Feature article

 North American Ski Academies Look to the Future

In 1970 Warren Witherell and Finn Gunderson took in the view from a hillside in East Burke, Vermont, and envisioned the concept of a ski academy..The idea—a model that combined focused athletics and academics in an environment built around trust and community—spawned Burke Mountain Academy (BMA) and the imminent creation of Stratton Mountain School (SMS) and Green Mountain Valley School (GMVS). All benefitted from Vermont’s open-minded perspective on education and dense skier population. Decades before Covid, ski academies pioneered remote learning, combining it with midweek training that dramati- cally increased students’ time on snow to 100 days a season. With all the nec- essary pieces in place, academy skiers excelled nationally. 

Photo above: Courtesy Carabasset Valley Academy

As Gunderson describes, the ski academies’ early success was also their undoing. “As the academies dominated, other programs caught on,” he explains, adding that once snowmaking became ubiquitous in the West, the season there dramatically lengthened. With the ski academy model now proven, and demand growing, the youth market exploded.

HEALTHY COMPETITION

Soon the Big Three had company. In 1975 Vermont’s Killington Mountain School opened its doors. In 1982 Carrabasset Valley Academy (CVA) in Sugarloaf, Maine, came on the scene, as did Rowmark, an academy attached to Salt Lake City’s well-established Row- land Hall prep school. Resort towns like Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Sun Valley, Idaho; Squaw Valley, California; and Steamboat, Colorado, all offered ski racing options at public, private and charter schools. The Hellman family, who had started SMS, created a Western version in 1998, the Sugar Bowl Ski Academy. In 2007, Vail Ski and Snowboard Academy became the first public ski academy, dramatically decreasing the cost of mixing school and ski racing, and increasing accessibility to the ski academy experience.

Meanwhile, in the East, where more than half of U.S. Ski and Snowboard’s racer population resides and where these youth can access a full range of competitions within a few hours’ drive, traditional prep schools like Proctor Academy, Holderness School, Gould Academy and Northwood School beefed up their ski programs.

In all, 27 schools now identify as ski academies across the country, with options that broaden accessibility and, therefore, the potential talent pool. This growth has allowed more ski racers to pursue the top level, increasing competition and challenging the original model. While ski racing remains the central focus, the demands for excellence in everything else—from academics and college placement to extracurricular options and standard of care—has dramatically increased. And as they have from the start, the academies adapted.

ADJUSTING THE GOALPOST

Just as expectations have changed, so, too, has the motivation to attend academies. With more athletic competition from across the country, and a longer development track in the sport, making the U.S. Ski Team in high school is now an unlikely outcome—but it’s also less of a priority. Burke headmaster Willy Booker, himself a BMA graduate, can’t pinpoint when that attitude shifted but notes that in the interview process, few kids men- tion the Olympics or the U.S. Ski Team as a goal. Most focus on skiing for a good NCAA Division 1 school. “When I came to Burke, college placement wasn’t even a thought,” Booker recalls.

At the same time, getting into the most desirable schools has also become more competitive: In 1997 students applying to Dartmouth—an Ivy League school with a top NCAA ski team— had a 25 percent chance of getting in. This year, the acceptance rate was less than 8 percent of applicants. As colleges have gotten more selective, high schools that offer a proven pathway in, as well as character-building values, are highly coveted. Successful college-placement outcomes now include not only the 20 schools with NCAA ski teams, but also the 175 schools in the USCSA that offer a wide range of academic and athletic options.

Ski academies stack up favorably against their prep-school peers on tuition, and what they lack in diverse academics and general athletic facilities, they make up for in specialized staff, pro- gramming and venues. “You can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison,” says Booker. “The athletics are worlds apart.”

COST: THE COMMON ENEMY

During the 2022 Beijing Olympics, one article not about Mikaela Shiffrin grabbed the public’s attention—a Wall Street Journal piece entitled “U.S. Alpine Ski Racing’s $500,000-per-Kid Problem.” It highlighted the “financial doping,” from a young age, that is narrowing skiing’s Olympic pipeline.

The number is not an exaggeration, especially for kids attending private ski academies. Lost in that headline, however, is the fact that kids are also getting a private school education at a small boarding school, learning the values those schools hold dear and then getting into top colleges. Demand for that avenue to success will likely remain strong and thus maintain the viability of academies, each of which already offers more than $1 million annually in financial aid and scholarships. The academies work hard to build their endowments in order to broaden accessibility. Furthermore, the aggregation of facilities and staff at state-of-the-art venues greatly benefits the full spectrum of the ski racing com- munity, from junior to post-graduate.

More critical to ski academy survival than tuition is the viability of the entire sport. The two most challenging issues ski racing faces are snow and cost. The quest for snow, a diminishing resource, is increasingly expensive. Keeping costs in check is a universal theme of ski programs looking to survive and includes initiatives like snow farming to extend the ski season into spring and reducing off-season travel. Nevertheless, as Booker says, “For the immediate future, we see travel as part of the necessity of what’s going to happen.”

That travel comes from the desire to increase days on snow, which puts Eastern academies at a geographical disadvantage. As winters grow warmer, the original gold standard—100 days on snow—that con- ferred such an advantage to ski academy athletes, is now harder to achieve in many venues. Moreover, 100 days of on-snow training is now deemed inadequate. With improved snowmaking in the West, Colorado athletes can log 150 annual days on snow with minimal out-of-region travel, while Eastern skiers can still only rely on those 100 days at home and must travel significantly for the rest.

With the added prices of lane fees, lift tickets and lodging, it is often less expensive for Eastern skiers to travel to Europe for training than to Colorado. Plus, the cost of ski equipment, and the amount needed, has also risen dramati- cally, while gear sponsorships—nearly ubiquitous for all academy racers a generation ago—are now exceedingly rare.

The other major contributor to cost in all ski clubs, but especially at academies that now require specialized employees in both academics and athletics, is staffing. Covid initiated a mass migra- tion of remote workers to mountain towns, especially in the West, driving up property values and rents. GMVS and Burke have both acquired adjoin- ing land and structures to expand their campuses and offer more staff housing, but it remains an ongoing challenge.

This not only affects staff, but also drives out the local mountain families with homegrown athletes who traditionally took advantage of financial aid at ski academies and factored heavily into the talent pool. No amount of financial aid will help if families are priced out by real estate, equipment and travel, and can’t get into the sport in the first place.

SOLUTIONS, FROM THE GROUND UP

One way in which academies hope to remain competitive is by growing their talent pool right at home, building lifetime miles on snow when kids are young. Then by the time kids are of ski academy age, they will already have the basics in place to optimize further development. “By the time skiers are U16 they might be 200 days behind,” says GMVS headmaster Tracy Keller. “We are looking behind the pipeline to offer more midweek skiing for younger skiers.” Academies have robust feeder clubs that capture local skiers. Burke’s junior program is run by Olympic gold medalist and BMA alum Diann Roffe, with the idea that building the right fundamentals into kids’ skiing is a key for future success.

On the other end of the age spectrum, all academies provide high-level post-grad programs to help top athletes, who at age 18 are still years away from realizing their athletic potential in the sport, continue elite development towards collegiate or national teams.

PARTNERSHIPS AND COOPERATION

Burke has forged a partnership with Baerums ski club in Norway to help defray the costs of off-season camps by sharing equipment and staff in each place. GMVS has explored a relationship with Apex 2100 academy in France. SMS’s ground-breaking partnership with the T2 Foundation created a home base for post-grad Nordic skiers. Since 2013 SMS T2 athletes have won world championship medals at every level (U18, World Juniors, U23s and the World Championships themselves).

In season, academies also work closely with their home mountains to optimize access. “We are mindful that the Rockies are offering a longer season,” says SMS headmaster Carson Thurber, “but we still find plenty of days on snow.” Stratton Mountain guarantees SMS access to the first trails open early season, while the academy also takes advantage of Eastern resorts like Sunday River, Maine, that get early sea- son snow and are more cost- and time- effective than traveling to Colorado.

One benefit of Covid was increased collaboration among ski academies, which banded together to work with the state of Vermont in order to have any kind of competition season. As Thurber explains, “Everyone is willing to be a good partner and neighbor, and that was not always the case.”

This new spirit of collaboration could help academies control costs by working with each other, and also enable them to use their combined voices to influence changes for a more sustainable future. Recently BMA hosted a sum- mit for Eastern academies with Sophie Goldschmidt, the new CEO of U.S. Ski and Snowboard. The academies formed a coalition to advocate for more resources in the East. Their influence could also urge the national governing body toward policies to support the sport’s long-term health, such as minimizing travel at younger ages, reserving out-of-region trips for necessary competitions and scheduling important races later in the season to reduce the advantage gained by those who can afford early-season travel.

EMBRACING THE SPECIAL SAUCE

On the topic of academies, Kirk Dwyer is both an expert and an optimist. He came to GMVS in its second year and stayed for 25. He next served as headmaster at BMA for 16 years and then as executive director at Ski and Snowboard Club Vail for six years. In 2021 he returned East as Alpine program director at CVA. The biggest challenge for all of the academies, he says, is attracting more kids to the sport and retaining them. He points out that the new norm of excessive travel carries not only financial costs but also opportunity costs, leaving Eastern acad- emies less time to exploit their natural strengths. As Dwyer says, “Success comes when you are the best you can be, not when you try to be someone else.”

Rather than simply racing toward more days on snow to emulate their Western peers, Dwyer believes Eastern academies should embrace their advan- tages in everything from independent academic calendars to co-ed training to the region’s dense competitive landscape. Less travel would allow them to leverage their unique cultures, which breed cre- ativity, physical strength, independence, innovation and community.

He also suggests that academies could use their shared voice to advo- cate for the sport’s sustainability. “We could agree that we’re going to try to limit, especially in the East, how much we race because we have fewer days on snow,” says Dwyer, who describes how over-racing detracts from the valuable days on snow. By fully exploiting all the resources, facilities and days on snow at home, then supplementing them with necessary camps, “you start to really bend the cost curve,” says Dwyer.

Finn Gunderson has seen how the positive impact of ski academies goes beyond racing and into life overall. “We created something different, and skiing was the vehicle,” he says. “The whole idea that these kids in the fall will carry wet hay bales up the training hill—that stuff changes you.” Gunderson has since moved from ski to soccer academies.

When he considers the future of ski racing, though, he thinks big picture: a paradigm change to boost participation and accessibility; regional development centers and additional fundraising to pro- vide free training and travel for kids.

When thinking of the possibilities, he harkens back to his memory of standing in a field with Warren With- erell, with no plan and no money but a vision. “To people who say, ‘You’re a dreamer,’ I say, ‘You should have been at Burke in 1970.’” 

Olympian Edith Thys Morgan is a regular contributor to Skiing History. The first part of this article ran in the July-August issue.

 The slalom world champion and Olympic bronze medalist has won her second term in Australia’s parliament, as a Green/Blue independent. 

Photo above: A pioneer throughout her career, Zali Steggall became the first Australian woman to win a World Cup event in Alpine skiing, a 1997 slalom in Park City, Utah. She also won Australia’s first Olympic Alpine medal and first FIS World Championship title, both in slalom.

What does one do for an encore after winning a World Cup race, a World Championship slalom title and an Olympic medal in Alpine skiing?

If you’re Zali Steggall, you get a law degree while raising five kids, beat a former prime minister for his seat in the Australian Parliament, get elected to a second three-year term and take up ultra-running—all by the age of 48.

Somewhat miraculously, the four-time Olympian and slalom specialist found a moment to chat shortly after Australia’s most recent federal election in May 2022. She phoned from Warringah, the district she represents, which encom- passes Sydney’s north shore and lower northern beaches. It’s a three-and-a-half hour drive from the capital city of Canberra, where members of Parliament sit for about 22 weeks a year, from Monday to Thursday, so she returns regularly to her electorate. It’s the same district that Tony Abbott represented for 25 years (including as prime minister from 2013-15), un- til Steggall, an independent, defeated him in 2019 by a 14.4 percent margin, after all the votes for the less popular candi- dates were re-allocated. (When voting, Australians must rank each candidate in order of preference.)

This May, Steggall won her second term, with a 22 percent lead over the Liberal Party candidate. She viewed this increased margin as a positive sign that her old critics were wrong when they said that the only reason she won as an independent in 2019 was because she’d taken on Abbott, regarded by some as a toxic personality who weaponized cli- mate policy in Australia. Once he lost, their logic went, voters would go back to traditional party lines.

“The criticism is always: What can an independent do be- cause I’m not part of a big-party machine?” she says. “I think I really showed that I can be very effective in pressuring the government and putting forward sensible solutions, especially around climate.” She is not alone. This year, six women were elected as “teal independents” for their blend of green (pro-environment) and liberal-leaning (blue) politics.

When Steggall retired from ski racing after the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, she wasn’t hellbent on politics. All she knew was that her life’s pinnacle was not her 1997 slalom vic- tory in Park City (the first World Cup win by an Australian woman) nor the 1998 Olympic slalom bronze she captured in Nagano (Australia’s first Olympic Alpine medal) nor her 1999 World Championship title in Vail (another Aussie first). When asked to identify the highlight of her life at her final press conference, she said, “I’m 27, and I certainly hope I haven’t had it yet.”

“That [statement] really epitomizes my philosophy,” she says now. “It doesn’t matter what you achieve, it’s important to keep setting new goals and keep challenging yourself in new ways. For me, a satisfying life is a challenging life.”

NO STRANGER TO CHALLENGE

When she was 4, her parents took Steggall and her older brother, Zeke, to live in Morzine, France, for 10 years. She spoke French in school and English at home, and trained with the French junior ski team. Had she continued, the deal was that she would have to represent France when she turned 18. Instead, the Steggalls returned to Australia in 1988 and absorbed tremendous expenses to finance their daughter’s coaching, equipment and travel in a nation that had a grand total of four World Cup podiums in Alpine skiing.

The road to the 1992 Albertville Olympics was even more fraught, because Australia only received two Alpine berths. Steven Lee was likely to take one, and a half dozen men in their early 20s on the Europa Cup or World Cup level expected to vie for the other. Says Steggall, “I was a 17-year-old upstart who said, ‘No, the two spots should go to the best-ranked skiers with the best prospects.’” She quit her final year of high school to train full-time, improved her FIS ranking and snatched the second spot. “It meant a lot to me because those Olympics were in France, and I’d grown up in France,” she says, “but also, I was training with Annelise Coberger from New Zealand. To watch her win the silver medal in slalom there was huge, the first-ever Alpine medal for the southern hemisphere. She proved it could be done. It was pivotal.”

By the 1994 Lillehammer Games, Steggall still didn’t have the resources to compete with the top nations and she was ski- ing five events—although she pared it down to slalom, GS and combined for the Games. Still, she had to pay her own excess baggage fees to get six to eight pairs of skis, gates and other equipment to the Olympics. She laughs about it now but after Lillehammer, she says, “I had to make a strategic decision. I felt my best shot was to become an absolute expert at slalom.”

Around that time, the Grollo family, who owned Mount Buller, got behind Alpine racing. They started the Australian Ski Institute, paying for Steggall’s coaching and providing her with a proper program. But she still needed a world-class training group, so by the 1997–98 Nagano Olympic season, Steggall was working with the German women’s technical team. At 23, she had already been racing for 10 years. “It was crunch time,” she said. “Ei- ther crack the top seed of World Cup or do something else because I was going into my third Olympics.”

As it turned out, she put together the two best seasons of her career.

At the World Cup opener in November 1997, a clear, crisp day in Park City, Utah, everything went according to plan. She won the first run—the bane of a slalom skier. “Shit,” she thought. “Can I do it a second time?” She did, becom- ing the first Australian woman to win a World Cup race. But Ylva Nowén of Sweden won the next four slaloms, and Steg- gall went back to Australia for 10 days leading up to Nagano. “Those years were pre-internet, pre-Facebook, pre-mobile phones,” she recalls, “so you’re quite disconnected. I was quite lonely, living on my own in Europe for months on end. Com- ing home meant you spent 24 hours on a plane travelling, but you really got a lift emotionally, mentally. In January, it’s mid- summer, warm.”

As a result, she missed both Nagano’s opening ceremony and her brother Zeke’s event. (Zeke was competing in the Olympic debut of snowboarding, 11 days before Zali’s race.) Upon arrival, she stayed with the German team on the moun- tain, away from the drama of the Olympic Village.

At the time, Australia had exactly one winter Olympic medal, a 1994 bronze in the men’s 5,000-meter short track speedskating relay. At Nagano, everyone expected Australia to win its first individual medal, most likely in aerials because Kirstie Marshall was the 1997 world champion and Jacqui Cooper was ranked second in World Cup aerials. Both failed to make the finals, however, and the short track team didn’t medal, either.

“All of a sudden, the whole Australian contingent at the Winter Games turned to me because I was the last prospect,” Steggall says. “Two days before the end of the Games, the whole team is facing criticism. ‘We haven’t progressed from the bronze relay medal. What does this mean for Australia at the Winter Olympics?’ I was incredibly nervous. It was in- sane. There was so much on the line.”

After the first run of slalom, Steggall and her training partner, Hilde Gerg of Germany, were third and second, re- spectively, behind Deborah Compagnoni of Italy. The course- setter for run two was their German coach, Wolfgang Grassl. Between runs, Steggall spent a couple of hours talking to her brother in the athletes’ tent. “All I can remember is talking about everything and nothing,” Zeke says, “not concentrating too much on skiing.”

By the end of the day, Gerg had won gold and Steggall collected bronze.

“You can’t underestimate what [that Olympic medal] did for winter sports funding in Australia,” she says. The Austra- lian Institute of Winter Sports was formed after Nagano. (In 2001, it was renamed the Olympic Winter Institute of Aus- tralia, or OIWA.) “That was the launch of the whole proper professional winter program in Australia,” adds Steggall “Fi- nally, everything I had dreamed it would be, was. I had good coaches, good equipment, a good program, good sponsors, sufficient funding to have a world-class program.”

A year later, at the 1999 World Championships in Vail, Steggall took another trip home during the lead-up to the event. Once again, her coach set the slalom course for the second run. This time, it was Helmut Spiegl, and he set it across the hardest section of Pepi’s Face. “Hellie decided to go straight over the top and straight down the steepest section, and that’s where I made up my whole race, basically,” Steggall recalls. After the first run, she was tied for sixth with Pernilla Wiberg of Sweden but, says Steggall, “the last 10 turns down the steep is where I won it. I was not intimidated, and I nailed it.” Australia had its first world champion in Alpine skiing.

At the time, Australia was gearing up to host the 2000 Sydney Olympics, so when Steggall came back with the Olympic bronze from Nagano and a world title, she was a star—especially in her hometown of Manly, a beach suburb, where she would later carry the 2000 Olympic torch on its fi- nal leg around town, across the ferry and up Sydney Harbour by the Sydney Opera House. “It was as close to a home crowd celebration of sport as I was ever going to get because I was never going to have a World Cup [race] in Australia,” she says.

By then, Steggall had married an Olympic rower from the 1996 Games, David Cameron, but he had retired from the sport, and their time apart took a toll. She was far from home and had trouble sleeping before races. She caught glandular fever and tried to compete through it because she was a team of one with two coaches. Also, the top athletes had switched to shaped carving skis during the European summer and Steg- gall had missed the changeover. “It’s just the tyranny of being southern hemisphere and isolated from the rest of the Alpine community,” she says. And then, while she was training in New Zealand, terrorism hit the United States on September 11, and Steggall wondered if she shouldn’t do something more substantial than racing.

“Any good thing is going to come to an end at some point,” she says. “The question is: ‘How?’ By the time I got to the 2002 Olympic Games, I didn’t miss a single season, didn’t take a single break for injury. I was mentally and emotionally exhausted.” Her career ended with a first-run DNF in the Olympic slalom.

Steggall had finished her college degree while competing, but she had always been keen to study law. “So for the next four years [2002–2006], I studied law, had my two kids and worked part-time,” she relates. “I turned up for lectures with my [younger] son, Remy, in the Baby Bjorn and cut out to change his nappy. I multitasked my way through my law degree. I worked for my dad as a solicitor. Ultimately, I really wanted to be an advocate, or a barrister, who goes to court,” she says.

Doing so required additional exams, and by the time she was done in 2008, she had divorced, remarried and gained three stepdaughters. She donned the iconic 17th-century uniform of Commonwealth courts: a powdered wig and black gown. Compelled to make a difference, Steggall became a legal expert in land environment, native title, commercial, equity, family and sports law. In fact, as a member of the international Court of Arbitration for Sport, Steggall attended a fifth Olympics, in 2018; as part of the court’s ad hoc division, she helped dismiss the last-ditch appeals of 47 Russian athletes and coach- es to participate in the PyeongChang Winter Olympics.

After 11 years, Steggall left her profession as a barrister to become a politician. “By late 2018, I was really focused on climate,” she explains. “Our climate policies have been very dysfunctional for 10, 15 years. The previous member of my seat in Warringah, Tony Abbott, was incredibly destructive. There was a strong movement to have an alternate choice. Newspaper articles talked about how the best candidate to take on Abbott would be a professional female, 35 to 50, ideally, with a profile and professional experience. I thought, ‘I can do this.’ I turned to my husband [Tim Irving] and said: ‘What if I give this a go? It took off, and we had a very intense campaign for five months.”

The campaign wasn’t the only thing she was running. A week after Steggall declared her candidacy, she learned that she and her ultra-marathon training partner had won the lot- tery to enter the Tour de Savoie, a 145-kilometer (90 miles) race with 9,100 meters of elevation gain. Eight months later, with less-than-perfect training, she pulled out after 113 kilo- meters (70 miles). “It’s the only event I’ve quit,” she says. “I want to go back and complete either that or the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc.” Also on her bucket list: the Western States 100 in California, the world’s oldest 100-mile trail race.

“I’m not afraid of a challenge,” says Steggall, who went from winning 50-second slalom runs to racing 20 hours non- stop and designing government policy for an entire continent. 

 The Austrian mountain guide shot four Olympics, four Himalayan expeditions and countless scenes around his Vermont home.

Photo above: “At the downhill, I got frostbite on my nose from pressing the camera too long against my face. Next morning, I wiped the skin away.” [Photo taken by Dick Needham at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics.]

 

Hubert Schriebl grew up climbing and skiing in Austria, then apprenticed as a saddle- and harness-maker. He moved to Innsbruck, the nation’s mountaineering hub, in 1955, at age 19. “I worked at the Kohler Sports factory, making leather grips for ski poles and the like,” he says. “I loved skiing the steep Nordkette runs on the north side of town, on the Seegrube lifts.” He became a certified ski and mountain guide, and in 1961 joined a German survey team mapping in the Himalaya. The work entailed photography. It was the first of his four trips to Asia.

“In 1964, while preparing to lead a Dutch expedition to Nepal, I met Emo Henrich in Igls,” Schriebl recalls. In 1961, Henrich had been named director of the new Strat- ton Mountain ski resort in Vermont. Says Schriebl, “He asked what I planned to do when I got back and invited me to Stratton. I had been thinking of guiding out of Lech, but thought I’d try one winter in America.” In late October, Schriebl led the first ascent of 23,000-foot Manaslu North. He arrived in Stratton two months later, on Christmas Eve.

In addition to shooting at Stratton, Schriebl landed choice assignments from SKI and Skiing magazines, Sports Illustrat- ed, Time, Newsweek and Vermont Life. He photographed four Winter Olympics—Innsbruck (1964 and 1976), Lake Placid (1980) and Sarajevo (1984)—and captured mountaineering expeditions in the Arctic, Africa and Mexico. He’s climbed Mont Blanc nine times and climbed Monte Rosa on his 70th birthday. --Seth Masia

“It was 1965, shortly after I arrived at Stratton. I was amazed at all the complicated equipment, especially the bindings. American skiers had Cubcos, Looks, Markers, all the differ- ent cable bindings, plus Head and Hart skis, and colorful boot brands. All I’d seen in Austria were the local brands, Kneissl and Kästle.”

 

"In 1968, Hermann Goellner came to Stratton and showed us what he could do in the air. One of our instructors, Kasi Lindlebauer, had incredible reflexes and always landed on his feet—I called him the Cat. He tried to do a flip, like Hermann. Believe it or not, he landed this one. He stuck it!”

 

 

 

“This one is Emo Henrich, showing how it’s done, around 1973. Of course, you couldn’t get away with locking the feet together all the time. He took some exciting spills on hard snow!”

 

 

“This is the young Canadian skier Brooks Read, overpowering his own gear in 2019.”

 

 

 

“The skiers are Alfred Trinker, Karl Gegenschatz and Hansi Brantner. This was a set-up. In the early 1970s I didn’t yet have a motor drive, so I needed to get off a single shot. I needed them to ski very clean.”

 

 

“Franz Klammer greets fans at the St. Anton World Cup in January 1981. He was 27 and would win the World Cup Down- hill title once more, in 1983, before retiring.”

 

 

 

"Here are the Canadian women at the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck, with 20-year-old Nancy Greene in the middle."

 

 

“This is Margaux Hemingway, skiing pow- der in 1981 at Gerlos, near Hintertux. She was a lot of fun to ski with.”

“In 1968, I was in Nepal. We were doing cartography work along the bor- der with Tibet—in fact, this ridgeline on Rolwaling Himal, at 5,900 me- ters near Cho Oyu, forms the border. My partner is Dr. Klaus Göurtler. The evening before we had climbed the opposite side of the valley from our camp at 6,000 meters, and here we are looking at our own tracks.”

 

 

 

“In 1981, Phil Mahre won his first overall World Cup title, largely based on the combined trophies earned at Morzine, Oberstauffen and, in this photo, at St. Anton. He later beat Stenmark in three technical events [slalom and GS] that season.

“It seems Phil won almost every time I shot him. At the end of the 1982 World Cup season, I shot him winning the slalom on March 26, in Montge- nèvre, France, wrapping up his second overall World Cup championship. John Fry urged me to get to the Dolomites the next day, where Bill Koch had the chance to win the cross country overall World Cup. So I drove Fry’s car through the night, about 330 miles across northern Italy, and the next morn- ing shot Koch winning the 15k at Castelrotto, and the overall championship.”

 

 

 

"Ingemar Stenmark at the World championships in Vail, 1989. He would win his last World Cup race, the GS at Aspen, the following week, and retire at the end of the season."

 

“At the 1976 Olympics, the ski jumps were held at Patscherköpfl. I had not much experience shooting jumping. I learned a bit about panning and got lucky with this shot.”

 

 

“Today, Andre Arnold is something of a for- gotten name, but he dominated World Pro Skiing, winning the championship in each of its last four seasons—more pro champion- ships than anyone else had ever won.”

 

 

 

 

“By 1984, the Mahre brothers were at the top of their game. Here’s Phil in the first run of the Sarajevo Olympic slalom. Steve won that run by .7 sec- onds, but Phil took the second run by more than a second for the gold. The race might have been even more exciting: Stenmark was barred from the Olympics that year for a spon- sorship violation.”

 

 

“At the Lake Placid Olympic downhill, in 1980, Leonhard Stock was a last-minute addition to the incredibly deep Austrian squad. The top of the downhill course was cut just for this event, and a temporary poma extended a few hundred feet above the top of Skyward Lift. That’s all gone now. From the top of the poma, I shot off to the left and crawled through the woods to a steep pitch at the big orange safety fence. I had to cut an illegal hole through the mesh and stuck my 300-mm lens

through it. I didn’t have much movement and was so close that each racer just filled the frame—this shot is uncropped. Sports Illustrated had a small army of photog- raphers there and their own lab. They asked if they could process my film and look at it. The next morning I was told, ‘Great shot, Hubert!’ It was the only shot they published, either of Stock or the downhill.”

 

“It was 1959, and I was earning my mountain guide certification in Austria.”

Patrician attitudes initially dominated 20th-century sports.

In the late 1800s, professional sports attracted high-stakes gambling. The potential for bribery and extortion led to a general sense that paid athletes were corruptible and competitions untrustworthy. While betting on amateur events was common, a deep divide emerged between “pure” amateurs, who were said to compete for the love of the sport, and professionals, who competed for money in the form of cash prizes or other remuneration. The distinction often boiled down to so-called gentleman-athletes, who had private fortunes, versus working-class athletes, who had to earn money to live and train. Sport governing bodies consisted almost exclusively of gentlemen, who often preferred not to compete with working people.

Photo, top of page: Ski jumping became a spectator sport, drawing huge crowds. Ski clubs sold tickets, and athletes wanted appearance money. Thus was born, in 1929, a professional ski jumping circuit. Photo courtesy Washington State Dept of Transportation.

 

 

When Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the ancient institution of Olympic competition in the 1894 Paris Congress, two governing subcommittees were created: the Olympic committee and the Amateurism committee. The word amateur was defined very loosely; nonetheless, de Coubertin gave it a strong ideological tie to the Olympics that proved very difficult to strip away.

Any participant who accepted financial benefit for any performance was considered professional, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) acted quickly to disqualify athletes found to have done so. Olympic sport thus claimed to be untainted by the culture of cheating and scandal that was presumed endemic to professionalism. Avery Brundage, the IOC president from 1952–1972 and a staunch supporter of amateurism, said in 1955: “We can only rely on the support of those who believe in the principles of fair play and sportsmanship embodied in the amateur code in our efforts to prevent the games from being used by individuals, organizations or nations for ulterior motives.” This amounted to pure hypocrisy: Brundage himself, when he was president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, was complicit in the Nazi use of Olympic sport for political purposes.

Participation in the first modern Olympics in Athens, in 1896, was limited to gentlemen and military officers (who were granted automatic “gentleman” status). Professionals and the working class were excluded. The tradition continued when the Winter Games began in 1924. It became a flash point because skiing originated as a working-class sport, pursued by hunters, farmers, herders and common warriors from prehistoric times.

Especially in North America, the strictures on working-class participation in sport couldn’t stand. But the rules still favored those wealthy enough not to have to make a living from sport. Amateur athletes could not teach or coach sports for money, receive remuneration for participating in sport nor use their victories and reputations to promote any product.

Conflicts over Amateurism in Skiing

Harold “Cork” Anson, in Jumping Through Time: A History of Ski Jumping in the United States and Southwest Canada, described how skiing developed in North America as Scandinavian immigrants brought ski jumping to Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin. It became the “thrill sport of winter,” he wrote. Jumps were built on hills with enough vertical to provide good landings. By the end of the 1890s, Michigan had more than 30 ski clubs centered around jumping.

A trend developed during this period that was inconsistent with the Norwegian principle of idraet, the philosophy that an individual develops strength and manliness through exercise. In theory, a person jumps because of the love of the sport, not for reward. But for ski clubs, jumping was a spectator sport. To draw paying crowds, some clubs worked to attract top athletes who could provide the longest, most thrilling jumps. Clubs gave cash prizes to winning jumpers (based on both distance and style points) and for the longest jumps (regardless of style). The size of jumping hills was increased to set new distance records, “compromising the grace and beauty of well controlled flight,” and clubs offered top jumpers local employment as a recruiting tool.

In 1905, the National Ski Association (NSA) was formed in Ishpeming, Michigan, to promote skiing, standardize competition rules and ski jump design, and to establish standards of amateurism. In 1906, on the principle that money corrupted idraet, NSA decided there should be no cash prizes in competitions. It took 10 years for those prizes to disappear, however. Some ski clubs paid the expenses of outstanding jumpers to participate in their tournaments. Professionals found they could demand, and receive, appearance money. Separate distance records were kept for amateur and professional ski jumpers.

In 1927, at the annual meeting of the NSA in Red Wing, Minnesota, 30 “leading riders of America gave the group an ultimatum,” according to the Seattle Times (February 4, 1927). Either they be allowed to receive cash awards or they would establish their own association. The paper reported that “Crockery, silver-ware, medals, cash and professionalism were more animated subjects of discussion ... than the outcome of the various championship events.”

 

 

Thus, in 1929, a number of Norwegian ski jumpers broke away from NSA and formed the Western American Winter Sports Association. WAWSA organized a professional ski jumping tour to compete around the United States in tournaments and exhibitions. Its members used tournament prize money to pay for travel. The group included Alf Engen, his brother Sverre, Sigurd Ulland, Lars Haugen, Einar Friedbo and others. Some of the country’s best jumpers did not join the tour, including Roy Mikkelsen and George Kotlarek, to preserve their amateur status so they could compete at the Olympics.

In 1932, the Cle Elum Ski Club in Washington asked Engen about appearing in its tournament. Engen replied that if “satisfactory terms” could be made, he would attend the event. “I am a professional and have arranged to jump in several tournaments this winter which offer some very attractive monetary rewards but, should you, however, make an offer which will make it worth my while to come to your city, I shall be very glad to jump upon your hill.” It appears the right offer was not made, as Engen was not one of the contestants in 1932.

Engen set a new world professional distance record in 1931 by jumping 247 feet at Ecker Hill near Salt Lake City. Over the next several years he repeatedly raised his own record. Engen won five National Professional Ski Jumping Championships from 1931 through 1935 and set three world professional jumping records.

Open Tournaments Permitted Ski Instructors to Compete

As Alpine skiing grew in popularity in the 1930s, and ski schools hired paid instructors, new issues relating to amateurism arose. In Europe, the International Ski Federation (FIS) ruled that ski instructors were amateurs and eligible to compete in FIS races. This did not fly with the International Olympic Committee. Olympic Alpine events were scheduled for the first time at the 1936 Winter Games in Garmisch, but the Nazi-run German team had a problem: their men had been shut out of the medals at the FIS World Championships in 1935. The IOC responded to pressure from Germany and excluded from the Garmisch Alpine events all the Swiss and Austrian men, on the grounds that they had worked as ski instructors. This opened a path for German skiers to win medals at the Olympics, while the Swiss and Austrians dominated the FIS Alpine Championships, held concurrently in Innsbruck with no Germans present.

In the United States, NSA considered paid instructors to be “FIS amateurs” who could not compete in amateur tournaments. When Sun Valley opened in December 1936, Averell Harriman set out to make his new resort an international destination and the country’s center of ski racing. He sponsored ski tournaments that attracted the best skiers in the world, and publicist Steve Hannagan made sure newspapers provided extensive coverage of the events. In his autobiography, Dick Durrance said Harriman “was determined that Sun Valley would match anything Europe had to offer.”

Harriman hired some of the best ski racers from Europe to teach in the Sun Valley Ski School, although as ski instructors, they were not eligible to compete in amateur ski races in this country. Harriman decided to host “open” ski tournaments, welcoming both amateurs and professionals, so his ski instructors could show off their skills.

In spring 1937, Sun Valley hosted its first International Open tournament, which would become known later as the Harriman Cup tournament. “The ski instructors are generally considered superior to the average American amateur” and were not permitted to race against true amateurs, according to coverage in the Seattle Times. The Sun Valley International Open was “the No. 1 tournament of the year, because it numbered all the skiing greats in its entry list.” Two championships would be awarded, for open and amateur, and ski instructors were eligible only for the open title, while amateurs were eligible for both. Separate prizes were awarded to the winner of each category. Forty-four of the best European and American skiers entered: eight ski instructors who were eligible for the open championships and 36 amateurs in “the greatest field of foreign and resident skiers ever assembled in North America.”

Seattle’s Peter Garrett, one of the Northwest’s best racers, later lamented that amateur skiers had to compete with better-trained professionals, “who ski seven days out of the week and make skiing their living.” He called for a new system in which pure amateurs and pros would race in their own divisions.

 

 

Skiers Faced Discipline Over Amateur Issue

 

 

Engen immigrated to the U.S. from Norway in 1929 and became a U.S. citizen in 1935. Hoping to represent the U.S. in the 1936 Winter Olympics, he applied to be reinstated as an amateur. NSA ruled that an athlete could regain amateur status by proving he (or she) had not taken a sport-related payment for a full year. Engen did so, then out-jumped the competition at the Olympic trials and was named to the Olympic Team. However, Brundage, then president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, threw Engen off the team because his picture had appeared on Wheaties boxes (the “breakfast of champions”), along with those of basketball star Bob Kessler, hockey player Mike Karakas and speed skater Kit Klein. This made him a professional athlete, according to Brundage.

In late 1941, NSA revoked amateur status for Dick Durrance, Gretchen Fraser and Engen (again). Durrance was head of the Alta Ski School; in addition, both he and Engen endorsed Groswold skis. The NSA said that endorsing skis was allowed but that “use of a title and a record” made Engen a professional. The ski association said that Engen might be reinstated for open competition if changes were made to the advertisement, but it depended on whether the title and his record were used with his permission.

 

 

Fraser had been paid to double for Sonja Henie in skiing sequences in the 1940 movie Thin Ice and in Sun Valley Serenade in 1941. NSA ruled that she “will be a professional, eligible only as a F.I.S. amateur.” To address this issue, Northwest delegates to the NSA meeting were instructed to propose that all U.S. tournaments be open events under FIS rules.

In December 1941, NSA cleared Durrance of violating its rules. A skier could continue to be an amateur even if certified as a ski teacher, so long as he did not teach for money. Open-class competitors could endorse ski equipment “so long as titles were not thereby exploited.” In February 1942, Fraser and Engen each had their amateur status reinstated. The ski association determined that Engen endorsed Groswold skis but had not authorized the use of his record in any advertisement.

 

 

In 1936, both the winter and summer 1940 Olympics were awarded to Tokyo, Japan (to the surprise of many), making it the first non-Western city to win an Olympic bid. After the second Sino-Japanese War broke out in July 1937, doubts were raised about whether Japan should host the Olympics. Japan formally forfeited the Games on July 16, 1938, and the IOC awarded the Summer Games to Helsinki, Finland, which had been runner-up in the original selection process. St. Moritz, Switzerland, was named as the new host of the 1940 Winter Games.

St. Moritz’s willingness to host the Winter Olympics was threatened when a dispute arose over the eligibility of paid ski instructors to participate in the Games. While FIS insisted that instructors were amateurs, the IOC ruled that they were professionals and ineligible. As a result of this conflict, the IOC eliminated skiing as a regular event from the 1940 Olympics, making it an exhibition sport.

Switzerland refused to host the Games at St. Moritz unless skiing were changed back to a regular event. The IOC refused to do so, and the Winter Games were transferred to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, the host of the 1936 Olympics. Of course, both the 1940 and 1944 Games were eventually cancelled due to World War II.

 

 

After the war, the Winter Olympics resumed at St. Moritz in 1948, where Fraser competed as an amateur and won gold and silver, the first American to win an Olympic medal in Alpine skiing. Engen served as co-coach of the U.S. team with Walter Prager. Prager, a two-time World Alpine champion, Lauberhorn and Hahnenkamm victor and Swiss Nordic champion, was one of the Swiss ski instructors who had been barred from the 1936 Olympics. So he departed that year for America, to the benefit of Dartmouth College and the 10th Mountain Division.

As IOC chairman, Avery Brundage would campaign to exclude so-called professionals from “amateur” sports until his death in 1975. In his most notorious confrontation, he threw Karl Schranz out of the 1972 Olympics for signing endorsement contracts. In 1984, World Cup champions Ingemar Stenmark and Hanni Wenzel were banned from the Sarajevo Olympics for taking sponsorship money directly, rather than through their national teams. The IOC finally dropped the amateurs-only rule in 1986, permitting all athletes to deal openly with sponsors. 

John Lundin has won four ISHA Skade Awards for books on the history of Pacific Northwest skiing and Sun Valley. He wrote about Sun Valley’s Ruud Mountain in the March-April 2022 issue of Skiing History.

 

 

 

 

There was more to Willy Schaeffler than stern disciplinarian.

By PETER MILLER

During the 1970-71 World Cup season, the men of the U.S. Alpine squad clashed with their coach, Willy Schaeffler. After Billy Kidd’s departure in February 1970, Spider Sabich was the team’s most successful skier. When he quit in January 1971 to join World Pro Skiing, the proximate cause was money—U.S. Ski Team racers earned none. But Sabich also butted heads with Schaeffler. In his book The 30,000-Mile Ski Race (1972), Peter Miller told both sides of the story.

At fifty-four, their head coach, Willy Schaeffler, was a good generation gap older. His hair is grey, thin and combed straight back close to his skull. Part of his face seems to be paralyzed, so that his smile stops in the middle. Willy is a neat dresser and walks erect, almost stiffly. His blue eyes are appraising and sometimes appear quite cold. He spent the first half of his life in Germany, where he was born.

He had told the team earlier, when they were training in Aspen, Colorado, that he was the team hatchet man and that if someone had to be kicked off the team, he would do it, and he would be the scapegoat for all the difficulties. He had also told them that he was going to discipline their minds and bodies, and that although skiing is an individual sport, everyone must work together. He wanted to develop winners.

Willy has been a winner all his life. In his twenty-two years as the coach at the University of Denver his ski teams won 100 out of 123 dual meets, and 14 National Collegiate titles. For a while, his archrival was Bob Beattie, who, before he became one of Willy’s predecessors as National Ski Team coach, trained the ski team at the University of Colorado. Willy beat the pants off Bob. Most of the team did not appreciate Willy’s authoritarian attitude toward ski racing. . . .

The two months during which the young racers had lived and trained under their new coach had convinced them he was an autocratic disciplinarian. They called Willy a heavy-handed Kraut. What few of them realized was that Willy, like them, had started his life as an avid skier who disliked authority, discipline, regimentation, and the draft. During World War II, Willy’s rebellion against the political-military establishment in Germany nearly cost him his life half a dozen times.

Willy was raised in Bavaria, not far from Garmisch, where he learned to ski. His father was a Social Democrat, and since Hitler was not very well disposed to political opponents in the mid-thirties, the father was placed on the blacklist. Willy was drafted in 1937, and in a letter to an uncle in Chicago he described some of his training. The letter was censored. Then the government extended his Army duty, two weeks before he was to be discharged. Just as any American youth would do, Willy bitched, loud and clear. The Army brought forth the letter and accused Willy of being a spy. They criticized him for lack of patriotism. As Willy was not in the Party, and his family was blacklisted, they busted him from warrant officer to private and sent him to the Dutch border to what was called a baby concentration camp. For the next year and a half, he dug ditches from 5:00 a.m. until 4:00 in the afternoon. He was twenty-one, the same age as most of the racers he now coaches.

Willy was released in 1938 and started to live a happy period as a test driver for the Ford Motor Company. On weekends and holidays, he was a Garmisch ski instructor. When the war broke out, his presence on the blacklist saved him from being drafted. But the Army reconsidered in 1941 and inducted him into the ranks as part of a penal battalion. The battalion was sent to Poland to build bridges. When the offensive into Russia began, Willy’s penal battalion was offered a chance to rehabilitate itself. The men were given weapons and were used as special patrols and on spearhead missions. Willy was somewhere behind Moscow, as part of a pincer movement, when the temperature dropped to -54 degrees and the Russians began to pull the Germans apart. Willy put on the clothes of dead Russians. He was captured and lined up before a firing squad. He went through a very quick and intense period of concentration, where his life flashed in an instant. They fired and Willy, sure he was dead, fell to the ground. The Russians, drunk on vodka, fell down too, laughing madly over their practical joke. Willy managed to escape and rejoin the Germans. His life on the Russian front was probably saved by his fifth wound, shrapnel in the right lung and upper heart chamber. He was evacuated in a plane, which was shot down behind enemy lines. Willy, one of two survivors, hid in a small compartment for two days before he was rescued. He was transferred from one hospital to another until he arrived in Munich, weighing 130 pounds. It was 1944.

The military establishment decided that Willy, after he gained twenty pounds, was so well trained in winter warfare that he could rehabilitate himself again by returning to the Russian front. Willy silently refused. At about the same time, American Flying Fortresses blasted Munich. The headquarters building was evacuated before the raid, but Willy and a friend lingered and filled a knapsack with code numbers, passes, stamps, requisition orders. The building was demolished by bombs five minutes after Willy rifled the offices. A day later, Willy and his friend were dug out of a nearby bomb shelter. No one would ever know that the papers were stolen. Willy split for Austria.

He could, with the papers, go anywhere, requisition guns and munitions, food and uniforms. He entered the underground, harassing the German Army with sabotage. His biggest coup was in 1944, when Hitler ordered a last stand at St. Anton. Tanks, cannons and supplies were brought in by train from Germany through the Arlberg Tunnel, and the guns were being dug into the lower slopes of St. Anton—where today there are ski slopes. Willy blew up the tunnel with a box of dynamite and for the rest of the winter, from his hideout on the Valluga mountain, watched German troops struggle over the Arlberg Pass.

After the war Willy fished out a few top Nazis who were hiding in Austria and managed to land his old job at Garmisch, ski instructing American troops. One of his students was General George C. Patton. They became friends and Patton helped Willy, who had been living for two years on forged identifications, to receive official papers and the goodwill of the U.S. military.

World War II is history; the emotions of that period are lost on the younger generation. Yet perhaps it is the residue of that period of hardship that has forged this particular generation gap, the difference between the easygoing young American ski racers and the older, German-born, adopted American. Willy developed, in his younger days in Bavaria, as an independent thinker who believed in self-determination and who loved to ski. His beliefs, and they were as strong as are the anti-Vietnam war protests of the youth today, turned him into a rebel against authority, the establishment, draft, right-wingers. He developed his own philosophy, survived against the odds, and became a person who dislikes criticism and who is uncompromising in his beliefs. When he was twenty-one, the average age of the American ski racer, he was, because of his independent, outspoken attitude, digging ditches in a concentration camp. In fact, Willy, a German who sabotaged the war effort of his own country, has all the qualities that the young Americans think are so cool. The difference is that Willy was nearly killed a number of times because he adhered to what he thought was correct. Discipline and physical stamina and the will to win, or survive—that which he hopes to instill in his young American skiers—kept him alive. Money, prestige, security were luxuries he never knew in his youth. 

Willy Schaeffler was elected to the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame in 1974. After repeated cardiac surgeries, his heart gave out in 1988. He was 72 years old.

Peter Miller joined Life Magazine as a writer/photographer in 1959 and went on to write and shoot for dozens of national magazines, including Sports Illustrated and, from 1965 to 1988, SKI. He has written ten books. In 1994 he received ISHA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism.

 

 

 

Belatedly elected to the Hall of Fame, the charismatic skier drove the professionalization of Alpine ski racing.

From the moment he entered the world on January 10, 1945, a ball of energy and gangly limbs, Vladimir Peter Sabich Jr. would be known as Spider. His father, Vlad, a World War II B-25 bomber pilot and California Highway Patrol officer, and his mother, Frances, the local postmistress, were hard-working and pragmatic. They raised their kids in Kyburz, California, nestled along the South Fork of the American River, where the Sierra Nevada foothills rise into the mountains enclosing Lake Tahoe.

Photo top of page: Spider Sabich in peak form at the Aspen World Cup slalom, 1968. Courtesy John Russell.

Nature served up hunting and fishing in the summer and skiing in the winter. Spider, his older sister Mary and younger brother Steve (known to all as “Pinky”) learned to ski fast as part of Edelweiss Ski Area’s Red Hornets. Dede Brinkman, Spider’s Hornet teammate and lifelong friend, remembers the boy with big ears and a crooked front tooth as determined, focused and kind. By their teens, she says, “he had an aura. There was something magical about him.”

As the team packed into station wagons and racked up trophies throughout California, word of the “Highway 50 Boys” traveled beyond the Sierra. Spider and Pinky caught the attention of Bob Beattie, who offered them skiing scholarships at the University of Colorado. In 1963 Spider arrived in Boulder to study aeronautical engineering and ski. At the time, before the U.S. Ski Team was formed, Beattie’s CU Buffs were the de facto U.S. Men’s Ski Team. Spider and Pinky joined future Olympians Billy Kidd, Moose Barrows, Jimmie Heuga and Jere Elliot.

Beattie brought a hard-nosed, football-coach mentality to the ski team, implementing tough dryland training regimens. Bars were off limits. Instead, the team’s house, complete with swimming pool, became the party, where bands played, beer flowed and teammates bonded for life. Part drill sergeant, part cheerleader, part father, Beattie developed protective relationships with his athletes, no more than with Spider.

World Cup Victory at Heavenly

Over the course of his early career, Spider suffered seven broken legs. But by the spring of 1967, at age 22, he was whole and strong. He made his World Cup debut in the final slalom of the inaugural World Cup season at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and finished sixth. The following year, he tackled the circuit full time. Teammates remember him for his street sense and maturity, as well as a penchant for fun and mischief.  

In medal position after the first run of the 1968 Olympic slalom, Spider ended up fifth. The result matched Kidd’s GS finish as the best American skiing performance at the Games, and—though eclipsed by Jean-Claude Killy’s three gold medals—it heralded a bright future for American skiing.

During the 1968 season, Robert Redford was in Kitzbühel, Austria, researching his role for the 1969 film Downhill Racer. Though the original script based the lead on Olympic medalist Kidd, Redford gravitated to an unheralded, unpretentious and supremely charismatic teammate. “Spider Sabich was largely the inspiration for Dave Chappellet, probably more than any other one athlete,” says Redford. “What I remember most about Spider, and what I wanted to depict, was the way he attacked the race course, which to me reflected a feeling of going for broke.”

Spider ended his first full season on the World Cup with a win at Heavenly Valley, 30 miles from Kyburz. A crowd of 5,000 people lined the slope to cheer the hometown hero, who secured the win on a come-from-behind second run. Killy, who finished seventh in that race, won his second overall World Cup title and then retired.

Over the next two seasons on the World Cup, Spider won three more podiums and 11 top-10 results for a career total of 16 finishes in the top 10. Meanwhile, Beattie had moved on to launch the World Pro Skiing Tour (WPS), with Kidd as its star. After winning the FIS World Combined Championship in 1970, Kidd immediately turned pro and won the 1970 WPS championship as well. Spider, who was still competing on the World Cup, grew increasingly restless and unsettled at the hand-to-mouth existence it offered American skiers, while their European counterparts profited richly from sponsors. He finished out the 1970 season and went to Europe with the team the following winter, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Peter Miller, who chronicled the 1970–71 World Cup season in his book The 30,000 Mile Ski Race, summed up the particular challenge for U.S. skiers: “The American racer is a lonely figure on the international circuit. He is an amateur competing against professionals.” Miller also captured the personality conflicts within the team, under the disciplined coaching of Willy Schaeffler. None of it meshed with Spider’s motivations or personality, and he was ripe for change.

To Tyler Palmer, a 20-year-old slalom phenom on the World Cup during the 1970-71 season, Spider was both mentor and friend. In early January, the night before the slalom race in Berchtesgaden, Spider told Palmer he’d be leaving to join Beattie’s WPS. “My stomach hit the floor,” remembers Palmer. “You’re going to be fine,” Spider assured Palmer. “You’ve got everything I’ve got. Don’t hold back.” The next day Palmer, starting 61st, finished fourth. Two weeks later he scored his first World Cup victory.

Spider flew home immediately after Berchtesgaden. “It was such a relief to stop racing as an amateur,” Spider told Sports Illustrated in 1971. “I was fed up with the hypocrisy. Fed up with racing against guys who were making $50,000 a year, guys who had other people to wax their skis, sharpen their edges and who could go home when they got tired. I was nervous trying to compete with what I thought were insufficient weapons. Now I have no worries.”

Going Pro

Spider won his first pro race on February 4, 1971, at Hunter Mountain, New York, pocketing a check for $1,250. “The next thing we know, we’re getting reports Spider is winning every race.” recalls Hank Kashiwa, a U.S. Ski Team racer who joined the WPS in 1972. Spider went on to win seven races, beating Kidd in the final to win the overall tour title and $21,188. In the 1972 season Spider defended his title with nine more wins and broke his own record for prize money, making more than $50,000 ($360,000 today). That same year, the male U.S. Ski Team athletes were reimbursed $200 each for their commitment, the women $80.

WPS brought the relatively unknown sport of ski racing to the American people in an easily understood format and in easily accessible venues—from high-profile Colorado’s Aspen and Vail to tiny Buck Hill, Minnesota, and Beech Mountain, North Carolina. In Beattie’s head-to-head, gladiatorial format, the rules were simple: cross the finish line first and you win. The tour brought the drama, excitement and fun of ski racing up close to viewers and offered them ready access to the athletes and their personalities.

The tour also allowed sponsors and athletes alike to connect with the audience while enabling athletes to maintain their independence and claim cold hard cash. Under amateur rules, U.S. Ski Team members could not directly work with sponsors, but on the pro circuit, skiers could serve as billboards, eager to sell their sponsors’ brands while creating their own. Explains John Demetre, whose sweater designs, especially one based on Spider’s Kyburz High School football jersey, exploded in popularity, “This was showing America Demetre every weekend.”

Regular TV coverage on ABC and NBC, as well as Beattie’s made-for-TV celebrity pro-ams, ensured attention, sponsors and prize money for WPS. In its first season, prize money totaled $92,500. Over the next four years, the amount had grown to more than $500,000. Spider’s laid-back attitude, approachable personality and contagious joie de vivre made him a marketer’s dream, and he earned more than $150,000 annually from sponsors. Said Gordi Eaton, then racing director at K2, “Having Spider ... you knew he was going to handle the public side of the thing well because he loved people and could sell anything to anyone.”

In tirelessly promoting the tour, Spider took his sponsors along for the ride, none more so than K2. At home, he charmed the brand’s factory workers, retailers and customers, and diligently worked trade shows and press conferences to win the hearts and attention of fans. In Europe, where the American ski companies had previously garnered little credibility, he represented the free-spirited ambition and legitimacy of American skiing, and skis.

Klaus Obermeyer once described Spider as “a man drinking life out of a full cup.” Spider could seamlessly switch from being laser focused on course to being friendly elsewhere, headlining everything from autograph sessions to wet T-shirt contests and sponsor parties. He’d pound a glass of water before bedtime, then be first up in the morning to train. The ambassador of hard work and fun was eminently approachable, especially around kids, for whom he’d get down on his knee to have eye contact while signing autographs.

Explained the late Gaylord Guenin, the WPS PR director, “It was simply Sabich being Sabich. . . . He brought an honest vitality to the sport that can be compared to the vitality Joe Namath brought to football.”

Meanwhile, the restrictions on amateur skiers tightened further, climaxing with the disqualification of Austria’s top skier, Karl Schranz, from the 1972 Sapporo Olympics for “professionalism.” This impelled more top Olympians, enticed by Spider’s success and lifestyle, to travel directly from the Games to join the WPS. Among them were Kashiwa and Palmer. As more World Cup racers joined the ranks and learned the format, Spider rolled on to defend his title and lead ski racing’s revolution.

A Plane, a Porsche and a Pad

Spider embodied everything that Beattie had imagined WPS could provide: American ski racers making a living on their own terms, on their own turf, and using it as a springboard to their professional lives. With his earnings and competing near home, Spider was able to enjoy a lifestyle similar to that of European ski stars. He engineered a home in Aspen’s Starwood neighborhood, near his friend John Denver. The house was neither huge nor showy, but a unique creation featuring California timber, curved stone walls and a waterbed in the living room. He earned his pilot’s license and bought a twin-engine Piper Aztec that he often flew to competitions.

“He had the plane, the nice house, the Porsche. We wanted to be like him,” says fellow pro Dan Mooney, while noting that no competitors begrudged Spider his success. They fully understood the work it took and his talent for walking the line between fierce competitor and life of the party. Spider generously mentored incoming athletes, teaching them that making it as a pro meant managing training, travel, equipment, sponsors and one’s own competitive instincts. It meant working hard in the gym and on the hill, in the ski room and the board room, at trade shows, in ski shops and, most importantly, with sponsors.

Whereas amateurs were punished for promoting sponsors, pros were fined for not going to sponsor parties. Terry Palmer recalls Spider teaching him how to drink at tour parties by having one shot, then discreetly throwing subsequent drinks over his shoulder. His message, Palmer recalls, was always clear: “If you’re going to be good, if you’re going to make money at this, if we’re going to have a good tour, you’re going to have to work hard.”

Sponsors and athletes organized themselves into factory teams, bringing together the financial and logistical support of a national team while preserving the monetary incentive for individual success. So compelling was the tour that Killy came out of retirement for the 1972–73 season and joinedWPS, bringing it international attention.

Kashiwa was with Spider when they learned Killy was joining the tour and felt his demeanor change. “I think he wanted to prove that we [on the WPS] were the best skiers in the world,” says Kashiwa. Initially unprepared for the physical challenge of the format, Killy earned $225 total in his first race but retrenched over the Christmas break and roared back, winning five races to Spider’s three. Spider and Killy’s epic battle for the 1973 season title—recounted in the film Spider and the Frenchman and in Killy’s book Comeback—ended when Spider crashed off a bump, badly injuring his neck and shoulder.

Despite losing the title to Killy, and amid the infusion of new stars, Spider graced the cover of GQ magazine in November 1974. Clutching his red, white and blue K2 skis, in his signature Demetre sweater, he remained the face of the American pro tour and the picture of success. As tour director Nappy Neaman once put it, “Every kid wanted to be Spider. Every girl wanted to date Spider.”

As a brand ambassador for Snowmass (the resort’s only front man since Stein Eriksen), Spider deftly navigated all aspects of Aspen’s scene, comfortably mingling with cowboys, ski bums, celebrities and the ultra-rich. In 1972, at a pro-am event in California, he met French singer Claudine Longet. Recently and amicably divorced from Andy Williams, who had facilitated her Hollywood career, Longet and her three children later moved in with Spider. For a time, the couple seemed genuinely in love, but friends recall that her quick temper and possessiveness turned the intensity of the relationship into a liability. This shift coincided with Spider’s competitive decline. “If you’re out of shape by the eighth run, you’re not going to be able to do the things that you’re telling yourself mentally you can do,” he said. “And that breeds inconsistency. And in this game, inconsistency is elimination.”

Last Runs

In 1974, Spider managed two wins and limped through the season to finish fifth in the tour standings. By then his litany of injuries included knee, back and neck problems—on top of the seven early-career broken legs. Publicly he made no excuses, remaining upbeat and optimistic about the future. After missing the entire 1975 season due to injury, Spider knew his ski racing career was coming to its natural end. He and Beattie (as friend and advisor) together plotted the next step, which would likely involve K2 and Snowmass, and possibly ski area development, real estate and TV commentary. With Spider’s talent, education and connections, his next chapter promised to be as exciting as the last, and less stressful.

By March 1976, having qualified for the weekend round of 32 only twice that season, Spider decided to quit two things that were no longer healthy for him: ski racing and Claudine. He told Tyler Palmer as much in their hotel room in Collingwood, Ontario, before the penultimate race of the season. Palmer, upset at the prospect of once again losing his teammate and mentor, also mistrusted Longet. “I told him ‘Just be careful with her,’” Palmer recalls. “That was the last I saw of him.”

Longet and her kids were to move out by April 1. On March 21, Sabich spent his afternoon training at Buttermilk, while Longet, according to toxicology reports that were ultimately disallowed as evidence, spent hers indulging in Aspen’s notorious après ski. After a short visit with Beattie, Spider headed home to change. He planned to meet Beattie later that evening and to fly to the annual ski trade show in Vegas the next day. Instead, Longet shot him to death in his own bathroom, with the gun his dad had bought as a souvenir from the ’68 Olympics. Spider was 31 years old.

While the shooting itself still holds mysteries, the aftermath of the killing, the trial and the events that led to Longet’s sentence—a $250 fine and 30 days at the Pitkin County Jail to be served at a time of her choosing—are well chronicled (see “Spider Sabich: A Tale Larger Than Life,” by Charlie Meyers, in Skiing Heritage, September 2006).

A Long Legacy

Under Chuck Ferries’ supervision, K2 had introduced its first race ski in 1969. Spider’s success helped bring the brand to prominence, and by 1975 it had achieved a 30 percent market share in North America. Iconic, fiercely independent stars like Phil and Steve Mahre, Glen Plake and Bode Miller continued to build the uniquely American brand. Beattie’s WPS thrived, and the popularity of the format inspired a women’s pro tour, started by Jill Wing Heck in 1978. In 1993, Bernhard Knauss became the first pro skier to break the $1 million mark in tour winnings. “Even in the 90s, this name Spider Sabich meant something,” says Knauss. “I realized from the beginning that if I work hard enough and do well it can change my life.”

Skier Erik Schlopy revived his own amateur career with the technique and independence he learned through the pro format. When it came to naming his own son, Schlopy was inspired by one person: “Spider Sabich was the coolest racer of all time,” he says. Young Spider Schlopy now races for the Park City ski team. Today, a revived pro tour features both amateur and pro skiers facing off with no eligibility restrictions, and its star, Rob Cone, is a laid-back former U.S. Ski Teamer and collegiate skier who races on his own terms. Meanwhile, at the Spider Sabich Race Arena in Snowmass, people of all ages come to experience the rush of head-to-head racing.

Spider lives on in a more tangible way, too. “In the early summer of 1967,” Dede Brinkman recounts, “he and I spent the night together, and we conceived a child.” At the time, both were otherwise engaged, Dede to her future husband and Spider with his skiing career. The two decided to keep this secret. Dede remained close with Spider, as their lives took both of them from Tahoe to Boulder and, eventually, to Aspen. After her divorce, she lived in Starwood, where their daughter, Missy, had a close connection to Spider.

When Brinkman told her daughter, then age 20, the truth, “there was a lot more about my life that made sense,” says Missy. She now runs a successful coffee business in Salt Lake City, and her own daughter, Grace, recently graduated from UC Berkeley. They share a love of skiing and an appreciation for Spider’s ideals, which Missy describes as “doing what’s right, not what is easy. And making a difference.” While Spider never met his own grandchild, his parents did. Missy recalls Frances Sabich’s words: “It’s just the nicest thing to know there’s a legacy.’” 

Regular contributor Edith Thys Morgan spent nine years on the U.S. Ski Team, competing in three World Championships and two Olympics. She last wrote about “What to Expect When You’re Inspecting” in the January-February 2022 issue.

Spider Lives: On Film and in the Hall of Fame

Spider Sabich’s life is commemorated in the new film Spider Lives, which will hold its premiere at 5:30 pm on March 25 during Skiing History Week in Sun Valley. Produced by Christin Cooper, Mike Hundert, Mark Taché, Edith Thys Morgan and Hayden Scott, the 90-minute film earned a 2021 ISHA Film Award. On March 26, Sabich will be inducted into the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame, during its banquet in Sun Valley.

A teenager came to America, embodying the greatest ski jumping tradition of all.

North American skiing owes a lot to Kongsberg, Norway. This silver-mining town, 55 miles southwest of Oslo, dominated ski jumping in the first half of the 20th century. Between 1928 and 1948, of the 12 Olympic medals awarded in ski jumping, Norwegians won 10 (all gold and silver), and six went to Kongsberg boys. Often, three members of a four-man ski jumping team representing Norway were from Kongsberg.

(Photo top: Ragnar Ulland's leap at Mr. Norquay, Alberta, around 1955, appears to clear Mt. Rundle and the town of Banff. Courtesy Ragnar Ulland).

The guys with the red sweaters and white K’s on their chest included Birger, Sigmund and Asbjorn Ruud; Roy and Strand Mikkelsen; Hjalmar Hvam; Petter Hugsted; Arnhold Kongsberg; Nordal Kahldal; Tom Mobraaten; Henry Sodvedt; and Olav, Sigurd and Reidar Ulland.

The Ruuds Led the Way

The Ruud brothers dominated international ski jumping for Norway in the 1930s. Birger won back-to-back gold medals in ski jumping in the 1932 and 1936 Winter Olympics, plus the first Olympic Alpine downhill (not itself a medal event in 1936) and silver in jumping in 1948. He also earned two World Championship golds. In fact, the three Ruud brothers won the World Championships five times among them.

Sigmund won a silver medal in the 1928 St. Moritz Winter Games and Asbjorn won gold at both the 1938 FIS Nordic World Ski Championships and the 1946 Holmenkollen competition. In 1937–38, Birger and Sigmund toured the United States, setting new world records on America’s big hills.

Meanwhile, the Mikkelsen brothers contributed greatly to the development of ski jumping in North America. Strand won the 1929 U.S. National Championships, and younger brother Roy was a member of the 1932 and 1936 U.S. Olympic jumping teams.

Hjalmar Hvam grew up skiing in Kongsberg and came to Portland, Oregon, in 1927. Five years later, he won the first U.S. Nordic combined championship at Lake Tahoe, California, by taking first in Class B jumping and in the 18-kilometer cross-country race. He won several Northwest Alpine and Nordic events in the 1930s and 1940s and also is widely credited with inventing the first commercially successful Alpine release binding.

Petter Hugsted won the junior Holmenkollen championship in 1940 and went on to win a gold medal for Norway in the 1948 Winter Olympic Games.

The trio of Nordal Kaldahl, Henry Sodvedt, and Tom Mobraaten immigrated to British Columbia during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Known as the “three musketeers of ski jumping,” they dominated Northwest jumping events and helped organize, teach and judge skiing competitions throughout Canada.

In 1932, Kaldahl won more than five Class A jumping tournaments in the Northwest. The following year, Mobraaten won most of the same championship events, then joined the Canadian Olympic team in 1936 and 1948. Sodvedt, a champion in the combined Nordic events, was also active in the Canadian Amateur Ski Association, serving as a vice-president, and became a renowned international ski jumping judge.

Seven Ulland Brothers Competed

There were seven Ulland brothers. Sigurd came to the United States in 1928 and set hill jumping records at Lake Placid, New York, and Mount Shasta, California. In 1938, he won the U.S. Ski Jumping Championships in Brattleboro, Vermont.

In 1930, Sigurd’s younger brother Olav took third in the Holmenkollen junior championships. He then coached in France and won the 1935 French four-way championship. In the same year, Olav made jumping history at Ponte di Legno, Italy, where he soared 103.5 meters (339 feet) to become the first ski jumper ever to break the 100-meter barrier. He then coached the Italian jumping team at the 1936 Olympics. The Seattle Ski Club later hired him to coach their young ski jumpers.

Olav settled permanently in Seattle. He won several Class A jumping events in the Pacific Northwest, including the PNSA championships in 1939. Like many jumpers of his time, Olav was also an accomplished Alpine skier and took fifth in the Mount Rainier Silver Skis race of 1938. After years of teaching, he became coach of the 1956 U.S. Olympic ski jumping team, a role he continued through the 1958 World Championships in Lahti, Finland. In 1960, he was named chief of competition for jumping events at the Squaw Valley Olympic Games. Olav is also widely known for his role in the Osborn and Ulland sporting goods stores, a dominant Seattle area ski business from 1941 through 1995.

Olav brought his younger brother Reidar to Seattle in 1947. Reidar immediately found himself a top finisher in jumping tournaments. Four years later he brought his son, Ragnar, then 14, to Seattle.

Ragnar Ulland Continues the Legacy

Ragnar began jumping at age five in Kongsberg. By age eight, he was said to have been jumping from 110 to 120 feet in competitions.

During his first winter in Seattle, Ragnar consistently placed in the top five in Class B regional tournaments. At the 1952 National Junior Ski Jumping Tournament at Lake Tahoe, he took third and also received a prize for the most stylish leap of the day, a 127-foot effort.

Ragnar was said to achieve his amazing distances because he “held his float.” He had learned the technique of carrying skis higher on the float, keeping the air pressure under the blades all the way, leaning forward and then timing his landing to get the last yard, foot and inch. Indeed, the Kongsberg jumpers, starting with Ragnar’s uncle Sigurd, had refined a new style of leaning forward, bending at the hips and keeping the ski tips high on the descent.

During the 1952–53 season, Ragnar notched five first-place finishes, and the next year, at age 16, he began jumping in Class A events, consistently taking second in tournaments, with one first-place title when he beat Uncle Olav. The National Junior Ski Jumping Championships, held in Duluth, Minnesota, in February 1954, were no exception. He placed second, with longer jumps than the local youth, Jerry Lewis, who won the event based on style points.

In the 1954–55 season, Ragnar attended a two-week training camp at Howelsen Hill in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, under coach Gordy Wren. With three jumps at more than 230 feet, he took seventh in Class A events there. A month later, he won the National Junior Ski Jumping Championships at Leavenworth, Washington, and tied the hill record with a standing leap of 284 feet. With that win, he was invited, with 40 other jumpers, to the tryouts for the U.S. Olympic ski jumping team in Iron Mountain, Michigan. He took fourth place and earned a spot on the team.

Olympic Hopes Dashed

Going into the Cortina Olympics, Ragnar was 18, a senior at Seattle’s Roosevelt High School and, at that time, the youngest member of a U.S. ski jumping team to compete in the Olympics.

Before heading for Europe, the team trained at Lake Placid. The intensity there was high, as no American since 1924 had placed better than fifth in Olympic ski jumping. Uncle Olav, as coach of the team, knew European judges were tough on the landing and worked with the jumpers on their style.

In Cortina, the six U.S. jumpers pushed hard in practice, and mishaps occurred. Ragnar took a terrible spill and badly hurt his lower back. He was one of six U.S. winter athletes hurt in one day in Cortina. Disappointed and recovering, Ragnar went home to Seattle. He competed in the local Kongsberger Ski Club annual event, placing second.

With the 1956–57 season, tryouts loomed to select the next U.S. team to participate in the FIS World Championships, scheduled for Lahti, Finland, in 1958. Ragnar, now 19, still was recovering from his injuries, and, while he had several top-10 finishes, he finished 17th in the 1957 National Ski Jumping Championships in Berlin, New Hampshire.

In January 1958, he went to Ishpeming for the final tryouts for the 1958 U.S. Team. On the famed Suicide Hill, he repeated his 17th place finish from Nationals the year before. That effort, along with his previous record, was enough to qualify him as an alternate for the Lahti squad.

Later in 1958, he rallied and took third in the PNSA Class A championships at Leavenworth, with a long jump of 283 feet, one foot shy of his previous hill record. Judge Peter Hostmark told the local newspaper that, “The kid’s form was beautiful, better than I’ve seen him display before. I’ve never seen such uniformly good jumping in a Northwest meet.” Ragnar was said to have mastered the new “torpedo” style, with arms held back to augment torso lift.

Near Mt. Hood, Oregon, in March 1958, Ragnar soared 224 feet to set a Multorpor Hill jumping record, winning the Class A Western Open Jumping meet.

At age 21, going into the 1958–59 season, he was still in the running for the U.S. Ski Team and looking ahead to the 1960 Olympics. He had several first and second place finishes at tournaments in the Northwest but finished 14th at the National Championships in Leavenworth. While he missed the 1960 U.S. Team, Ragnar attended the Games as a trial jumper to test hill conditions prior to the official competitions.

Skiing Remains a Way of Life

Ragnar continued to jump through the 1960s, often securing a top-10 finish, but by then he was married and had a young family. He joined Osborn and Ulland on both the wholesale and retail sides of their business. In 1964, he was named manager of the company’s north Seattle store and ran that successful business for many years.

Today, Ragnar is retired in Mt. Vernon, Washington, where he looks back fondly on his ski jumping days. He makes annual trips to Kongsberg to visit relatives and friends, go cross-country skiing and reminisce about being lucky enough to recall the great era of Kongsberg jumpers. And his Multorpor ski hill record of 224 feet still stands. 

Longtime contributor Kirby Gilbert is vice president of the Washington State Ski & Snowboard Museum and Historian of the Ancient Skiers Association.

 

Before Hans Gmoser and Mike Wiegele made it a success, heliskiing had unsung pioneers.

The helicopter has been called the God Machine for its ability to hover and land on almost any kind of terrain. One has even summited Mount Everest: On May 14, 2005, test pilot Didier Delsalle braved high winds to perch a Eurocopter AS350 B3 on the summit for 3 minutes, 50 seconds, repeating the landing the next day. No one has done it since.

Photo above: Hans Gmoser (right) with five guests and a pilot, with a Bell 47B1, at Valemount in 1969. Courtesy CMH.

In decent weather, helicopters can land anywhere on earth. That wasn’t always the case. An early Bell 47G2 with a 260-horsepower piston engine could barely hover and land at 10,000 feet (3,048 m) in still air. That was just high enough to reach the ridgelines, if not all the summits, in British Columbia’s Bugaboos.  

Hans Gmoser, widely credited as the inventor of heliskiing, came to Canada from Austria in 1951, at age 19, and quickly became known as a top climber. He opened his own guide service in 1957, and in 1963 helped found the Canadian Mountain Guides Association. Gmoser himself said that the idea of heliskiing was first brought to him by Art Patterson, a Calgary geologist and a skier. Patterson had used helicopters in the mountains for summer fieldwork, and he knew that a lot of these machines were sitting idle during the winter months. He thought that hauling skiers could be an interesting new business. He also realized that to make the idea work, he would need professional guides who understood routefinding, snow and avalanches. Gmoser and Patterson teamed up, with Patterson handling the business side and Gmoser the guiding.

Their first heliski adventure began in late February 1963. Twenty clients, organized by Brooks and Ann Dodge, paid $20 each (approximately $160 in today’s dollars) for a day on Old Goat Glacier, 10 miles south of Canmore, Alberta. The result was disappointing. The two-seat Bell 47G2 helicopters could fly only one passenger at a time and climbed at less than 850 feet per minute; it took hours to get everyone to the 8,200-foot (2,500 m) summit. Then the snow conditions turned out to be less than ideal. They tried another heliski day in May, but encountered high winds that limited the possible landing zones. Patterson decided that heliskiing was a risky business and dropped out. But Gmoser saw the potential in helicopters.

He eventually renamed his guide service Canadian Mountain Holidays and, with the advent of fast-climbing, heavy-hauling, jet-powered helicopters, was able to create a successful heliski and helihike operation.

That’s the accepted version of heliskiing’s genesis. But earlier pioneers preceded Gmoser and Patterson.

1948

Writing in Vertical magazine (March 2012), Canadian aviation writer Bob Petite reported, “The first recorded occurrence of a helicopter being used to airlift skiers into mountains was back in 1948, by Skyways Services, which was one of three Canadian commercial operations at the time.” This wasn’t heliskiing proper—it was an air taxi service from Vancouver to the summit of Grouse Mountain ski resort (1,231 m, 4,039 ft). The fare-paying passengers then skied the lift network.

1950

In 1950, pioneering avalanche expert Monty Atwater used a helicopter while surveying Mineral King Valley, the proposed Disney ski resort in California. Elevations ranged from the valley floor at 7,400 feet (2,300 m) to surrounding peaks of more than 11,000 feet (3,400 m). In his book
Avalanche Hunters, Atwater wrote:

“In Northern California I once did a job surveying a complex of ski areas of the future. My companion and I used a chopper first of all to jump over the snowbound (i.e., closed for the winter) highways. Then we used it as a ski lift with an infinite number of lines. It flew us to the top, picked us up at the bottom, flew us to a different top. In three days of about three hours of flying time apiece we did more work than we could have in a month on foot and with Sno-Cats, and we did it better. It was an aerial platform for making maps and photographs. If one of us got hurt, our angel of mercy was slurruping overhead. I have ridden helicopters from Chile to British Columbia, and I have great affection for them.”

Clearly, Atwater was heliskiing. His wife, Joan, did realize how much fun it could be. Atwater wrote: “As soon as she knew that there was a chopper on the program, Joan began propagandizing for a ride in it. ‘Not a chance,’ I told her. ‘Do you have any idea how much it costs per hour to fly this doodlebug? Besides, it’s a government job and the government doesn’t approve of using its equipment for joy riding.’”

Much later, in 1965, Disney also hired Swiss avalanche researcher (and Aspen skiing pioneer) André Roch to study Mineral King. Roch, too, used a helicopter to access the higher bowls, and he brought along other skiers on these trips. If Disney had known, he might have become the first heliski vacation developer. Regardless, Mineral King Ski area was never developed due to opposition by environmental groups.

1957–58

Bengt “Binx” Sandahl moved to Alta, Utah, in 1953 and worked as a bartender in the Alta Lodge. There, he became interested in snow and avalanche work, and, according to his daughter, he talked frequently with Atwater, who was by then director of the avalanche research center. The following year he left to take a job in Alaska, where he eventually worked as a ski instructor at Alyeska. Skiing magazine (February 2007) reported that in 1958, Sandahl guided skiers using a helicopter. Video exists of an Alouette II—the first turboshaft helicopter, introduced in 1956—carrying four skiers and a pilot at Alyeska, around that time. Sandahl apparently hauled skiers to Max’s Mountain on the south rim of Alyeska’s bowl, charging $10 per ride for up to 100 skiers per day. Sandahl later became Alyeska’s snow safety director. Returning to Alta, he was hired as the U.S. Forest Service snow ranger in 1964. He then used helicopters to drop explosives into avalanche chutes.

The January 1959 issue of SKI magazine ran an article entitled “By Helicopter to Virgin Snowfields,” about replacing ski-equipped planes with helicopters for glacier skiing in Alaska and the Alps. “By helicopter it is possible to ski unbroken powder all day long without ever seeing ski tracks except the ones you make yourself.” The reference to heliskiing in Alaska is to Sandahl’s operation. The article reported that at Gstaad and at Val d’Isère, skiers could ride for $22 to $52 per flight—about $176 to $416 today. Heliskiing has never been cheap.

1960s

In 1963 Bob Hosking was flying skiers from the Rustler Lodge at Alta. It’s not clear if he held a special use permit that allowed this. It’s said that for $5 or $10 one could buy a lift to Mount Superior, above Alta.

The big breakthrough, as Sandahl had found, came with jet engines. In 1961 Bell introduced the turboshaft-powered 204/205 series helicopters, capable of flying 10 to 14 passengers and climbing 1,750 feet per minute. That was more than 20 times the performance of a Bell 47.

Before long, the 205 was outfitted with a 1,500-horsepower engine. So equipped, by the late 1960s, Gmoser really had CMH up and running. Sun Valley owner Bill Janss skied with Gmoser in the Purcell range and in 1966 launched Sun Valley Heliski. Mike Wiegele started his operation in Valemount, British Columbia, in 1970 and moved down the road to Blue River in 1974. In 1973 Wasatch Powderbird Guides started operations in Utah (Hosking was a partner). By November 1982, Powder magazine listed 15 heliskiing operations in the Lower 48 states alone.

Learning curve

The early leaders in heliskiing learned by trial and error. Protocols were needed for both helicopter and avalanche safety. Once the boom started, Gmoser and Wiegele, in particular, faced a shortage of qualified guides, the reason for the foundation of the Canadian Ski Guides Association (CSGA) in 1990. CSGA now has about 130 members, and heliskiing contributes more than $160 million annually to the economy of British Columbia. 

Fat skis: A second boom

By the late 1980s, the rising cost of aviation fuel was cutting into profits for heliski operators. The crunch was exacerbated by a limited pool of capable powder skiers—there simply weren’t a lot of skiers who could handle bottomless powder on the 68 millimeter–waisted straight skis of the era. Then in 1988, one of the competitors in Mike Wiegele’s Powder 8 contest contacted Rupert Huber at the Atomic ski factory and asked for a fatter powder ski. Huber responded in 1990 with the Powder Plus fat ski (112 mm waist width). Wiegele adopted and promoted the concept. Fat skis took off, and heliskiing resumed growing.

 

First Heavy Lifter

Use of helicopters in mountainous terrain depends critically on engine power. The first machine to lift significant loads at higher elevations was the German Focke-Achgelis Fa-223 Drache (Dragon), a twin-rotor design that first flew in 1940, powered by a 1,000-horsepower radial engine. Climb rate was 1,700 feet per minute. Theoretical service ceiling was 23,000 feet (7,100 m) at light weight, and 8,000 feet (2,440 m) with a full payload of 1,000 kg (2,200 lb). This was better than twice the performance of the much smaller Bell 47.

A Fa-233 is known to have crashed on Mont Blanc in 1944 during an attempted mountain rescue. Mountain flight testing resumed in Mittenwald in the Bavarian Alps in September 1944, with an emphasis on hauling heavy cargo to mountain troops—howitzers, for instance. The highest landing was at 2,300 meters (7,549 ft) while testing performance as an air ambulance. By then the factory had been repeatedly destroyed by Allied bombers and the project was abandoned. Of 11 built,only three survivedthe war. Neither of the Austrian-born pioneers of Canadian heliskiing, Hans Gmoser and Mike Wiegele, were aware of the German experiments.

Halsted Morris is president of the American Avalanche Association. His patrol handle is “Hacksaw.” See his website at heliskihistory.com.

 

In 1964, the Kokanee Glacier gave birth to Canada’s national ski team.

Canadians fared poorly at the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck. Only Nancy Greene had a top-10 finish (seventh in downhill). In May 1964, former Canadian downhill champion Dave Jacobs, who had retired with a broken leg in 1961, wrote a letter to Bill Tindale, then president of the Canadian Amateur Ski Association (CASA), concluding: “We have some tough problems to solve which require some slightly revolutionary solutions.”

Jacobs had experienced firsthand Canada’s dysfunctional ski racing program and witnessed the hugely successful programs of European nations. France, Austria and Switzerland had full-time coaching staffs, dedicated national teams with scheduled training camps and established programs for younger skiers to advance to the national level.

Canadians, by contrast, trained at their own hills, then gathered for a selection camp before major international events. CASA would then hire a European coach to join the team when it arrived at the events. This arrangement seemed to work for brilliant skiers like Lucile Wheeler and Anne Heggtveit, but it wasn’t a plan for consistent success. When Jacobs and his Canadian teammates arrived in Germany en route to the 1958 World Championships in Bad Gastein, Austria, they had never even met their coach—German Mookie Causing—and Causing certainly knew nothing about the Canadians.

It was time, Jacobs said in his letter, for Canada to develop a national team program, in which skiers could attend university on scholarship and train year-round with a full-time coaching staff. Unbeknownst to him, a small group of forward-thinking individuals were already working on just such a program. In Montreal, Don Sturgess, chairman of CASA’s Alpine competition committee, and B.C.-based John Platt, vice-chairman, had already agreed that drastic changes were needed. Meanwhile, in Nelson, British Columbia, Notre Dame University (NDU) President Father Aquinas Thomas and athletic director Ernie Gare had just implemented Canada’s first university athletic scholarship program, for its hockey team.

The four men saw plenty of common ground that could benefit both CASA and NDU.

Sturgess replied to Jacobs’ letter, saying CASA was likely to set up a national program in Nelson that year and, by the way, would Jacobs be interested in the head coach job? Jacobs eventually accepted the offer, with half his $6,000 annual salary paid by the association and half by Notre Dame, where he was employed to teach freshman math. Peter Webster took a leave from his banking job to serve as pro bono team manager, although he did receive $1,800 annually from the university to also serve as dorm supervisor.

So in the summer of 1964 Jacobs and Webster welcomed 15 men and 10 women to their new homes—the dorm at NDU—where the intense East-versus-West rivalry eased and one truly national team evolved.

Jacobs introduced high-intensity dryland training in preparation for hikes to nearby Kokanee Glacier for summer training, an experience few team members would forget. “You had to carry all your stuff in this backpack, and it was at least a three-hour hike that was quite rugged,” recalls Andrée Crepeau. “When we got to the top, some of the girls were in these tiny cloth sneakers and there was a foot and a half of snow and it was dark, completely dark.”

“We had those Keds, little canvas shoes,” adds Nancy Greene. “We used to go and get them at Kresge’s for a dollar forty-nine. The second year we got running shoes.”

“The boys had gone ahead, so we at least had a path in the snow to follow,” continues Crepeau. “It was kind of scary, but really exciting, and when we finally got to the cabin, wow! We were all on the floor of the top floor, no mattresses, nothing, people farting, snoring. It was such an adventure. I was a shy, well-bred little girl. I had turned 17 a couple of months before so it was quite a discovery. I loved it.”

“Each morning at 6:00 a.m. we hiked, skis on our backs, up to the glacier,” says Barbie Walker. There, a cable drag-lift awaited them, with a gasoline engine powerful enough to haul only one skier at a time. Each skier carried a tow harness that clipped to the cable. “That came in very handy to use as a tourniquet when coach Bob Gilmour, wearing shorts, sliced his calf deeply,” Walker recalls. “That accident was at 10:00 a.m., and we built a tent shelter out of ski poles and jackets to shield him from the hot sun. Currie [Chapman] ran down to the parking lot where the buses say, but, alas, the porcupines had eaten the rubber tires. He had to run further, to Kaslo, only to discover the helicopter was in Cranbrook for repairs. Four hours after the accident, Bob was riding beneath a helicopter on his way to the hospital in Nelson.”

After a day of hiking and skiing, the reward was a swim in the frigid glacier lake, followed by a sauna, sort of. Keith Shepherd, Currie Chapman, Peter Duncan and Rod Hebron had found an old pot-belly stove that they incorporated into the makeshift sauna. “Three walls of plastic on a frame against a flat rock, with a flap for a door, made warming up after the swim enjoyable,” says Walker.

With all of the hiking and just the one-person lift, Crepeau said the skiers only got in about four runs a day. “I sort of said, what am I doing this for? Am I really going to learn something with four runs?” Indeed, the skiers did learn, and it showed in their results.

“We went to the first races in 1965 in Aspen,” Jacobs says. “Billy Kidd and Jimmy Heuga had just won their ’64 Olympic medals. And Peter Duncan, Nancy Greene, Bob Swan ... they pretty much cleaned those guys. Sports Illustrated wrote this big article, ‘Canadians Raid Aspen.’ And it took off from there.”

Jacobs left the team after the 1966 season to work for Bob Lange. In 1967, Greene won six individual races and the first-ever women’s overall World Cup title. A year later she defended that title and won Olympic gold and silver as well. At the time, critics said she would have won even without the program.

“For me it was the perfect situation,” Greene says from Sun Peaks Ski Resort, where she is director of skiing and operates Nancy Greene’s Cahilty Lodge along with husband, Al Raine, former head coach and program director of the national team. “I trained a lot with the guys, so I always had somebody around who was skiing better than I was, who was training harder, who I would have a hard time catching up to.”

Based on her success, the International Ski Federation awarded a 1968 World Cup race to her home hill, Red Mountain, in Rossland, British Columbia. It was the first World Cup held in Canada.

Greene retired after the 1968 season, at age 24. Al Raine took over as head coach. The program moved out of Nelson in 1969 when Raine and CASA decided the skiers needed more time on snow and less in classrooms.

But the groundwork had been laid, and the Nelson camp launched an intergenerational success story. First, Betsy Clifford became the 1970 FIS World Slalom Champion, and Kathy Kreiner the 1976 GS Olympic champion. Then Currie Chapman coached the Canadian women when Gerry Sorensen and Laurie Graham took gold and bronze in downhill at the 1982 World Championships, and Scott Henderson coached the men’s team that gave birth to the Crazy Canucks, including Steve Podborski’s World Cup downhill title in 1982 and, eventually, Ken Read’s on-snow success, followed by his longtime stewardship of Alpine Canada. 

Freelancer John Korobanik is former managing editor of the St. Albert Gazette, in St. Albert, Alberta.

The Original Team

Head coach Dave Jacobs
Manager Peter Webster

MEN
Gerry Rinaldi
Currie Chapman
Peter Duncan
Rod Hebron
Scott Henderson
Wayne Henderson
Bert Irwin
Jacques Roux
Dan Irwin
John Ritchie
Keith Shepherd
Gary Battistella
Bob Swan
Michel Lehmann
Bob Laverdure

WOMEN
Nancy Greene
Andrée Crepeau
Karen Dokka
Judi Leinweber
Emily Ringheim
Stephanie Townsend
Barbie Walker
Heather Quipp
Garrie Matheson
Jill Fish

Photo top of page:  Volkswagen contributed buses painted in national team colors and members all had a Canadian uniform. “We had never had everyone in the same uniform before,” says Jacobs. “Everyone had a sense of purpose. This was Canada’s national ski team. It gave everyone tremendous incentive.”