Feature article

How a Hollywood producer and a ski patroller brought big-time skiing to North Carolina.

The ski boom of the 1960s helped turn the high country of northwest North Carolina into a thriving tourist economy. In 1968, former governor (and future senator) Terry Sanford wanted to see for himself what was happening there, so he took an informal ski lesson at Beech Mountain from an acquaintance named Jack Lester. Lester was intrigued by Clif Taylor’s direct-to-parallel Graduated Length Method (GLM) and thus had put Sanford on short skis. They were spotted by ski school director Willi Falger, who promptly threw Lester off the mountain.

Photo top: Cottrell and Lester (center) with French-Swiss instructors displaying their American-flag sleeve patches. Courtesy Jim Cottrell Collection.

Falger, a native of Innsbruck, may have been incensed by the GLM challenge to Arlberg orthodoxy. Or maybe he was just chasing off an “underground” instructor. Either way, Lester went away with a chip on his shoulder.

Lester, a middle-aged U.S. Tennis Association referee and an accomplished player, was a charismatic and driven personality, with a flair for the dramatic. Built like a fireplug, he wore colorful dress and shaved his head. When in his 20s, the Atlanta native had worked as a producer, promoter and choreographer for stage acts, and then as a theater manager, eventually landing in Hollywood and, later, Australia. Lester claimed to have served as an officer in the Australian army. And he had the athletic skills and personality to coach tennis and skiing. But he didn’t look the part.

Meanwhile, Jim Cottrell, a native of nearby Boone, learned to ski in a unique phys-ed course at Appalachian State Teacher’s College, on the slopes of Blowing Rock Ski Lodge, a ski area. While earning a master’s degree in business from Appalachian State University, he joined the volunteer ski patrol and became its director. On graduating, Cottrell taught accounting at a community college in Charlotte and weekended at Blowing Rock. During the summer of 1969, Cottrell and Lester were neighbors in Charlotte and met at their apartment tennis courts. Tall, slim and movie-star handsome, Cottrell was an odd contrast to Lester, but they hit it off.

One of the things they had in common was a distaste for Arlberg-style ski instruction. Cottrell, for example, didn’t like the way the Austrian ski school staff took all the advanced classes and left beginners in the hands of less-experienced instructors; he had also become a fan of Georges Joubert’s coaching methods. Together, Lester and Cottrell cooked up the idea of an American-staffed ski school that would sell package lessons to groups like ski clubs, churches and colleges. For marketing purposes, they wanted to give the new school a European shine, but not an Austrian one. So they named their project the French-Swiss Ski College. Adding to the luster: the French and Swiss had won two-thirds of the medals in Alpine skiing at the 1968 Grenoble Olympics.

Blowing Rock Ski Lodge had recently been purchased outright by Grady Moretz, one of its original investors. Moretz renamed the place Appalachian Ski Mountain in 1968. Cottrell told Moretz about his group-booking concept and got the go-ahead to give it a try. He approached the community college phys-ed department and was told it would offer a skiing course if he recruited 10 students. “One hundred and twenty-three signed up,” Cottrell says.

In the winter of 1969–70, Lester and Cottrell launched their ski school on a card table in the lodge at Appalachian. They offered courses at seven North Carolina colleges. “The number grew to 43 the second year and within five years we’d developed more than one hundred college programs,” Cottrell recalls.

When the French-Swiss Ski College started, Appalachian Ski Mountain had a ski school, but as Cottrell found, “We eventually were booking more people than were walking in, so they decided they didn’t need [their own] school. Folks saw us and said, ‘We want to be in that group.’”

Lester had chutzpah. He pitched the Pentagon on providing ski lessons to the U.S. military. “The army wanted to cut the injury rate among servicemen learning [to ski] in Europe,” Cottrell recalls. In 1972, hundreds of Special Forces troops were diverted from winter training in Bavaria to North Carolina. Over two winters, platoons bivouacked in the ski area parking lot in big tents. “Each day started with a slog up the slopes with a 60-pound pack and an M-16,” Cottrell says. “They were running gates and racing before they left.” Cottrell and Lester taught more than a thousand Special Forces soldiers to ski. “Out of all those Green Berets,” Lester claimed, “there was one fracture, in a group that had never been on skis before.” Lester presented their commander, Brigadier General Henry E. “Gunfighter” Emerson, with a “Doctorate in Skiology.”

Photos from the time show French-Swiss instructors sporting “Airborne” arm patches gifted by troops. Ironically, the ski-trained soldiers shipped out not to mountain or Arctic stations, but to Vietnam. Ten of them later returned to become French-Swiss instructors themselves.

Early on, Cottrell says, he could never get North Carolina State University to work with French-Swiss. That changed when the new head of the university’s phys-ed department arrived from West Point. “He was interested when he saw we taught the Green Berets,” says Cottrell. Soon, Navy Seals, college ski clubs and thousands more followed. During the Ford administration, Cottrell recalls that French-Swiss trained Secret Service agents—though other sources say that some of the agents who skied with Ford at his Vail home had been expert skiers, even racers, before joining the force.

A Real French Star Arrives

One of Lester’s contacts was the First Union National Bank in Charlotte, where vice president C.C. Hope was marketing services to young executives. Skiing was a good match, and Hope organized a ski club for customers that would take lessons with French-Swiss. According to Cottrell, Lester took it a step further: Working with New York–based International Management Group (IMG) and its super-agent Mark McCormack, Lester encouraged the bank to underwrite a visit from Jean-Claude Killy, a Moët & Chandon spokesman, to promote the 1971 opening of Charlotte’s newest, tallest building, Jefferson First Union Tower (now Two Wells Fargo Center). “The company brought a truckload of champagne,” Cottrell says. “They had three fountains flowing with the stuff at the reception.”

Lester and Cottrell got to know Killy. A year later, for the premiere of Killy’s movie Snow Job, IMG and Warner Brothers brought the party to Boone. Killy, Cottrell and Lester—the latter resplendent in silk ski pants, fur boots and an eagle-embroidered sweater—were at the center of a major media event. Co-star (and Killy’s fiancée) Danièle Gaubert also attended, as did French ambassador Jacques Kosciusco-Morizet. Killy even taught a French-Swiss clinic for instructors from West Point. Two days later, the film screened in New York.

A year later, in 1973, Killy competed in a World Pro Skiing race at Beech Mountain. Characteristically, Lester told the local press that French-Swiss had arranged Killy’s “exclusive” visit. In truth, he was en route to the pro championship in his comeback year on the circuit and needed every race for the points.

Lester had become a regional rep for IMG and a personal manager of Jean-Claude Killy in the South. Killy was named an “honorary director” of the French-Swiss Ski College. Killy said privately that the ski school name was “grandiose,” but he made local guest appearances nonetheless. When rain cancelled ski training before the ’73 pro tour races, he got some tennis pointers from Lester at the resort’s tennis bubble. Killy also shared his pre-season ski-training exercises with Cottrell, who passed them along to college groups and wrote about them in a series of handbooks he published and revised over the decades.

Promotion Ramps Up

Always the showman, Lester took skiing to shopping malls with the French-Swiss Ski Revue, which performed on a 40-foot ramp. “Jack Lester’s motto was, ‘You gotta make ’em remember you,’” Cottrell recalls. “How could you go to a mall in the summer and not remember a man with shiny, skin-tight ski pants and furry boots with an eagle embroidered on his sweater?”

The program got its start during the summer of 1970 at the grand opening of the upscale South Park Mall in Charlotte. Over the course of a week, an estimated half-million people escaped the summer heat to watch the show in the air-conditioned mall. The ramp show then toured major Southern cities for a decade. “We got malls across the South to promote skiing,” Cottrell says. “No-cost marketing.” A French-Swiss ski village at the base of the ramp showcased ski clubs, ski shops and travel agents.

Presidential Recognition

In early 1974, French-Swiss affiliated with the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. Lester was named the national program’s director of skiing, and Cottrell developed the ski program. At Appalachian Ski Mountain, French-Swiss awarded more of the program’s patches for Alpine skiing than did any other resort in the country.

Lester wanted to franchise the French-Swiss Ski College nationally and internationally, but never got the chance. In summer 1974 he had open-heart surgery, and a massive heart attack later killed him at age 65. Cottrell carried on.

Joining the Special Olympics

One of the most important contributions French-Swiss made to skiing was through its role in the Special Olympics. In 1976, Cottrell met the director of Special Olympics North Carolina, Monty Castevens, who told him that a group of his athletes would attend the first International Special Olympics Winter Games at Steamboat Springs, Colorado, in 1977. When he asked who was training the athletes, Cottrell was told they weren’t being trained. “I didn’t think we should send never-evers,” he says. “The South already had too much of a ‘skiing on grits’ image.”

Thus, Cottrell put together a three-day pre-games training program at Appalachian. When Castevens got back, Cottrell proposed starting an annual regional games “so we’d have trained athletes for the next international games.” The 1978 Southeast U.S. Winter Games—the first regional Special Olympics winter games in the country—“was a disaster,” Cottrell says. “Everything we took for granted didn’t work. And with cognitive disabilities, the athletes couldn’t communicate the solution.”

He continues, “It took hours to get people outfitted and when they came in for lunch, just one person getting the wrong skis started a chain reaction that took hours to sort out. At the end of that year, we said, ‘How do we fix this?’”

Ultimately, the process became tightly organized. “Everybody had a bib with a number,” Cottrell explains, “so we put a bib number on their skis and matched them up in an instant. Eventually, every piece of equipment had the bib number and the athlete’s first name—huge name on the bib, front and back, so volunteers could always shout encouragement, coming and going.” The ’79 Games were vastly improved. Even with 300 special athletes, skis, boots, poles and helmets were easily accessed, used and returned.

By the 1980 games, Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver “had heard what we were doing and came down to observe,” says Cottrell, who had by then completed a coaches’ manual and the first operations manual for organizers. Shriver followed up by asking Cottrell to attend the 1980 Directors’ Conference, an international gathering to plan the 1981 International Special Olympics Winter Games in Smugglers Notch, Vermont. The meeting was also the first national training school for Special Olympics program coordinators, with a theme of “Training for the Future.” Cottrell wowed attendees with creative, time-tested processes for organization and surprisingly effective instructional techniques for the intellectually challenged.

Later, Shriver invited Cottrell to move to Washington and head the Special Olympics winter sports program, but he demurred. “I didn’t want to leave God’s country,” he says. But he began volunteering 30 days a year to train instructors, coaches and games directors, visiting many states and Canada.

Every year since 1978—46 times—Appalachian Ski Mountain has hosted the regional winter games. French-Swiss methods ultimately became the program’s template nationwide and are still in use. Over time, Cottrell discovered that teaching any kind of new skiers how to get in and out of gear, how to get up from a fall and other basics was easier done indoors. “First-timers get hit with a lot at once, even if they’re doctors or lawyers,” he says. “Thanks to Special Olympics, we found out how to eliminate some of the trauma before we ever stepped on snow. Had we not been doing Special Olympics, we never might have learned all that.”

A Lasting Legacy

Cottrell’s independent ski school at Appalachian eventually merged with the Professional Ski Instructors of America and its evolving American-oriented methodology. Cottrell became a PSIA Level III–certified ski instructor, and in 2019, on the 50th anniversary of French-Swiss, he was honored with PSIA Eastern Division’s Regional Recognition Award.

French-Swiss recorded its one millionth lesson in 2005. By then, snowboarding was part of the curriculum. Today, Appalachian has three terrain parks and a Burton Learn-to-Ride Center plus a famous alum: Luke Winkelmann, who is now on the U.S. Snowboard Team. Cottrell, meanwhile, retired in 2022 and the resort bought the ski school, which is now run by French-Swiss veteran Benjamin Marcellin—an actual Frenchman.

Cottrell still skis every day of the winter, at his home slope and elsewhere. He closed out an 89-day ski season last spring at Montana’s Big Sky resort. After that, per tradition, he spent a few weeks in Aruba, building on 40 years as a certified wind-surfing instructor. “I wanted to set up a wind-surfing program somewhere during the summer,” he confesses, “but my wife, Wynne, said no. She told me, ‘I am a ski widow all winter—we’re not doing that in the summer.’”

Each year, after Appalachian’s Meltdown Games event in March, Cottrell ends the season in the parking lot with a gathering of instructors from the 1980s and their children and grandchildren. “We’ve come from virtually no skiers in this region to generations now,” he says. That achievement reflects the essence of the French-Swiss method, which Cottrell describes as “a teaching style based on what we learned from the Special Olympics: that people learn at very different rates and that patience and a caring attitude are essential parts of a skier’s success.”

Sounds like the perfect approach for a region where most people never or rarely see snow. No wonder the accents of Southern skiers are now heard all over the country and around the world. 

Randy Johnson’s book Southern Snow: The New Guide to Winter Sports from Maryland to the Southern Appalachians includes a deep dive into Southern ski history. He wrote “Pioneers of Southland Skiing” in the July-August 2022 issue.

One southern winter, Dick Durrance, James Laughlin and the Bradley brothers conquered New Zealand and Australia.

During the summer of 1937, two American ski teams competed outside the U.S. One team raced in Chile in the first Pan-American Skiing Championship (see “Pan-American Skiing Championships,” November–December 2023). That team consisted of Seattle’s Don Fraser and five members of the Dartmouth ski team, three of whom were on the 1936 Olympic team: Fraser, Warren Chivers and Ted Hunter.

Photo above: Dick Durrance on the downhill course, 1937. Steve Bradley photo.

A second American team went to Australia and New Zealand for a summer full of skiing, competing in both the 1937 Australian and New Zealand championships. This squad included three members of Dartmouth’s ski team—Dick Durrance plus Dave and Steve Bradley—along with James Laughlin of Harvard.

Durrance was the most successful American-born ski racer in the 1930s. He led the 1936 U.S. Olympic team and Dartmouth’s ski team, and won the first Harriman Cup tournament at Sun Valley in March 1937, winning both the downhill and slalom and beating the likes of downhill world champion Walter Prager (his Dartmouth coach) and Alf Engen.

As Durrance told the story in his book The Man on the Medal, not long after the Harriman Cup races, he got a surprise call “from a complete stranger with an amazing proposition. ... How would you feel about going skiing in New Zealand and Australia?” The stranger was Laughlin, a student at Harvard who had learned to ski above Geneva, Switzerland, and in St. Anton, Austrian, raced a bit and acquired a taste for high-mountain touring. Laughlin’s family owned a steel mill in Pittsburgh. He had money and offered to pay for the trip.

Durrance seized the opportunity and suggested asking his Dartmouth teammates, Dave and Steve Bradley, to join them. Durrance and the Bradley brothers were four-way skiers, competing in downhill, slalom, jumping and langlauf (cross-country). Steve finished fourth in jumping and combined at the Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Union Championships. At six-foot one, he towered over his kid brother; Dave, a year younger, was the 1936 U.S. Eastern Champion in Nordic combined and captain of the 1937–38 Dartmouth ski team. Laughlin, at six-foot five, and Durrance, at five-foot six, made an unlikely duo.

Durrance asked Roland Palmedo, president of the Amateur Ski Club of New York, to help certify the group as an official U.S. team through the American Ski Association. As the first American team to compete Down Under, they called themselves the “Official U.S. Expeditionary Alpine and Nordic Team.” Getting to the Southern Hemisphere took more than three weeks on the steamship Mariposa. Durrance, an art major at Dartmouth who would go on to a career in photography and film, brought his Leica. So did Steve Bradley. They even brought darkroom equipment.

Skiing with the Kiwis

On New Zealand’s North Island, the travelers were hosted by the Ruapehu Ski Club. They were taken by a half-track to a mountain hut and skied several days in unrelenting fog, dealing with “armor-plated ice,” according to Laughlin, writing in the American Ski Annual, 1938. They held a few races, in which the Kiwis weren’t serious, “but we did have a great time with them,” Laughlin wrote. “They were good company.” The highlight was the ascent of Mount Ruapehu at the end of the stay, where the skiers emerged above the clouds onto a vast, smooth glacier leading to an ice-set crater of deepest emerald green, with a panoramic view from the summit. The Ruapehu Ski Club made them honorary members, and the Americans were touched by the gesture.

On the South Island, they traveled to Mount Cook and stayed at the Ball Hut, the headquarters and social center for the New Zealand National Championships, and climbed to the Ball Glacier, riddled with crevasses and threatened by avalanches. The Kiwi skiers “seemed blithely unconcerned with crevasses,” Laughlin wrote.

The championship races took place at the top of the glacier. The South Islanders were much better skiers than their North Island counterparts, and the Americans had a great time. They built a 30-meter ski jump to hold a four-way New Zealand championship at the top of the mountain.

The two-mile-long downhill course covered 2,500 feet of vertical and was marked with little paper flags. “It was pretty much guessing yourself down through the crevasses and hoping for the best,” wrote Durrance. He won the downhill, while Laughlin was third and the Bradleys came in fifth and sixth. Harry Wigley (Kiwi team captain and a pioneer aviator) and Brian McMillan (the top Kiwi jumper) finished second and fourth. As Laughlin wrote, “Durrance won cleanly, running the sweet, brainy, faultless sort of race that only he among us can, cutting the course record nearly in half.”

Durrance designed the slalom course. According to Dave Bradley, writing in the American Ski Annual 1938, it was “an excellent sequence of exacting situations, which included a series of sweet S corners at the top, an unavoidably icy descent, more fast turns and a six-gated flush just before the finish.” Durrance, continued Bradley, “thrilled the audience that had come up ... to watch him, having heard of his European record.”

In slalom his technique and incredible muscular speed put him far ahead of all the rest of us. Each of his runs brought gasps, a hush and then cheers. He ran in his new low position of complete vorlage, doing the sharper turns over a pole pivot, choosing infallible lines, and always leading with the chin—that is, with the head and shoulders always down in front, literally pulling his body and skis along behind them. He was greased lightning in the tightest flushes, and his sight judgment of traps, checks and lines was a joy to watch.

Durrance won both slalom runs, followed by Dave Bradley. In the jumping event, Durrance had the longest distance, at 30 meters, but he lost on style points to the Bradleys. The cross-country race was canceled because of weather.

According to Laughlin, the Americans’ biggest take-away from their time in New Zealand was the international camaraderie that develops from skiing. “Young men and beer: a good time was had by all.” He added,

We weren’t skiing against the New Zealanders but with them. It was that way from the first. We skied with them. We lived with them. We borrowed each other’s things. We taught them Durrance’s stick turns, and they showed us the best lines to take on their courses. It was like that. The figures showed that we beat New Zealand, but New Zealand won us completely.

Laughlin closed by saying the Americans would remember "the friends we made, the cities we saw, the nosedives we took in the unfamiliar deep snow—there was nothing in the whole visit we would want to forget. ...There is a place down under the South Seas where summer is winter and the skiing grounds are as good as all but the most expert skiers could ask for. New Zealand does take imagination, but it isn’t a dream. It is a real place to ski."

Injuries in the Land of Oz

The Americans spent five amazing weeks in Australia, hosted by the Ski Club of Sydney “in the Down Under style,” Durrance reported. “You try to drink more than I can, and I’ll prove that you can’t. We became extremely good pals.”

The team competed in three tournaments: the national championships and Inter-Dominion and Inter-State matches. The best snowfall of the season covered the Charlotte Pass ski area “with an abundance of snow for racing purposes,” according to Durrance.

The Americans first competed at Mount Buller, in the U.S.A.–Victoria match, although Laughlin and Dave Bradley suffered injuries that limited their racing. On the way to the ski area, the car in which Bradley was riding got into a head-on collision. His hand went through the windshield, and he cut a tendon in his thumb. Dave spent three weeks in the hospital, where he met more “new friends than the boys who were still racing,” wrote Durrance.

Meanwhile, Laughlin broke his collarbone when he hit a pile of rocks in the downhill race at Mount Buller. That ended his ski tour, but, Durrance wrote, he met “an amusing Australian girl named Toodles, whose parents had a beach house, where he had three weeks of pleasant R&R.” Both Laughlin and Dave Bradley got medical treatment in Melbourne, then Laughlin went home. Durrance and Steve Bradley went to the next tournament and were later joined by Dave.

But before they left Mount Buller, Durrance won the two-run downhill, likely establishing “a world’s record for downhill races” (according to Dave Bradley) by finishing the first run in 24 seconds. Laughlin and Steve Bradley were second and third. Durrance also won the slalom, followed by Australian Tom Mitchell and Steve Bradley.

The Americans next competed in the Australian championships, held at Mount Kosciuszko. Durrance and Steve Bradley, the last men standing, did little training for these races, instead spending their time developing yards of Leica film. Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. each entered two-man teams that would run in four events each.

The chalet where the racers stayed at Mount Kosciuszko was 18 miles from the highway. They skied into the chalet, while a half-track carried their luggage. The three Americans stayed in a small room with two Austrians and a Norwegian, which they called “the League of Nations Chambers,” according to Dave Bradley, because of the “endless riotous discussions which took place there.” However, its conditions were “scarcely flattering to that dignified body,” Bradley wrote. Wet clothes were hung everywhere; the floor was knee deep in clothes, boots, cameras, packs and suitcases, and “every bed in a similar unhappy state.”

Durrance won the slalom, wowing the fans, and was followed by the Austrian Ernst von Glasersfeld (skiing as an individual, not part of a team). According to Walter Annabel, writing in the Australian and New Zealand Ski Year Book:

Durrance’s running stirred the spectators to great enthusiasm and was applauded most of the time he was in action. He rarely was more than two feet from the snow in a deep crouch. Always watching two pairs of flags ahead, he showed perfect rhythm of rise and drop in each turn, and at one point took a 30-feet jump in each run.

Meanwhile, von Glasersfeld “gave a classic exhibition of true Arlberg running,” Annabel noted.

The ski jump was dangerously flat and narrow, and the event was won by Durrance with “a beautiful and startling ‘aero-dynamic’ style,” according to Annabel. Steve Bradley, who hurt his knee during the competition, place second, exhibiting “a delightful performance of graceful jumping.” Dave Bradley won the 10-mile cross-country race, with his arm in a cast, giving “an accomplished exhibition of langlauf” and beating Durrance “by the narrowest of margins,” wrote Annabel. Australian George Day was third.

The downhill course on Mount Townsend was steep and fast, although the sun thawed the lower part of the course, making the snow almost too slow for a championship downhill. Dave Bradley reported that the course was a six-mile trek each way, involving the ascent of three substantial ridges. As was true for most downhill races in those days, there were no control gates, and each racer chose his own route of descent. Von Glasersfeld, wrote Annabel, “was going quite fast in his usual nonchalant style.” Annabel noted that Durrance appeared tired after the prior day’s jumping and cross-country events and was beaten by von Glasersfeld by a few seconds. Australia’s Pattinson brothers finished third and fourth (a triumph for Australia), followed by Brian McMillan from New Zealand, then Steve Bradley, who finished fifth in spite of his knee injury.

Durrance, the Bradley brothers and von Glasersfeld ended the day by climbing nearby Mount Clark and skiing the long way down as the sun set, filmed by Durrance.

The American team won the Australian championships—which were contested among Australia, America and New Zealand—because Durrance and Steve Bradley were four-event specialists. Annabel, in his article “Australian Championships, 1937,” provided closing thoughts about the meets. The international flavor of the Australian tournaments, he wrote, was shown by the presence of “two charming and capable members from the Ski Club Arlberg, Frau von Glasersfeld and her son, Ernst or ‘Bibu.’ Both these fluent runners were on all occasions a joy to watch with their correctly executed Arlberg technique. In the National Slalom, Ernst von Glasersfeld pressed Durrance very closely, and turned the tables by running the Townsend Course magnificently to win the Australian Downhill title.”

Skimeisters

The American team was especially impressive in its ability to succeed at the highest levels in the four-event competitions. According to Annabel, Durrance was the undisputed hero of the tournament, “a runner of extraordinary ability, and well worthy of the great name that had preceded him here.” Annabel continued,

To describe adequately Dick’s style is difficult under the usual standards, for this remarkable and highly unorthodox runner possesses a technique that seems to have been built up to suit his own particular physical attributes. It is an intriguing mixture of tempo schwung and land dive, while he maintains an unbelievable amount of vorlage throughout his running with what must surely be the world’s most powerful pair of legs. Crouching uncommonly low, he darts downhill and through slaloms at a great pace with the utmost nonchalance.

Durrance’s jumping, if not as efficiently executed, is as startling as his running. His jump of 40 metres in the championship on a “hill” that was deplorably flat and soft, was the result of super energy and perfect timing at the take-off; and, with superb steadiness on alighting, was an extraordinarily fine exhibition of aerodynamics. With langlaufing ability well up to standard, Durrance is the greatest all-around skier ever to race in Australia.

Steve Bradley’s alpine racing was impressive, but he will be remembered for his ski jumping and cross-country (langlauf). .... Steve Bradley’s performance at Charlotte’s Pass proved him a class slalom and downhill man. But it will be for his gloriously graceful jumping style that Steve Bradley will be most remembered in Australia. Using a fairly high stance he seemed to float, rather than jump, off the take-off, always getting well out with good vorlage, his body bent from the hips, landing with a delicate and attractive skidding without the semblance of a thud, and ever in complete control.

Dave Bradley, in spite of his injured hand, “got around surprisingly well and actually competed in the Australian Championship slalom with praiseworthy results,” reported Annabel. “It was indeed a tragedy that this visitor was physically unable to display fully his true skiing capabilities.”

Durrance recalled that the Australians were a bit wilder and tougher than the New Zealanders. The Americans, he wrote, made a “lot of university friends about our own age, plus the old-time pioneer skiers were there. . . . [We] did as much teaching as we did racing.” The trip broadened the Americans’ outlook on skiing before they returned to Dartmouth and Harvard for school.

The subsequent ski-industry careers of Durrance and the Bradley brothers are well known to regular Skiing History readers—they helped launch Alta, Aspen and Winter Park, and were all elected to the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame. Laughlin partnered with Durrance to become a key investor in Alta, then was a major force in American literature as founder and publisher of New Directions magazine. Von Glasersfeld became a world-famous mathematician and philosopher. He founded the Radical Constructivism movement in psychology. 

John Lundin, an award-winning historian, is a regular contributor. Sources for this article include two articles in the American Ski Annual, 1937–1938: “Skiing in New Zealand,” by James Laughlin, and “South for Snow” by David J. Bradley; The Man on the Medal: The Life & Times of America’s First Great Ski Racer, by Dick Durrance, as told by John Jerome; and “Australian Championships, 1937,” by Walter B. Annabel, in the 1938 edition of The Australian and New Zealand Ski Year Book.