley could not keep the WIND blowing for long.

In the mid-2010s, Sadie Maubet Bjornsen called Bradley out of the blue. The U.S. women’s team, led by coach Matt Whitcomb, wanted to learn more about the pioneering skiers who had laid tracks for the current women’s program. “I was in tears when Sadie emailed me,” said Bradley. “Really?! Someone remembers me?”

Bradley, Randall, and Wemyss ran with the idea, founding U.S. NOW. When Rosie Brennan received US NOW’s first award—and $1,000 to go with it—she was shocked. “I’ve had a lot of challenges in my whole career,” said Brennan, who was dropped for the second time from the U.S. Ski Team after she contracted mononucleosis during the 2018 Olympic year. “To be awarded this award from this group of people who have also gone through their own challenges means more than any race could ever mean to me.”

Two years after Randall and Jessie Diggins won America’s first Olympic gold medal in cross-country skiing (Team Sprint) at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympic Winter Games, Bradley was nominated to the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame, and several women on the 2018 U.S. Olympic team, plus Coach Whitcomb, penned a letter in support of her nomination.

“We are thankful for all Alison has done to further our sport, which gave us all something to dream about as young women,” read the letter. “The gold medal this winter has not only been an achievement for our team, but for the larger ‘team’ that Alison truly championed… all of (this) started with a leader who wouldn’t take ‘no’ as an answer.”

The hurdles Bradley-Owens and her colleagues faced in a male-dominated sport—and world—are in sharper focus now, but she’s pragmatic about the quest: Don’t blame the men, who deserve credit for organizing all the sports in the first place, she says, but step up yourself instead. “It’s been a slow change, but it is changing,” she says. 

Peggy Shinn is a senior contributor to TeamUSA.org, has covered five Winter Olympic Games and is a regular contributor to
Skiing History.

Arguably nothing has had a bigger impact on skiing and snowboarding during the past 25 years than the Winter X Games.

Standing at the start of the 2012 Winter X Games SuperPipe in Aspen for his final run of the event, snowboarder Shaun White was the dominant and defending champion in the event and already a certified legend. Just to drive that point home, he made a run that soared 15 to 20 feet above the shiny pipe walls, casually spinning and whirling like some enraptured snow dervish. When it was over, he’d thrown the first-ever frontside double cork 1260 (three full spins with a double horizontal twist) in a pipe and scored the first and only perfect 100 in the event in X Games history.

“I’ve waited for that one hundred for a long time!” said the jubilant 25-year old. He also picked up another gold to add to an overall medal stash of 18 as of this writing. It’s all part of a stellar career that surely has him headed into the US Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame.

In January of 2020, Mark McMorris tied White’s medal record with a silver at Snowboard Big Air in Aspen, then topped it at the Norway X Games with a gold. Whether this major achievement will help propel him into the Hall of Fame remains to be seen. But that it could, illustrates the status the Winter X Games have attained.

They got there in part by pioneering many firsts in winter sports (first switch triple rodeo, first snowmobile front flip, and so on). Winter X Games 2021 had its own dubious first: It took place in a quarantine bubble in Aspen without the 111,500 live fans who watched in 2020.

Coverage ran live on ESPN and ABC throughout the four-day event, and will rerun almost incessantly across ESPN’s many platforms for the rest of the year. That’s because the games generate some of the network’s biggest ratings outside of professional and college football, basketball and baseball. And Winter X gives skiing and snowboarding their biggest global audience other than the Olympics, reaching up to 215 countries and territories and 400 million households.

This transformative and deeply lucrative franchise arose from brainstorming at ESPN in 1993 aimed at creating a world-championship-level gathering of action—or alternative or extreme (take your pick)—sports. The concept was unveiled at a press conference at the New York Planet Hollywood in 1994. In 1995, 27 events in 9 different categories were held at the first X Games during the last week of July in Rhode Island.

With an enthusiastic response from everyone—the athletes, the hosts, 198,000 spectators and, critically, the high-profile sponsors—ESPN realized they were on to something. Plans began evolving and expanding, an ongoing process today. The network scheduled events annually instead of every two years as originally conceived, and cloned the product.

That resulted in the first Winter X Games, at Snow Summit in Big Bear Lake, California, in 1997. The following two years the Games were held in Crested Butte, Colorado, and then moved for two years to Mount Snow, Vermont. Since 2002, the event has been held in Aspen.

The 1997 inaugural lineup consisted of five divergent categories of competitions held over four days: Snowboarding (BoarderCross, Big Air and Slopestyle), Ice Climbing, Snow Mountain Bike Racing, Super Modified Shovel Racing, and a crossover multi-sport event.

For the first time ever, ESPN’s sister channel ABC broadcast an X Games event, and coverage reached nearly 200 countries. Shaun Palmer won both the BoarderCross and the Snow Mountain Bike race for what would be the first two of his six total Winter X medals, all of them gold. Sweden’s Jennie Waara won gold, silver and bronze in three separate snowboard events, still a Winter X record.

Striking in retrospect is that skiing itself wasn’t even included. The glaringly insane—and not widely followed—shovel race was axed after one year. Mountain bike racing downhill on snow didn’t survive much longer. But the snowboard events flourished. And new skiing comps along the same lines were introduced in 1998 with Freeskiing and Skiboarding (a terrain-park oddity on tiny skis jettisoned in 2001) at the new venue of Crested Butte.

This second Winter X also added snowmobiles. Skiing and snowboarding today form the bulk of the Winter X Games and drive their broadcast popularity. But snowmobiles (and for awhile motocross bikes) have played a prominent role, too, and routinely attract some of the biggest live crowds in Aspen, who come for the noise, danger and NASCAR-style action.

Skiing and snowboarding also had dangerous, head-to-head events. BoarderCross (or Boarder X), featuring multiple riders on a wild course, was in the games from the start for both men and women. SkierCross was soon added, and both are now in the Olympic Games. Part of the thrill is the imminent possibility of disaster. Sure enough, carnage ensued. And after 20 years the events were dropped from Winter X in 2013. Boarder Cross was reintroduced back in 2014, but both are now gone.

The first five years saw the introduction of women’s Freeskiing, and Shaun Palmer was the first to win gold three years in a row, doing it in BoarderCross (’97-’99). The SuperPipe replaced the original Halfpipe competition in 2000 when organizers raised the walls from 11.5 feet to 15 (the walls grew to 22 feet in 2009). Todd Richards, Barrett Christy, Ross Powers and Tara Dakides were tough to beat in the early years when frontside and backside 720s (two full spins) won gold in Snowboard Halfpipe and Slopestyle.

In 2002 Aspen Skiing Company officials finally reversed a longtime ban on snowboards on Aspen Mountain and needed a way to publicize their change of attitude. X Games honchos were attracted by Aspen’s fame, and by the opportunity to present all the winter events at one venue: Buttermilk ski area.

Killeen Brettman, head of communications for ASC at the time, said, “When we sensed there was a chance to get the X Games, we decided this would be a bigger bang than anything else we were considering. The fact that a resort of Aspen’s stature was interested in hosting their event was appealing to ESPN in that they felt being accepted here gave their event tremendous credibility.”

Not everyone in Aspen was thrilled, of course. Some feared X Games crowds were just rowdy hip-hoppers with bad attitudes and no money. Even after the games succeeded, familiar questions around town were, “What do people see in all of this? And why do they like it better than the World Cup races?” Even early on, Winter X outdrew Aspen’s World Cup races, live and on TV. Sponsors, naturally, noticed.

When three full rings of the Winter X circus went off simultaneously, either you got it or you didn’t. With skiers arcing high above the walls of the SuperPipe, padded gladiators battling down a full-contact BoarderCross course, snowmobiles flying through the sky in the tear-ass SnoCross races, music pounding and Jumbotrons flashing images of it all to every corner of the premises, it was action-packed snow theater for our short-attention-span times. Not incidentally it also featured great athletes doing crazy and amazing athletic things.

As an index of the event’s importance, the entire U.S. Olympic freestyle snowboarding team showed up in Aspen to compete in the 2002 SuperPipe, just a few weeks before the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Aspen’s own three-time Winter X gold medalist Gretchen Bleiler boiled it down when she said, “For me the Olympics will always be huge, but the X Games are becoming the modern Olympics because the kids are really into them.”

On the business side, ESPN ramped up world domination plans by launching the X Games Global Championship in May 2003. A team event with both winter and summer sports, it was held simultaneously in Austin, Texas and Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia. More than 69,000 spectators attended live, Team USA won, and women’s ski SuperPipe was introduced with rising star Sarah Burke taking gold. There hasn’t been a second edition. ESPN found other ways to become an international brand.

By 2010, live annual attendance blew past 80,000. The games were carried across all ABC and ESPN media platforms, including clips on iPod, nightly X Center highlights, and daily mobile content.

In 2004, the first time ESPN and ABC broadcast the games live, they added massive lighting for nighttime, prime time viewing. It helped juice up television viewership over 30 percent from the previous year. And by 2006 viewership hit a record of more than 747,000 households, raising the 2005 numbers by 45 percent. The audience in every form was expanding exponentially.

The juggernaut helped create big stars such as Bleiler, White, Kelly Clark, Travis Rice, Lindsey Jacobellis, Tanner Hall and Sarah Burke. Winter X raised the bar every year on what could be done, expanding the limits of the sports and providing unprecedented opportunities for riders who had few other options at the time.

The Games also became labs for advancements in park and pipe gear, as well as features like twin tips that made their way to the general public. The entire new hard and soft goods industry that had sprung up for boarding got a huge boost as dedicated park and pipe ski lines such as Armada and 4FRNT joined pioneers like Burton and Jones, and crossovers from the surfing and skateboarding worlds like Oakley and Quiksilver, all flourishing in the bright lights of the X Games.

“Winter X has brought sports like skiing and snowboarding into people’s living rooms that probably would never have seen them before,” said Chris Davenport in 2004, when he became an announcer for them. Davenport got a bronze in Skier X at Crested Butte in 1998. “It’s one of my prize possessions, seeing how big the X Games have become,” he said, adding that they’ve “helped mainstream our sports and the athletes that participate, leading to more money from sponsors. Today we see more kids getting into skiing and snowboarding because they have been exposed to them through Winter X.”

Meanwhile, ESPN’s long shot bet on crazy youth looked brilliant. “In 10 years the X Games have become, pound for pound, one of the most valuable enterprises in television sports‚—and a favorite venue for Sony, Gillette and other marketers eager to reach an elusive audience: 12-19-year olds,” wrote Monte Burke in Forbes in February of 2004. It was no secret ESPN targeted generations X and Y, and succeeded. Burke also noted that in four years TV ratings for the winter games increased 88 percent, and that in 2003, 37 million people watched some slice of them.

He further pointed out that the astronomical cost of buying major league sports rights was predicted by Morgan Stanley to cause “billions of dollars in losses for the four major broadcast networks in the next four years.” On the other hand, the X Games, winter and summer, were expected to bring in up to $70 million for 2003 and net $15 million, “though ESPN executives insist the franchise’s overall profit is only $1 million.”

However much they’re cashing in, it’s in large part because they own the games outright, coughing up zero for TV rights, with no risk of losing them to a rival network in a bidding war. Disney, ESPN’s owner, doesn’t break out ESPN’s financial performance, so it’s hard to know how much that network makes, let alone its X Games brand. But the fact that reruns air constantly suggests healthy ad sales.

One important question Burke raised in Forbes was whether athletes are fairly compensated given the amount of money the games generate. Some athletes said no, and made attempts to unionize and launch competing events. But many of the top competitors seemed to agree with Barrett Christy, who made $100,000 annually in endorsements, when she said, “They’re not paying us enough, but I’m where I am because of ESPN.”

For ESPN’s part, President George Bodenheimer said, “No one is holding a gun to anyone’s head to participate.” Then they began adjusting their awards scale.

“When the X Games first started, the total prize money was $186,000,” said ESPN PR director Katie Moses Swope. She then explained that as the games and athletes were progressing, so were the financial rewards. For 2007, gold medal wins were reportedly worth $20,000, and by 2008 were up to $30,000 out of a total purse of a million dollars.

Meanwhile, athletes understood that winning Winter X metal, and the constant drumbeat of media coverage on ESPN, helped them earn name recognition with kids everywhere. The program guide became a Who’s Who of extreme sports.

ESPN introduced disabled sports at Winter X 2007 with a combined men’s and women’s MonoSkier X event, with Tyler Walker taking home the first gold, and Sarah Will, the top female finisher, coming in fourth overall.

In 2010, Winter X went global with an event in Tignes, France. Games followed around the world, but 10 years later only Norway plays host outside North America. Now ESPN has licensed Winter X Games in China and Asia in 2021 and beyond, and is optimistic about further franchising.

In April of 2020 Luis Sanchez followed up on Monte Burke’s story 16 years earlier by doing “some detective work” for a financial website on Disney’s media properties. Sanchez concluded that “ESPN likely generated at least $11.4 billion of revenue last year.”

Assuming total expenses of around $9 billion, “it implies that ESPN generates over $2 billion of annual operating income … and probably a good deal more.”

Given that profits are hard to come by in the major sports league coverage, it isn’t unreasonable to think that the X Games could be earning hundreds of millions or more of that total. Perhaps reflecting these impressive figures, an X Games gold medal in 2020 came with a $50,000 check.

A new generation of stars is rising to the occasion. Former teen sensation Chloe Kim already has seven medals, including five gold, from seven Snowboard SuperPipes starting in 2015. Reigning Snowboard Big Air queen Jamie Anderson takes lots of risks and gets lots of injuries. Also, lots of medals: 16 so far, more than any other female snowboarder in Winter X, ever. And last year skier Gus Kenworthy (five medals and counting) threw the first ever switch triple rodeo 1440 (three backflips with four full rotations) in Slopestyle, as the barrage of high-flying aerials continues. There’s no end in sight.

It’s a fitting metaphor for the Winter X Games, still flying high, unleashing genius and breaking records—a quarter of a century later. 

Photo above: Walter Amstutz led the transition from free-heel to locked-heel skiing. In 1928, he pioneered a spring to control heel-lift, soon known as the “Amstutz spring.” Reduced heel-lift helped spark the parallel turn revolution. Photo courtesy Ivan Wagner, Swiss Academic Ski Club

From 1929 to 1932, steel edges and locked-down heels transformed downhill and slalom racing into the high-speed alpine sports we love today.

It’s often said that alpine skiing was born in 1892, when Matthias Zdarsky experimented with skis adapted for steeper terrain, or perhaps with Christof Iselin’s 1893 ascent, with Jacques Jenny, of the Schilt in Switzerland.

But Zdarsky, Iselin and their heirs—including Hannes Schneider—were free-heel skiers and today we would lump them in with the nordic crowd. The sport we recognize as alpine skiing began with a pair of inventions that transformed downhill and slalom racing over the course of three winters, from 1929 to 1932.

Racers in Austria and Switzerland were primed for alpine competition, but lacked the tools for downhill speed. Kitzbühel held its first Hahnenkamm downhill in April 1906, won by Sebastian Monitzer at an average speed of 14 mph. Arnold Lunn launched the Kandahar Cup at Crans-Montana in 1911. After the Great War, Lunn headquartered at Mürren and in January 1924 founded the Kandahar Ski Club. This prompted Walter Amstutz and a few friends to launch the Swiss Academic Ski Club (SAS) the following month. Lunn intended the Kandahar to promote racing amongst his British guests—a rowdy assortment of public school Old Boys. Another contingent of sporting toffs infested the neighboring town of Wengen. Rivalry between the groups led the Wengen chaps, in 1925, to create their own ski-racing club. Because a railway ran partway up the Lauberhorn, the Wengen skiers disdained climbing. They called themselves the Downhill Only Ski Club (DHO).

 

 

Downhill and slalom racing were still fringe sports, pursued by a few dozen people at half a dozen meets each year. Lunn often said it was just good fun, and no one took it seriously. The equipment—hickory or ash skis without edges, and bindings with leather straps—worked well only in soft snow. Downhills were gateless route-finding exercises. Winning time on a typical two-mile downhill might be 15 or 20 minutes, for an average speed around 15 mph. Low speeds meant that falls, while common, rarely produced serious injury. Racers expected to fall, get back up, and finish. Slaloms were usually set to produce a one-minute winning time, but every gate required an exaggerated stem turn. A smooth stem christie was the mark of an expert skier.

On hard snow, edgeless hickory skis slipped and skidded uncontrollably. Skiers dreaded any traverse across an icy or crusted steilhang. In 1931 Christian Rubi, director of the Wengen ski school and a founder of the Lauberhorn race, recalled the terror of wooden edges:

“Touring skiers are on a Whitsun tour in the high mountains. They take their skis to the summit, and prepare to descend. Then comes the traverse on the hard firn, above the bergschrund. One of them slips, his edges don’t grip, he falls, slides, tries to stop in vain, slips headfirst and disappears into the coal-black night of the yawning crevasse – After half an hour, rescue is at hand. Someone dives into the cold depths on a double rope. There the victim dangles head-down from his ski bindings, face bloody. . .”

 

 

In December 1917, the mountaineer and ski jumper Rudolf Lettner had just such a scare during a solo tour on the Tennenbirge south of Salzburg. Lettner was able to self-arrest, stopping a potentially fatal slide by using the steel tip of his bamboo pole. Back at his accounting job, Lettner began doodling designs for steel edges. It took nearly a decade to figure out how to armor the skis without making them too stiff, but he filed a patent in 1926 for what we now call the segmented edge: short strips of carbon steel screwed to the edge of the ski-sole in a mortised channel.

Using steel edges, Lettner’s daughter Kathe finished second in downhill at the very first Austrian championships in 1928 (she reached the podium four more times in the next six years). Another early adopter was the 18-year-old ski instructor Toni Seelos of Seefeld, who used Lettner edges when he won a 1929 slalom at Seegrube—by five seconds.

Skiers outside of Austria heard about metal edges, but were skeptical. In 1927, Tom Fox of the DHO acquired a set of Lettners, but other Brits scoffed. Segmented edges looked fragile. Besides, 120 screws might weaken the ski. Arnold Lunn, after grumbling that some Englishman had tried unsatisfactory steel edges in the early ’20s, ran articles in the British Ski Yearbook suggesting that they made skis heavy, dragged in the snow, and inhibited turning. Beginners, he wrote, should by no means use metal edges. Over the next decade, experiments were made with continuous edges of brass and aluminum (continuous edges of steel proved far too stiff).

However, Lettner’s neighbors took notice. A handful of racers from the Innsbruck ski club saw an opportunity and on January 10-12, 1930, at Davos, they beat the pants off everyone at the second World Inter-University Winter Games. On Lettner edges, the Innsbruck boys took four of the top five places in slalom (and eight of the top 15 spots), plus the top four places in downhill. Notable were the Lantschner brothers, Gustav (Guzzi), Otto and Helmuth, who took first, second and fourth in downhill; Otto won the slalom with Helmuth fifth. On January 15, three days after the Davos triumph, Guzzi and Otto each went 65.5mph at the first Flying Kilometer, organized by Walter Amstutz at St. Moritz. They did it on jumping skis without steel edges, though they obviously hit the wax.

The Lantschners were hot but they had not previously been world-beaters. Only a year earlier, Guzzi came fourth in the 1929 Arlberg-Kandahar downhill and Otto tenth in the slalom.

It was obvious after the January 1930 races that steel edges were now essential for winning. Top “runners” scrambled for Lettner edges. The wealthy Brits of the Kandahar and DHO clubs were happy to pay a carpenter about $100 (in today’s money) to mortise their skis and sink about 120 screws.

 

 

In Wengen, Christian Rubi and Ernst Gertsch were convinced. Seeking to prove that local Swiss skiers could beat the Brits, they were busy organizing the first-ever running of the Lauberhorn, set for February 2-3. But Gertsch found time to take over the workbench at his father’s ski shop and install the new edges.

So equipped, they were able to beat the Lantschners. Rubi won the downhill, with three Brits following: Col. L.F.W. Jackson, then Bill Bracken, founder of the Mürren ski school, with Tom Fox third. Guzzi Lantschner settled for fifth, with Gertsch seventh.

The next day, Gertsch tied for the slalom win with Bracken. The next three places belonged to Innsbruck skiers, including Guzzi Lantschner in fourth, followed by Fox and Rubi. Bracken, who had grown up skiing in St. Anton, thus became the first Lauberhorn combined champion.

Over the space of three weeks, all the top alpine racers in Europe had converted to steel edges.

 

 

In the Illustrated Sportsman and Dramatic News (London), Arnold Lunn wrote “The Austrian team at the Winter University Games last year had all provided themselves with steel-edged skis, and they scored a run-away victory in the slalom. Again, steel edges had a great triumph in the race for the Lauberhorn Cup which was held at Wengen in the middle of February. The snow in the Devil’s Gap was the nearest thing to genuine ice that I have seen on the lower hills in winter since I was nearly killed twenty-five years ago on a cow-mountain above Adelboden. The contrast between the ease and security of the racers with steel edges and the slithering helplessness of the other competitors was most impressive.” Lunn predicted universal adoption of metal edges and recommended armor for the lower legs to prevent lacerations.

Scotsman David A.G. Pearson of the DHO reported to Ski Notes and Queries (London), “At my particular sports shop in Wengen the first supply [of edges] was sold out almost immediately, and I had to wait some days before a new stock came in. I believe that our friends at Mürren were as keen as we were.” Pearson warned that “A certain amount of skill is needed for their use. . . . If, in doing a Christiania one gets for a fraction of time on to the outside edge of the lower ski, one can hardly avoid going over like a shot rabbit . . .” This may be the first reference in print to catching an edge.

In late February, after years of lobbying, Lunn finally persuaded the FIS to sanction alpine races (some accounts say that Walter Amstutz did most of the talking on Lunn’s behalf).

 

 

Meanwhile, a parallel revolution was brewing. The switch from free-heel to locked-heel skiing began when Walter Amstutz took a close look at his bindings. Amstutz, like nearly every ski racer of his era, used a steel toe iron (Eriksen and Attenhofer Alpina were the popular brands) with leather straps over the toe and around the heel. Rotational control, not to mention what we would today call leverage control, was imprecise at best. In 1928, Amstutz introduced a steel coil spring to control heel-lift. The spring attached at one end to a leather strap above the ankle, and at the other end via a detachable clip to the top of the ski, about six inches behind the boot heel.

Arnold Lunn considered this a brilliant innovation. Beginning in 1929 nearly all top racers adopted the spring or some variant—less expensive competing versions used rubber straps. Decades later, Dick Durrance told Skiing Magazine’s Doug Pfeiffer, “The Amstutz springs were great. They held your boot to the ski. . . . we did add some strips of innertube for better tension.” By tension, Durrance meant heel hold-down.

Better control of the boot heel optimized the advantage of steel edges. Toni Seelos figured out how to cinch down his leather binding-straps to hold his heel solidly to the ski-top. He practiced jumping his ski tails around close-set slalom gates, using plenty of vorlage (forward lean) to get the tails off the snow so he could swing them sideways, in parallel, and land going in the new direction. The technique eliminated the draggy stem. Gradually he refined the movement, moving the tails sideways as a unit, without a visible hop.

 

 

Amstutz’ friend Guido Reuge, a mechanical engineering graduate of ETH Zurich, went one better. With his brother Henri, in 1928 he cobbled up a new binding, the first to use a steel cable to replace leather straps. The cable tightened around the boot heel with a Bildstein lever across the back of the boot (the lever was later moved out ahead of the toe iron, where a skier could reach it easily for binding entry and exit). But the real innovation was a set of clips

 

 

screwed to the sidewalls ahead of the boot heel. With the cable routed under the clips, the boot heel was clamped to the top of the ski for downhill skiing—English speakers called this effect “pull-down.” With the cable routed above the clips, you had a free-heel binding for climbing, touring and telemark. Reuge called this the Kandahar binding. He received a patent and began selling it in 1932. The two new technologies—steel edges and locked-heels—worked perfectly in concert, enabling all forms of stemless turning.

Meanwhile, Seelos perfected his skidless parallel turn. The concept was new and unique: No practitioner of Arlberg had ever thought of it. As late as 1933, Charley Proctor wrote in The Art of Skiing that the ultimate downhill turn was the “pure Christiana,” which skidded both skis.

That year Seelos brought his new turn to the FIS World Championships and won the two-run slalom by nine seconds over stem-turning Guzzi Lantschner. (For the full story of the Seelos turn, see “Anton Seelos” by John Fry, in the January-February 2013 issue of Skiing Heritage.) Seelos instantly transformed from ski instructor to international coach, and over the next two decades taught parallel turns to Olympic and world champions from Christl Cranz and Franz Pfnur to Toni Matt, Emile Allais and Andrea Mead Lawrence.

Decades later Durrance told John Jerome: “Seelos . . . developed this knack for getting through slalom gates like an eel. In the first FIS that he ran I think he won the slalom by something like thirteen seconds. He was head and shoulders above anybody else. He was my idol when I left Germany [in 1933]. . . With nothing but your weight shift you cut a carved turn, letting the camber of the ski do the turning for you.”

 

 

“I thought I’d just start skiing slalom like Seelos and I’d beat anybody,” Durrance said. If “anybody” meant any North American, he was right. But he couldn’t beat another Seelos fan, the professional Hannes Schroll, winner of the 1934 Marmolada downhill and new ski school director at Yosemite.

Like the steel edge, the Kandahar binding became an instant must-have for alpine racing, and then for all alpine skiers. The binding was manufactured under license, or simply copied, by numerous companies around the world. Under a variety of brand names (for instance, Salomon Lift) it remained the standard alpine heel binding design into the 1960s, long after the Eriksen-style toe iron was replaced by lateral-release toes. Some of the top racers, including Durrance, used both the Kandahar and the Amstutz spring for extra pull-down.

With new technology, race times tumbled. In 1929 at Dartmouth’s Moosilauke downhill, Charley Proctor set the fast time of 11 minutes, 59 seconds on the 2.6-mile course (average speed 13mph). He had hickory edges and free-heel bindings. By 1933, with steel edges and Kandahar bindings, he had it down to 7:22 for an average 20.25mph.

In 1930 the Lauberhorn start moved up to the summit, and assumed its modern length of 4.4km (2.7 miles). Christian Rubi won that race in 4:30.00, for an average speed with steel edges of 36 mph. In 1932, with heels locked, Fritz Steuri knocked 20 seconds off that time for an average speed of 38.9 mph.

Top speeds were getting interesting, and alpine racing became a spectator sport. At the 1936 Olympics in Garmisch, 50,000 people turned out to watch the slalom. The winner was Franz Pfnur. But there was a faster skier on the course. Toni Seelos, ineligible to race because he was a professional instructor and coach, was the forerunner. He beat Pfnur by five
seconds.

Pretty soon skiers didn’t even have to unlock their heels to reach the race start. A few resort hotels had already built rack railways and Switzerland’s first cable-pulled rail car, or funi, opened in 1924 at Crans, the first cable tram in Engleberg in 1927, Kitzbühel’s Hahnenkammbahn in 1928, and Ernst Constam’s T-bar at Davos in 1934. The race was on for uphill transportation, and alpine skiing had conquered Europe. 

Sources for this article include numerous reports in Der Schneehase and in the British, Canadian and American Ski Year Books for the years 1928 through 1939. Thanks to Einar Sunde for scanning many of these articles from his own library. Dick Durrance quotes from The Man on the Medal by John Jerome and from Skiing Magazine. More details from Snow, Sun and Stars, edited by Michael Lutscher. 

Other photo credits for the print edition: Guzzi Lantschner photo from Getty Images; Toni Seelos photo source unknown.

1921 was an important year in the history of ski racing. In 1920 the British ski racing pioneer Arnold Lunn, then age 32, became chairman of the Federal Council of British Ski Clubs and thus responsible for British ski racing. In January, 1921, at Mürren, Switzerland, he organized the first British Championships to be based on a “straight” or downhill race, with a slalom won on style points, not speed. Over the course of two days, slalom competitors were required to score points with telemark turns, stem turns, jump turns and stop-christies, in soft and difficult snow conditions. Winner of both the downhill and the combined trophy was 19-year-old Leonard Dobbs, who, as the son of Sir Henry Lunn’s local agent, had grown up skiing in Switzerland.

Lunn considered the judged slalom “a failure.” “The object of a turn is to get round a given obstacle losing as little speed as possible, therefore, a fast ugly turn is better than a slow pretty turn,” Lunn wrote in the British Ski Year Book. And so, over the course of 1921, he changed the rules. On January 1, 1922, on the grounds of Mürren’s Palace Hotel, Lunn organized the first-ever slalom race in which speed through gates was the sole criterion for victory. The winner: Johnson A. Joannides, a Great War veteran then resident in Mürren.

This was before the International Ski Federation (FIS) was founded (that came in 1924). FIS published its own rules for timed slalom in 1927 and the first race under those rules took place at Dartmouth College in 1928 (winner: Dartmouth freshman Bob Baumrucker). It would be 1931 before the FIS included a timed slalom in the first Alpine World Championships.  –Patrick Thorne

 From her home base in Monaco, the Swedish superstar is a TV commentator, advocate for World Cup racer safety, entrepreneur, and homeschooling mom.

When you’re a world champion, an Olympic champion, a World Cup overall champion and a successful TV commentator, you’re not the average mom. But last March, Swedish alpine ski-racing legend Pernilla Wiberg found herself at home in Monaco, doing what many of the world’s moms were doing: homeschooling her kids and busting outdoors for exercise.

Photo top of page: Wiberg in the the final slalom race of the season on March 16, 1997 in Vail. 

“It’s a rollercoaster,” says the 50-year-old Wiberg of parenting, pandemic or not. “It’s not easy and there is not [only] one way to succeed.”

Wiberg and her husband Bødvar Bjerke, a former Norwegian national alpine team coach, share parenting duties for their son and daughter, ages 17 and 13. Most winters, Bjerke covers for Wiberg when she travels extensively for her TV work, from late October through March. Last spring, while the family hunkered into quarantine in Monaco, back in Sweden Wiberg’s brother, sister and mother carried on their lives with no restrictions.

“Nobody can say right now if the approach that Sweden has taken with COVID-19 will in the end be the right one or not,” says Wiberg of the nation’s less-restrictive “herd immunity” policies. “It will take some years.”

Wiberg’s journeys include regular trips to the Pernilla Wiberg Hotel in Idre Fjall, a small ski resort and former mining village tucked up close to the Norwegian border in the northwest part of Dalarna in Sweden. The ski-in, ski-out hotel was built in 2003, shortly after Wiberg retired from racing. “It was the perfect project to jump into,” says Wiberg. She drew on lessons learned as a world-class athlete, from navigating sponsors and negotiating contracts to “doing mistakes,” she says. Today, Wiberg is engaged in all aspects of the hotel, from designing skier-friendly features—including small drying cupboards and lots of hooks for gear in every room—to overseeing marketing and consulting on menus. Her fierce dedication to skiing has shifted from winning races to sharing her love for the sport.

THE EARLY DAYS

Sweden’s winningest female ski racer did not grow up in ski country, but rather 200 miles south, in Norrköping. As the middle of three athletic kids of school-teacher parents, Pernilla participated in a variety of activities, including basketball, running, gymnastics, dance and music. She built her strength and her will by chasing her older sister, Annika. The family learned to ski at the local hill, 400-meter-long Yxbacken, and on school holidays the family made the five-hour car trek to the mountains.

She started racing at age 11 and found quick success on the slopes. In her first international event, at age 14, she won the Tropheo Topolino slalom. At age 16, she joined her sister at Malung—the ski academy that 2018 Olympic gold medalist Frida Hansdotter later attended—and continued her rise through the ranks, competing in the 1988 World Junior Championships.

Athletic kids growing up in Sweden in the 1980s had a god for each season, and they were named Ingemar Stenmark and Björn Borg. “It was amazing,” says Wiberg, recalling the time her alpine-racing idol, Stenmark, walked down a corridor where she and other athletes were stretching during a training camp. “It looked like he was floating over the ground.”

Wiberg suffered a devastating knee injury while competing in Vermont, just before the 1989 World Junior Championships in Alaska. The U.S. Ski Team athletes and coaches convinced the 18-year-old to stay in the States, and to see orthopedic surgeon Dr. Richard Steadman in South Lake Tahoe. After a five-hour surgery, and rigorous rehab that included delivering mail by bicycle to rebuild her strength, Wiberg became another Steadman success story.

But she pushed herself too hard. It was only after her family forced her to go on vacation at Christmas, and she stopped training for a week, that things started to click. She returned to racing in February 1990, and by March, less than a year after surgery, she was on a World Cup slalom podium.

THE TITLES

The following season Wiberg nabbed her first World Cup win, a slalom in January. The next month, at the 1991 World Championships in Saalbach, Wiberg charged back from a 1.6 second deficit on the first run of the giant slalom to win her first World title. She backed that up with Olympic GS gold the following year in Albertville. Wiberg would add speed events to her repertoire, eventually winning in all five World Cup events, and earning World Championships and Olympic medals in four.

The Swedish ski team was small and close, under the direction of Jalle Svanberg. They often trained with the Americans, and Julie Parisien fondly remembers NorAm trips and later U.S. Ski Team training camps with Wiberg, her teammate Ylva Nowen, and Svanberg.

“They were a great team, and such fun,” says Parisien, who remembers Wiberg’s sheer strength and superstar aura. When breakaway poles came on to the scene, the Swedish women were the first to master the technique, meticulously testing ways to clear the gates most efficiently. After scoring her first Super G win in 1994, and then Olympic gold in combined that year, Wiberg started running downhill. She teamed up with the Americans for off-season training and Picabo Street took Wiberg under her wing. “I was like a sponge,” says Wiberg. “I listened to everyone.”

Svanberg, who spent 11 years as Wiberg’s coach, starting at age 14, fostered this innovative and daring spirit. “From early on, she understood that to be the best, she had to do something nobody else did,” says Svanberg. That included exhaustive equipment testing and tweaking, experimenting with favorite smells to induce a “flow state” (Svanberg: “I’m not sure it worked, but we tried”), and working with a leading neurologist whose studies suggested doing max squats the day before a race.

Wiberg’s ability to come back from seemingly insurmountable challenges—including injuries, time deficits or in-season slumps—was legendary and, in her mind, entirely innate. “You are born with the ability to rise from falling, or not,” she says. Svanberg recalls the time a sports psychologist, after one meeting with the Swedish team, told Wiberg, “You don’t need me.”

Wiberg’s skiing success, bolstered by her dazzling smile and well-spoken, friendly demeanor, translated to popularity in her home country and beyond. After winning her first (of four) World titles, she shelved her university studies in economics and sport became her business education. That same year she released the song and music video Privilege. In 1992, after her first of two Olympic gold medals, she united with other Swedish athletes to try to create a more favorable tax status to preserve their earnings. Ultimately, and at first reluctantly, she followed the path of her sports heros Stenmark and Borg and moved to Monaco in 1995. “In the end it was good,” says Wiberg, who explains that Monaco’s proximity to the Alps made it far more convenient than Sweden for a ski racer.

As with many successful athletes, Wiberg sought greater independence, and specifically wanted Bjerke to travel with her for support. When Swedish team members opposed that, she went her own way, spending one year year training with the Norwegian team, and another with Svanberg as her private coach. That year, 1996, Wiberg won world titles in slalom and combined, and the following year she won the World Cup overall title. Despite their success together, she and Svanberg agreed the private team dynamic wasn’t healthy. Ultimately, Wiberg returned to the Swedish team. She and Nowen, with whom she had the original conflict, remain close friends today.

AFTER RACING

By the time Wiberg retired from racing, after the 2002 Olympics, she had racked up three Olympic medals (two gold), six World Championship medals (four gold), one World Cup overall title, an individual slalom World Cup title and 24 World Cup victories across all five disciplines. In 2019 Wiberg was given the Swedish Sports Academy’s Honorary Award, which goes to “the sportsperson who, through their ongoing efforts, brought admiration and respect and enriched Swedish sport.”

Wiberg remains a regular on the World Cup, but now as a commentator for Swedish TV, traveling to the studio in Stockholm on weekends, and sometimes to the ski venues. Olympic medalist and longtime commentator Christin Cooper-Taché appreciates Wiberg’s talents on the hill and in the booth. At Sochi the two would exchange notes daily during the course inspection at dawn. “She is very smart, and very informed and objective about ski racing,” says Cooper. Wiberg enjoys the challenge and the connection. “[Racing] had been my life for so many years, and now I can give back to my sport by explaining racing to viewers.”

Wiberg gives back in other ways, too. While still competing, she was elected by her peers as chairperson for the FIS athletes commission from 1996–2000, and then to the IOC athletes commission from 2002–2010. Since then her involvement has been dizzying, including her work for the past ten years with the FIS Alpine Equipment Working Group. This international group of World Cup athletes and coaches has helped to identify and develop ways to reduce injuries by looking at things like equipment design, cut-resistant fabrics, and factors like physical training, balance, physiology and technique. Wiberg notes how few injuries well-balanced skiers like Mikaela Shiffrin and Marcel Hirscher have had, and believes that plays a key role in injury prevention. She also advocates a backed-off schedule to allow athletes longer recovery times.

Along with her work for the FIS and IOC, Wiberg is a “Champion of Peace” for Peace and Sport, an international NGO, and a board member of both the World Olympian Association and Svenska Olympier. The former is dedicated to inspiring the 100,000-plus Olympians around the globe to help society and fellow Olympians, and the latter is an organization of all living Olympians in Sweden. In addition to her many volunteer roles, she serves on a professional board through her work with MIPS (multi-directional impact protection system) helmet technology.

Despite her own mental strength in competition, Wiberg understands the struggle for many athletes, and acknowledges the challenges of success. “When you have a medal, everyone sees you as a star,” she says. “They expect you to be a superhero and if you are not, the fall is so long. If you feel fragile, you don’t want to tell anyone. We have to say it’s okay to not feel okay.”

Wiberg’s own children enjoy recreational skiing and are active in soccer and gymnastics. After two months at her summer home in Sweden, the family is back in Monaco. Her TV duties will be in the Stockholm studio until the new year, when she hopes they shift to being on site at World Cup venues. What’s next on her rollercoaster? “People expect you to have goals in normal life, but you don’t,” she says. “I still don’t have a career goal, but jobs come to me for different reasons.”

Whatever comes along, Wiberg will attack it in her usual style, with guts and resolve. “All top athletes like to do things 100 percent!”  

 

reuters / alamy stock photo

reuters / alamy stock photo

Toni Sailer raced to seven World Championship medals in an improbable 24 months—helping him become skiing’s first leading man.

Above: The Blitz from Kitz: Combining three gold medals with his matinee-idol appearance, 21-year-old Toni Sailer was the breakout star at the 1956 Cortina Winter Olympic Games.

The ski world conventionally remembers Austria’s Toni Sailer as the first racer to capture three gold medals in a single Olympics, winning all the alpine competitions (slalom, giant slalom and downhill) at the 1956 Winter Games in Cortina, Italy. After Jean-Claude Killy hat-tricked again in 1968, no man has three-peated. But to appreciate Sailer’s dominance, you have to know what he did two years after the Olympics. In the 1958 Alpine World Ski Championships at Bad Gastein, Austria, he was in a class by himself. He won the giant slalom—in which victory is often decided by hundredths of a second—by four seconds, and he won the downhill as well. And he was second in the slalom, narrowly missing gold. The result was that he easily won the overall FIS World Championship combined gold medal.

At the time, Olympic medalists also received World Championship medals (the practice ended in 1980). So Sailer’s three 1958 gold medals, on top of his Olympic four (including the 1956 victory in the “paper” combined event), gave him seven World Championship gold medals in two years—a feat no other racer has achieved. To top it off, during the same 24 months he won the world’s toughest downhill, the Hahnenkamm. Twice.

How could a racer be so dominant? Going fast is one way to win. Its complement is to travel the shortest distance. Sailer was ahead of his time in perfecting the technique of taking a straight line between gates, using an uphill step to enter turns normally. American Tom Corcoran says watching Sailer’s line in 1958 was a lesson that he never forgot—and one that helped him become America’s top giant slalom skier.

Sailer also had a mental edge. His desire to win was so deeply embedded, he explained, that the goal of coming in first didn’t cross his mind. Rather, he likened his skiing to throwing a stone. “The stone flies by itself, and it lands by itself,” said Sailer. “I get the prize because the stone flew well. Why did it fly well? Because I threw it the right way.”

The 1958 World Championships were Sailer’s final races. Strict Olympic guidelines on amateur status forced him to retire. “I have to make money,” said the 23-year-old, by then Europe’s most famous athlete. And he did. Built like a football player and Hollywood handsome, he became a successful movie and TV actor, and a heartthrob to millions of women.

Sailer long served as chairman of the International Ski Federation’s Alpine Committee, making rules for the sport he once ruled as a competitor. One of his life’s proudest achievements was establishing the children’s ski school in his hometown of Kitzbühel. 

Post-script: Sailer died in 2009, in Innsbruck, Austria. He was 73. With his remarkable competitive success, along with his post-racing career in film and entertainment, skiing’s first leading man was nothing short of a national hero. Heinz Fischer, president of Austria, paid tribute to Sailer as “a top athlete who already became a legend during his lifetime.”

Excerpted from the February 2008 issue of SKI Magazine. John Fry (1930-2020) was editorial director of SKI and Snow Country magazines, and longtime president, then chairman, of ISHA. He authored the award-winning book The Story of Modern Skiing. His final book, published posthumously, is Abandon Foolish Scheme: Deathly encounters that you won’t find in bestsellers about dying. 

 

 

From Olympic racing to elite coaching, this once-and-future family has had a powerful impact on the sport. 

Above: John Caldwell at home in Putney, Vermont, where he first started competing as a high-school student in the late 1940s. By 1951 (right), he was training with the U.S. nordic team for the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo.

The Caldwells are America’s first family of cross-country skiers. As elite athletes, coaches, ski technicians, organizational founders, retailers and advisors, the family and the sport have formed a multi-generational bond that goes back 70 years. In U.S. skiing, only the Cochrans come close.

On a breezy June day in Peru, Vermont, three generations of Caldwells—grandfather John, son Sverre, granddaughter Sophie and her husband, Simi Hamilton—gathered on the porch of Sverre’s home, with its sweeping view south to Stratton Mountain. They pieced together a family history that begins with John’s journey from the Putney School to Dartmouth College to the 1952 Olympics, stretches through Sverre’s seminal coaching gig at Stratton Mountain School, and strides into the present with Sophie and Simi’s leadership on the U.S. World Cup team.

The family legacy has humble roots in late-1940s Vermont. Although a gifted downhill skier, John was a cross-country neophyte as a high-school athlete at Putney. In his first nordic race, he borrowed his sister’s clunky alpine skis (because they were smaller and lighter than his) and “basically ran around the course on skis,” he recalls. He finished in the top 15. Yet by the time John reached Dartmouth, his skills—and equipment—had improved sufficiently to enable him to compete as a four-event skier, in cross-country, jumping, slalom and downhill. He was named to the 1952 Olympic nordic combined team.

Grand as it might have been to go to the Games, he didn’t exactly receive the gilded Olympic treatment. Cross-country was little more than a blip on American skiing’s radar screen. “Not many ski clubs were promoting cross-country skiing,” John says, and the team essentially had no budget. Preparation for the Games in Oslo was an on-the-fly affair. Relegated to the margins, John and his teammates self-funded an impromptu camp in Sun Valley, where they didn’t always maintain an intensive focus on training. Enticed one day by fresh powder, they were spotted by a photographer who was so impressed by their downhill talents that he took publicity shots for the resort’s marketing campaign.

Not surprisingly, John’s Olympic performance in Oslo was less than stellar. “I never felt so unprepared for an athletic event in my life,” he says. He remembers making 11 jumps from the legendary Holmenkollen and falling six times. One inelegant but successful jump enabled him to qualify for the 18-kilometer cross-country event, in which he was 73rd among 75 finishers. More than 24 minutes behind the Norwegian winner, he managed to beat just one Australian skier.

That ignoble performance motivated John to embark on a long campaign to upgrade the stature of—and support for—cross-country skiing in America. In 1953, he launched a three-decade career of teaching and coaching at Putney while he and his wife, Hep, started a family (or, as Sophie teases her grandfather, “popping out kids”). Tim, Sverre, Peter and Jennifer formed the next generation to carry the family name forward. Meanwhile, John continued to burnish his own legacy.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was back on the national-team scene, coaching several Olympic and world championship teams, becoming the nordic representative on the U.S. Ski Team board, and writing a book, The Cross-Country Ski Book, the only one of its kind in the U.S. at that time. (The book’s success “kept me out of the poorhouse,” John says.) He was also founder of the New England Nordic Ski Association, whose prestigious annual award now bears his name.

Despite these efforts, acceptance of the sport was slow in coming. “Nobody paid attention to cross-country,” John says, and he remembers another USST board member telling him: “If you weren’t such a nice guy, we wouldn’t even have a cross-country program.” For the 1966 World Championship team, it took a $1,000 gift from a friend to pay for top-quality equipment for team members.

That was the world Sverre and older brother Tim entered in the late 1960s and early 1970s as they rose through the nordic ranks. Tim carried the family banner into elite racing, competing in the first of four Olympics as an 18-year-old in 1972. (Peter was also a successful XC racer, building an impressive collegiate record, while Jennifer would win the prestigious American Birkebeiner race in 1983.) During Tim’s 12-year Olympic run, between 1972 and 1984, respect for cross country finally began to take root. “A lot of things changed,” Tim says, and by 1984, “we were treated like kings compared with our predecessors.”

That was all relative, of course. By alpine standards, the American cross-country program was still a bare-bones operation. Team coaches “wore many hats,” says Tim—waxing skis, making travel arrangements, cooking meals, devising fitness programs. “In 1972, you never heard the term ‘wax tech.’ And even in 1984, we were doing a lot of waxing ourselves.” That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “There was something to be gained by getting a feel for your skis by waxing them.”

And in the absence of official support, says John, U.S. skiers might have had a few advantages over well-financed Scandinavian and Russian programs. Freed from sponsor obligations, for example, U.S. skiers could use any wax brands and combinations that they wanted. “We knew more about waxing than anyone else,” John says of the 1960s and 1970s. “We tried waxing innovations that might have given us an edge.”

Health issues—pneumonia and back problems—slowed Sverre’s athletic development. He stayed connected to the sport by dabbling in coaching as a Dartmouth student in the 1970s. But he found that coaching and athletic development hadn’t advanced much since John’s Olympic struggles in 1952.

When Sverre took over the nordic program at Stratton Mountain School in the late 1970s, he was hired not because of his great expertise but simply because there wasn’t much competition. “There just weren’t that many experienced coaches,” he says. After all, there were no technical manuals for guidance (except perhaps for The Cross-Country Ski Book) and no great American mentors. The concept of the ski academy was essentially birthed with Burke Mountain Academy, founded in 1970, followed by Stratton Mountain School in 1972 and Green Mountain Valley School in 1973. But the academies’ focus was almost entirely on developing alpine athletes. Like John flying blind in preparing for the 1952 Olympics, Sverre had no template to guide him.

Left to his own devices, Sverre managed to turn the SMS nordic program into the best secondary-school program in the country. In a 40-year span beginning in the late 1970s, 16 Olympians have had SMS roots, and Sverre produced so many national-team members that the best number he can put on it is “30ish.” Among those elite skiers are Sophie and Simi, as well as Sophie’s cousin (and Tim’s son) Patrick and recent Olympic gold medalist Jessie Diggins.

As a third-generation standard-bearer for the Caldwell legacy, Sophie claims she felt no pressure to live up to the family name. (“I took the pressure off because I wasn’t a very good athlete,” jokes Sverre.) But there were decided advantages to being a Caldwell: Sophie could tap into a deep reservoir of wisdom and experience.

Thanks in part to John and Sverre, the national team has advanced by light years since the early 1950s. Both Sophie and Simi have been most successful as skate skiers in sprinting events. Sprinting wasn’t added to the roster of Olympic sports until 2002, and skating technique was just beginning to evolve in the early 1980s, when Tim was nearing the end of his competitive career. What Sophie and Simi are doing today was unimaginable in John’s time … or even in Tim’s. Sophie is a two-time Olympian who finished third in the 2017–2018 overall World Cup sprint standings; Simi, who grew up in Aspen, is a three-time Olympian who finished ninth in the overall sprint standings the following year.

Sophie and Simi are not alone in sustaining the family legacy. Sverre’s son Austin has followed his father into the collegiate coaching ranks. Patrick is now retired from the national team, but cousin Zach, proprietor of Caldwell Sports in Putney, is considered one of the best—if not the best—cross-country ski tech in the country. And when Sophie and Simi talk abstractly about having a family in the future, perhaps a fourth generation of Caldwells is preparing, prenatally, to carry the banner farther into the future.

They are, indeed, a once-and-future force of nature.  

 

From Skiing History, Sept/Oct 2020

 

 

 

Above: Dartmouth coach Dodge in the finish area at the Birds of Prey World Cup giant slalom event at Beaver Creek, Colorado in 2017. Edith Thys Morgan photo.

A former World Cup and pro racer, Dartmouth’s men’s alpine coach has led the return to relevance of U.S. college racing. 

Although few ski racers have been able to take to the slopes this summer, the racing community has been hotly debating the relationship between NCAA skiing and U.S. Ski and Snowboard in athlete development. It’s a long-running argument. At its heart is the question of how elite racers can—or cannot—use collegiate competition in their path to the World Cup.
For more than 30 years, Dartmouth College alpine coach Peter Dodge has been leading that conversation.

Every December, at the Birds of Prey World Cup giant slalom in Beaver Creek, Colorado, the finish area is awash in a sea of green parkas, emblazoned with the iconic Dartmouth ski team snowflake. Dodge is always there, surrounded by student athletes cheering on fellow and former Dartmouth classmates. This past year, they were rooting for Tommy Ford, the eventual winner, and also for 2018 graduate Brian McLaughlin and current student George Steffey, competing in his first-ever World Cup event.

Now entering his 14th year on the U.S. Ski Team, Ford has attended Dartmouth as many national team athletes have—by patching terms together opportunistically while rehabbing from injuries and during off-season breaks. Like Steffey, Ford never raced for Dartmouth on the NCAA circuit. By contrast, McLaughlin, the 2018 NCAA giant slalom champion, is the latest in a trend of promising American skiers who attended college full-time while racing on the NCAA circuit. He emerged with the skills, maturity and ranking to make the jump to the World Cup.

One man who’s been instrumental in creating an environment where such success can happen—especially for American athletes—is Dodge, who’s coached the Dartmouth men’s alpine team since 1990. Looking at his own path in ski racing helps to explain his motivation.

RURAL VERMONT ROOTS

Dodge and his older brother Dave grew up in St. Johnsbury, in the heart of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. As he remembers it, “every little town had a rope tow.”  Their father, Dave “Duffy” Dodge, an interstate highway builder who had raced for the University of Vermont, taught the boys how to ski under the lights on the rope tows of the Lyndon Outing Club. “Skiing” also included cross-country touring and jumping. On weekdays after school the boys would climb the hill behind the Murphy family’s hotel. They hauled a few saplings along and used them as slalom gates.  On weekends, they’d go to the “big mountain” at Burke.

Racing in that corner of northern Vermont was a down-to-earth affair. On the way to a competition in tonier Stowe, the younger Dodge remembers mentioning to his Dad that the Stowe kids were “a bit stuck up.” Duffy gave his son some no-nonsense advice: “Beat them and they’ll be your friends.” Dodge did just that, and fondly remembers a mass snowball fight that same afternoon with his new buddies. Soon Dodge’s skiing skills would take him well beyond the Kingdom.

Dodge worked his way up the skiing ranks, attending regional camps and national competitions while attending public high school at St. Johnsbury Academy. Meanwhile, the Murphys helped to entice Warren Witherell to come to Vermont, where he started Burke Mountain Academy in 1970. At Burke, coaches Witherell and Chris Jones — as well as Eastern Regional coach George Ostler — helped Dodge to progress. By the time he graduated from high school in 1973, he was on the National Development Team.

HITTING THE ROAD

After one gap year, Dodge started Dartmouth in the fall of 1974. He took the winter off, won the 1975 Can-Am title, and spent the next year on the U.S. Ski Team before being demoted to the C Team. After a lackluster season racing in Europe, Dodge was dropped from the team and returned to Dartmouth in the fall of 1976. Following his fall term, he returned to form, winning the early season races in December 1976. Dodge was then offered and declined a spot on the D Team, with far less accomplished athletes.

That was when he had his first epiphany. “I was sitting in the parking lot of my brother’s fraternity during Christmas break, and it was about 60 degrees. I remember thinking ‘I know I can ski better than this.’” He decided right then to go to Europe on his own.

Dodge recruited Bill Doble as his ski tech and Swiss native Konrad “Butch” Rickenbach — then a student at Burke Mountain Academy — as his coach. Finally, he talked his parents into buying a Peugeot for European delivery so they could get around. After a month together, and strong results, the trio broke up and Dodge joined a Europa Cup tour (funded by the Europa Cup) through Czechoslovakia and Poland. The entire tour, with racers from 15 nations, literally piled into a Russian airplane in Zurich, and then traveled around by bus, with ski bags in the aisle. “It was super fun,” recalls Dodge. His results earned him a spot on the U.S. B Team, and he competed in World Cup races the following season.

Despite finishing 1979 with two top-15 World Cup finishes in Stratton and Waterville Valley, when coach Bill Marolt tracked him down by phone at his brother’s condo in Burlington that spring, it was to kick him off the team. That was when he had his second epiphany. “It was the same story as before. I put down the phone—click—and said, ‘I just turned pro!’” Dodge recalls with a laugh.

That experience helps Dodge relate to the athletes who come to Dartmouth with unfinished business. “After two stints on the U.S. Ski Team, I knew I could ski better. I just wanted to go out and ski the way I knew how to ski.” As with so many American and international skiing stars in that era, he found the World Pro Tour to be liberating.

“The beauty of the pro tour was there were no politics: You show up and go fast,” he says. Dodge found immediate success, winning Rookie of the Year in 1980. After nine years, he retired in 1989 and went to work for his longtime supporter CB Vaughan at CB Sports. Just as he was looking to return to college to finish his degree, the Dartmouth coaching job came up. Dodge took the position over from Mark Ford, who’d been on that same Europa Cup bus tour that launched his international success. Ford’s son is the aforementioned Tommy, currently America’s top giant slalom skier.

COLLEGE RACING’S COMEBACK

At Dartmouth, Dodge inherited a big piece of skiing history and built on the tradition. He has presided over an era that saw NCAA racing move from a step-down program for elite junior racers, to a highly competitive arena where top athletes toggle between the World Cup and the carnival circuit, and often continue their athletic careers after graduation. In many respects, it has returned college racing to its roots and relevance.

“Ski racing in the U.S. was originally born out of college outing clubs,” explains Dodge. Chief among them was the Dartmouth Outing Club, which organized the first Winter Carnival in 1911. Until Bob Beattie organized a U.S. Ski Team in the 1960s, Olympic teams were chosen from the college rosters.  As the U.S. Ski Team grew, college racing became less relevant for development, though some athletes—like Dave Currier, Dodge and Tiger Shaw—were able to work Dartmouth’s flexible D-Plan around their competition schedules.

Shortly after Dodge took over, college coaches in the West, including Richard Rokos at Colorado and George Brooks at the University of New Mexico, took the lead from the World University Games and held some FIS-sanctioned University (FIS UNI) races. Dodge, who was president of the Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association (EISA), saw the opportunity in that, and eventually Dartmouth hosted the first official EISA FIS UNI race in 1995. “That changed things,” he explains.  In a push to make the tour better, FIS UNI races were phased in and become the norm.

As FIS-level racing legitimized the circuit, and the level of competition rose accordingly, NCAA skiers—from the U.S. and other countries— started moving to their national teams after college. In Dodge’s tenure as coach, skiers who advanced to their national teams, after competing for and graduating from Dartmouth, include: Bill Gaylord (GBR), Patrick Biggs (CAN), Martin Anguita (CHI), Brad Wall (AUS), Tanguy Nef (SUI) and Americans Andy Martin, Roger Brown, Paul McDonald, David Chodounsky, Ace Tarberry, and McLaughlin. Nef, who will graduate with a computer science degree next spring, scored two top 10 World Cup slalom results last season.

By the time Chodounsky, a last-minute recruit, started at Dartmouth in 2004, the team was “stacked,” he recalls.  (Dartmouth men won the NCAA slalom title for five years straight, from 2002 to 2006.) “I was not the top guy, but I knew I was going to a good team,” he says. It was also a tight-knit, hard-working and fun-loving team. Dartmouth’s all-American squad won the NCAA championships in 2007. “Peter never pressured us to finish,” he adds. “He told us you have to go for it if you want to win.” He’d also remind his athletes: “Someone’s got to win today. It might as well be you!”

By Chodounsky’s senior year, he was invited to compete on the Europa Cup with the U.S. Ski Team. As is his policy, Dodge fully encouraged the opportunity for higher-level competition, even though it meant missing two carnivals. Chodounsky graduated in four years with a double major in engineering and earth science and went on to become the top American slalom skier, spending nine years on the U.S. Ski Team and competing in two Olympics.  

THE DARTMOUTH EXPERIENCE

Chodounsky’s success not only made him the poster child for the Dartmouth Experience, but also triggered a shift in perception. College racing, for some athletes, can not only be a path for elite development, but also the preferred path: Four years in a stable, social, intellectually stimulating team structure can be an ideal environment for discovering true potential. “Dartmouth is all about excellence in academics, conduct, standards… having a good experience for athletes,” says Dodge. “Winning is fun, but it’s not all it’s about. We’re preparing them for life.”

That starts by creating a supportive team atmosphere, which is not a mere consequence of a team sport. “We really work on it,” says Dodge, who encourages athletes to help coach each other. “When you coach someone else, you improve your own skiing,” he explains. Dodge, who bristles at the concept of hazing, encourages incoming athletes to be leaders from the start. “I tell them there is no seniority or hierarchy here.  Learn from the seniors, but I don’t expect you to be the last one in line. If you go fast, you’ll start.”

The appealing combo of high-level training and personal development—highlighted most recently by Chodounsky and McLaughlin—has brought Dartmouth an embarrassment of riches, particularly in American ski talent. Again this season, the team will include athletes with multiple years of USST experience. Many have aspirations to continue racing through and after college. In all, Dodge has 12 athletes vying for six spots in each carnival.

Dodge points out that the high level of competition is not unique to Dartmouth, and not unique to men. “Nationally, there’s a lot of college talent. We’re head-to-head with other top teams.”

Athletes like Leif Kristian Nestvold-Haugen, Trevor Philp and Erik Read (all racing for the University of Denver), Jonathan Nordbotten (University of Vermont) and David Ketterer (University of Colorado) have established NCAA legitimacy on the men’s side. And “five past or current NCAA women are scoring on the World Cup,” Dodge says. These include Canadians Laurence St. Germain, Amelia Smart, Ali Nullmeyer and Roni Remme, as well as U.S. racer Paula Moltzan. Meanwhile, U.S. Ski Team members Katie Hensien and Keely Cashman, both World Junior medalists, are competing on the NCAA circuit this season for Denver and Utah, respectively.

If the U.S. has been slower than other nations (especially Norway and Canada) to capitalize on collegiate programs as a development resource, Dodge continues to advocate for ways in which skiers can work towards the national team. “The key is not centralizing,” he says — not defaulting to a system of making selections and choosing stars. That said, coordinating national development with colleges, regions and clubs—so they can all support each other— is particularly important for NCAA college teams, which are not allowed to train together out of season. Dodge has participated in summer projects that bring NCAA athletes from several schools together under the U.S. Ski Team umbrella, and is optimistic about its potential for future collaboration.

Meanwhile, as the NCAA moves to develop rules that allow student-athletes to receive compensation for their “name, image and likeness,” Dodge sees that college skiers—many of whom must buy their own equipment—will see some real benefit. “If ski companies could get some promotional value from college skiers, it would provide incentive for them to provide better and/or less expensive equipment … or even some compensation.”

Along his way, Dodge wondered if he should have tried something else or moved somewhere else— or maybe just gone after a big paycheck as a private coach. But he also realizes that having the opportunity and freedom to build and run a program the way he wants is a good gig. From his base in the Dartmouth Outing Club, his influence on American skiing has been far-reaching and profound. It’s also been rewarding.

“I get to work with great kids and great families, and it keeps you young,” he says. He’s close to his son Jensen, who will play hockey this year for the Morrisville State College Mustangs, and lives next to his dad, Duffy, who quit skiing at age 90. He gets to see plenty of friends who went to New York and made their millions. “When they say they want to move back to Hanover, I say, ‘I’ve got you beat!”  

Edith Thys Morgan spent eight years as a member of the U.S. Ski Team, competed in two Olympics (1988, 1992) and three FIS Alpine World Championships (1987, 1989 and 1991), and was ranked among the top ten downhill and Super G skiers in the world. She retired from racing in 1993. She’s now a writer, blogger, frequent Skiing History contributor, and ski-racing mom. She lives in Hanover, New Hampshire with her family. Learn more at racerex.com. An earlier version of this article first appeared on skiracing.com.

 

 

 

Alpine ski jumpers—sticking Geländesprungs, cliff hucks and gap-jumps—have been sending it for more than a hundred years.

Jesper Tjader explains what he wants to try on a practice run for the 2014 Nine Knights terrain park competition in Livigno, Italy, and no one thinks it’s possible. But he casually skis onto the in-run anyway. He’s planning a transfer from one big ramp to another one about 50 meters (164 feet) away on a completely different course. Coming up short means a face-full of vertical ice and almost certain serious injury. Overshooting isn’t a consideration since nobody believes he’ll clear the massive gap to begin with. But 20-year old Tjader, without consciously knowing it, is riding a wave of Big Air heroics that will define the first two decades of alpine ski jumping in the 2000s. The Swede sticks the landing three times that day on a jump no one else is even thinking about, and the last time he throws a double back flip.

Photo above: Athletic achievements in action sports often arrive unplanned. Swedish freeskier Jesper Tjader decided to try an unprecedented 50-meter “death gap” transfer between ramps during practice at a 2014 competition. He nailed it three times. And on his final attempt, he threw in a double back flip. Suzuki Nine Knights photo.

When Skiing Big Air debuts at the 2022 Winter Olympics in China, it will be on the back of these kinds of attention-grabbing feats over the past twenty years. Candide Thovex making the first successful jump on 120-foot Chad’s Gap, near Alta, in 1999. Jamie Pierre dropping a 255-foot cliff huck in 2006 in the Grand Targhee, Wyoming, backcountry, only to have Fred Syversen up the ante to a bonkers, and accidental, 351 feet two years later filming in Norway. Rolf Wilson laid down a 374-foot-long alpine jump in 2011 during a competition off the 90-meter jump at Howelsen Hill, and David Wise popped 46 feet above a park jump in 2016 in Italy, upping the record by more than 10 feet. All of this was accomplished on regular alpine ski gear—and it all began with something called the Geländesprung.

Hannes Schneider likely introduced, or at least popularized, the Geländesprung (literally “terrain jump” in German) in the early 1900s in the Austrian Arlberg. Writing in Skiing magazine in 1964, G.S. Bush mentioned Schneider demonstrating a maneuver where he “used two ski poles instead of one, and, an accomplished jumper, he leaped even when there was no ramp. Rushing across a sharp break in a slope, he’d push himself up and forward on the poles, catapulting himself high over the hill’s edge, and then, by twisting his body and skis, he’d change the direction his skis were facing in mid-flight. He called this spectacular trick, ‘Geländesprung.’”

By the 1950s that description was obsolete and gelandes had come to more broadly encompass all alpine-style jumping that includes ski poles and bindings with locked-down heels—two major things that differentiated it from classic heads-and-tips-first Nordic jumping. It began to make regularly noted appearances in the U.S. in the 1930s where it was mentioned as an activity at areas from Glen Ellen, Vermont, to Badger Pass in Yosemite.

Oddly, it also turned up on an American stamp issued in 1932, commemorating that year’s third Winter Olympics, being held in Lake Placid. As noted collector James Riddell remarked in an article, “The Scandinavian disciplines Langlauf and Springlauf only at Lake Placid! This stamp, strangely enough, depicted a Geländesprung, which hardly suited either event.” Ski journalist Mort Lund observed that the stamp displayed “a form of skiing for which there was no Olympic, world or local competitions…” It may have been the 1940s before the first known gelande events started occurring at places like Alta, Utah.

Seeing is Believing

What would primarily propel alpine jumping is photography, which has proven both a blessing and a curse, with detractors claiming that photo fame and peer pressure drive kids to do dangerously crazy things they wouldn’t otherwise. But as the world rolled into the 1960s, magazine photos and movies became major drivers for alpine ski jumping. Not because people were doing it for the cameras, but because the cameras craved it. Big air was dramatic and it sold. Take Jim McConkey, for instance.

A famous early image showed him jumping 100 feet over a ski plane on a glacier in Canada in 1962. He next dropped a 90-foot cliff in the Bugaboos, which was then nearly unthinkable. Ninety feet is still bragging material. And it opened up the mountains to stuff so ridiculous that jumpers had to create wings. Tragically, one who did was McConkey’s son Shane, who died in a skiing and BASE-jumping accident in the Dolomites in 2009.

Jim McConkey’s early 1960s plane-jumping image was followed by a 1963 Hans Truöl photo of legendary Austrian racer Egon Zimmermann, who would go on to win the Olympic downhill gold medal, jumping the Flexenpass highway above Lech and clearing a new 356 Porsche in the process. Zimmermann personally gave visitors a postcard of the photo at his Hotel Kristberg in Lech right up until his death at 80 this past August. He once told me that he’d done the jump mainly as a promo for Porsche, which he thought was ironic since he suffered a bad wreck in his own Porsche several years later. The pic is still iconic today and along with McConkey’s plane jump helped create the modern concept of gap-jumping as an Evel Knievel form of showmanship.

The value of film to big league ski jumping was cemented when skiing action scenes, being shot by Willy Bogner in some of the Alps’ most glamorous locales, began appearing in James Bond movies. The high-octane Bond footage gave a big boost to skiing in general and extreme jumping in particular, the latter as a result of three deeply memorable stunt sequences.

The first was in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1969, where George Lazenby’s stunt skiers were German racer Ludwig Leitner and Swiss downhill ace Bernhard Russi. Near the end of a long chase sequence at Murren, Switzerland, Bond jumps over a highway very reminiscent of Zimmermann’s Porsche-clearing gelande. Only Bond did it over a huge snowplow with a snowblower that devours the pursuing bad guy when he doesn’t go big enough. Unfortunately, “Russi was injured when he crashed on the road,” Willy Bogner once told me. But it definitely raised the stakes on gap-jumping and built on the Zimmermann/McConkey foundation.

Next came Rick Sylvester’s mind-boggling jump off Mount Asgard on Baffin Island in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me that ended 3,000 vertical feet later with a parachute landing. It was a game-changer that furthered the blending of skiing with BASE-jumping and fired up ski jumpers by exponentially extending the limits of what was possible. The movie scene took three tries for the camera crew to get the shots, but it awed a global audience and inspired people like Shane McConkey. (Sylvester got the coveted call for the Spy stunt because he had skied off El Capitan in California in 1972, which was filmed by a young Mike Marvin, who went on to Hot Dog—the Movie fame. Sylvester’s El Cap feat is considered the first filmed BASE jump on skis.)

In 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, extensive ski scenes in Cortina, Italy, are capped by former 6-time World Champion freestyle skier John Eaves standing in for Roger Moore and jumping off Cortina’s famed 90-meter Nordic hill—on a pair of 205 Olin Mark VI slalom skis. Almost everyone used at least 215s on gelande jumps a lot smaller than a 90-meter, with 220s more likely under foot. Plus Eaves did it tandem, side-by-side with a regular, properly equipped Nordic jumper.

“I had my own jump,” Eaves told me. “It was set at 0 degrees. The Nordic take off was -11 degrees. They need that to get into the air foil. Mine felt like a good kick when I hit it, allowing me to gain altitude over the Nordic jumper immediately. Then I would slowly lose altitude as he went ahead… I did 200 feet once.” It wasn’t out of his wheelhouse, Eaves explained. “I got second place at the Whistler gelande in 1974 on a pair of Dave Murray’s lead weighted downhill skis.”

Big Air, Big Competitions

Competitive alpine ski jumping wasn’t hugely successful over the years, but it was the testing grounds for a lot of what followed. While earlier gelande competitions definitely occurred, Alf Engen staged the first-ever National Gelande Championships at Alta in 1964, and just for good measure won it.

That event lasted for ten years (plus occasional resurrections for anniversaries) before insurance companies and lawyers got involved. But by then there were gelande comps, and their direct descendants in the form of “ski splashes,” going on everywhere: Mad River, Sugarbush, Purgatory’s famous Goliath Gelande, Snowbowl Montana, Steamboat Spring’s Winter Carnival off the 70 and 90-meter jumps. Other hosts included Jackson, Whistler, Alyeska, Aspen’s Winterskol, a swimming pool alongside the Silvertree Hotel in Snowmass, and so on, with a tour that included 13 stops at its peak. But Alta’s remained the granddaddy and the big one everybody aimed for.

Interestingly, Porsche stayed allied with alpine ski jumping over the years, supplying a car as first prize for one of the early gelande events in Vail, won by Mark Jones in 1974 at the then world-record distance of 213.5 feet. The prize got everyone’s attention as much as the length, and helped to jump-start (ahem) the gelande tour.

By this time freestyle skiing aerial events had been going on for a few years in the US and around the world. They were formally recognized by the FIS in 1979 and first showcased at the Olympics in 1994. Combining outrageously vertical air (20 feet above the kicker, up to 60 feet above the landing) with full-on gymnastics (three full back flips with five full twists for example), they’ve made for great TV. They also led directly to the jibbing movement and park and pipe riding that rewards tricks as much as amplitude or distance.

For the last 40 years, the sky has literally been the limit for gelandes, gap-jumps and cliff hucks, to the point where some of it has gone almost beyond the pale and stalled a bit as a result. Meanwhile, park and pipe events have combined most of the other forms of alpine jumping and added some new wrinkles, along with wide exposure and money that both attracts and nurtures a lot of the jumping talent.

Freestyle courses, super-pipes and big air kickers provide highly visible venues for people to go huge while emphasizing tricks and still being able to ski away. That’s because the jumps are vaguely within reason, and are regular events instead of one-off stunts to set a record.

Video Revolution

There’s no avoiding the inherent danger of big air. After Paul Ruff’s fatal 160-foot jump in 1993 near Kirkwood, California, in an attempt to set a world record, some industry insiders said it would slow the seemingly endless rush to push skiing’s limits. Not so.

There are still people, of course, getting big air, and there’s still a market for it, primarily in the ski-porn films that are more popular than ever with platforms like Netflix and YouTube. The video cameras were there when Candide Thovex made the first successful flight over Chad’s Gap in Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, in 1999, throwing in a mute grab, and when he came back the next year and did it with a D-Spin. Yes, the same Chad’s Gap where Tanner Hall, after sessioning it well all day in 2005, came up short trying a switch cork 900 and broke both ankles. On video. He returned for redemption in 2017.

The cameras were running in 2006 when Jamie Pierre stuck a 255-foot cliff drop in the Grand Targhee backcountry of the Tetons. He literally stuck it, going in almost headfirst like a dart and having to be dug out. He’d worked his way up since 2003 from 165 feet to 255 during a series of big leaps in Utah, Switzerland and Oregon.

“I just really wanted to hold the record, even if only for a day,” he said afterward. With a young family, he noted he could now happily “retire” to slightly less hazardous skiing. Sadly, he died at 38 in 2009 in an avalanche in the Alta backcountry.

The heart-stopping heights of serious cliff hucks had progressed to the point in the 1990s where no one was even trying to ski away from them. They would simply plant their landings in deep snow, using the tails of their skis when possible to absorb some impact, and just hope to survive. That was Fred Syversen’s plan in 2008 when he made a filmed practice run, during a movie shoot, to a cliff in Norway chosen to break Pierre’s 255-foot record. But he turned too early in his fast-moving descent, and realized it too late.

“Braking or trying to stop was no longer an option, it simply went too fast,” he posted on social media. “So that left one choice: go for it and do it right!” He turned slightly to avoid rocks to his left, got out over snow and tilted so he didn’t land on his ABS pack that could have damaged his spine. He cratered like an unexploded howitzer shell. His only slight injury came when someone hit him with a shovel digging him out—351-feet later.

There’s also nine seconds of wobbly bystander footage (pure gelande still doesn’t get much love) of Rolf Wilson setting the alpine-jumping world record of 374 feet at Howelson Hill in Steamboat in 2011. You probably didn’t see it even if you lived in Steamboat. “It’s such an odd sport,” allows Wilson, who’s from Missoula, Montana. “One of the sports that doesn’t get a lot of recognition, because the guys that do it really just wanna jump, and see how far they go, and have fun. And we’re a bunch of hooligans to be honest with you.”

Jesper Tjader’s giant transfer in 2014, and David Wise’s 2016 blast, rocked the park and pipe world. And since then Big Air has seemed poised for the next big step. As some alpine jumping records near their survivable outer limits, no one has been lining up to try to beat Syversen’s 351 (12 years ago) or Wilson’s 374 (nine years ago). So what’s on the horizon?

More X Games-style productions; more ski movies; more genius films like Candide Thovex’s with amazing stunts that aren’t always potentially lethal; wing-suited jumpers regularly landing on slopes from big drops without ever popping chutes; and someone letting the true gelande crowd build the jump they yearn for with a lightning fast in-run, adjustable kicker, and endless run out.

Meanwhile, if you want to go really long the best bet is still Nordic ski flying on the 120-meter hills, where the current world record by Stefan Kraft of Austria at 831 feet is just shy of three football fields, no tricks involved. 

Jay Cowan has written about skiing for five decades and received Colorado Ski Country USA’s Lowell Thomas Award for print journalism, multiple magazine feature writing awards from NASJA, and has been included in The Best American Travel Writing of the Year. His books include Hunter S. Thompson and his latest, Scandal Aspen.

 

World Pro Ski Tour draws star athletes but suffers short season due to COVID-19.

The World Pro Ski Tour never got to the meat of its season, which would have seen seven-time gold medalist Ted Ligety contending with silver-and-bronze Olympian Andrew Weibrecht for $150,000 in championship prize money. 

Before the pro season was canceled, Ligety, at age 35, did break away from the World Cup season to compete in two Pro Tour races at Steamboat’s Howelsen Hill and Eldora. He had trouble learning to time the barn-door starting gates and his best finish was a fourth place at Steamboat—proving, he said, that the Tour was serious competition.

The Tour entered its third season with six events scheduled. A long list of sponsors, led by Tito’s Handmade Vodka, offered $300,000 in prize money. When COVID-19 canceled the final three events, Rob Cone of Killington and Middlebury College, a former NCAA champ and U.S. Ski Team Europa Cup racer, topped the field of 21 racers who finished in the money, winning $30,200 for the truncated season. Michael Ankeny, of Buck Hill and Dartmouth College, a veteran of eight years on the U.S. Ski Team, came second ($12,200). Garrett Driller of Squaw Valley and Montana State, an NCAA All American and U.S. Alpine Championship parallel slalom winner, finished third ($8,350). 

The Tour Finals at Sunday River and the World Pro Championships at Taos were scheduled for April, after the close of the World Cup and national championships. Ligety and Weinbrecht were on the schedule to compete at those races. “To succeed, the tour needs those top athletes,” said tour chief Jon Franklin, who earned his chops managing top skiers for International Marketing Group. Because the Taos championship event would have awarded $150,000 in prize money, the participation of FIS superstars might have upended the full-season leaderboard. All the events were televised by CBS Sports Network (see season highlights at https://worldproskitour.com/multimedia/).

Franklin predicts a longer, richer tour for the 2020-2021 season. “We don’t have a schedule yet because it has to fit around the NorAm and World Cup schedules,” he points out. He hopes to open the season before the Beaver Creek World Cup in November. 

Pro skiing has always depended on the star power of World Cup racers, beginning when Bob Beattie’s new World Pro Skiing circuit recruited the likes of Jean-Claude Killy and Billy Kidd. Fifty years ago, in 1970, Kidd won the FIS World Championship combined gold medal, promptly turned pro and then won the WPS championship the same season. He’s still the only skier to pull that one off. —Seth Masia