Feature article

 

From the freestyling Seventies to the rock-and-roll Eighties and high-tech, high-ticket Nineties, men’s skiwear kept up with the times.  

By Barbara Alley Simon
Photography by Scott Markewitz

Park City locals had a blast modeling vintage men’s skiwear during Skiing History Week in Utah (see page 33). These classic outfits, selected from the Barbara Alley Collection at the Alf Engen Ski Museum, depict a three-decade progression of design for the male skier.

The 1970s was the decade of disco, the first freestylers, wet T-shirts and streakers, and men’s ski suits were sleek and sexy, as well as colorful for exhibitionist hotdoggers. The 1975 suits pictured in the photo above used stretch fabric with stretch insulation, which gave flex to the tight fit. Jackets were short, so pants needed higher waists and shoulder straps. Chris Neville’s red Bogner jacket has tri-color stripes that run down the back. Grandoe gloves pick up the trim. Nick Hansen’s bright yellow HCC (Henri–Charles Colsenet) two-piece has bell-bottomed pants that fit smoothly over ski boots. The hat is HCC; the goggles are by Smith; the poles are by Collins; skis by The Ski with Burt retractable bindings.

As you’ll see on subsequent pages, the 1980s began with classic colors but midway moved to neons. Silhouettes shifted too, from slim on the top and wide on bottom, to wide on the top with slimmer legs. The neons, of course, were great for flat light and finding kids. Thinner but warmer insulations (such as Thinsulate) and free-hanging waterproof liners (such as Gore-Tex) gave designers more play. Outfits may not have looked it, but they were warm.

The 1990s went high tech and high ticket. A suit that cost $245 in the ’70s could cost $1,000 by then, especially with embroidery. Solar fabrics, ceramic insulations and special liners all arrived on the scene, plus pockets—the more the merrier for men. 

I’ve always thought sexy stretch pants contributed to the growth and popularity of skiing. So what’s hot in 2014? Looks to me like Bubble Heads and Baggy Pants. Guess that leaves sexy to the imagination. 

From Turkey to Turin, the Occasionally Murky History of Snowboarding’s First 400 Years

By Paul J. MacArthur

The origins of snowboarding are poorly documented. Conceived and promoted by hobbyists, the exact beginnings and history of the sport are often disputed as some pioneers try to position themselves in the history books. As Chuck Barfoot, who started building boards in the 1970s, notes, “The dates keep getting pushed back.” 

When the first person rode a single plank through the snow is unknown, but anecdotes of miners in Austria riding a long wooden board with a rope or handlebar for balance—the device was called a ruariser knappenroesser (nicknamed the knappenross)—date back to the 16th century, and there are tales of a knappenross race taking place in the 1800s. Another invention called the ritprätt (also called the rittpritt), on which a rider could sit or stand, is supposed to have been used in the Swiss Alps during a similar timeframe. Austrian Toni Lenhardt is believed to have ridden a monogleider (which translates to “monoslider”) in 1900. It’s said Lenhardt used his invention in the Alps and held a monogleider contest in 1914 in Bruck an der Mur. Whether knappenross, ritprätt, or monogleider riders rode their boards like snowboards or monoskis is still being researched. 

There are also claims that U.S. soldiers stood sideways on barrel staves and slid downhill during World War I. A number of snowboard history Websites mention M. J. “Jack” Burchett, who supposedly took a piece of plywood or a barrel stave, secured his feet with clothesline and horse reins, and sailed through the snow in 1929. Who was Burchett and where did he live? No one knows. The source of the story was the grandfather of a friend of a guy who worked at Transworld Snowboarding. There’s also the tale of someone in Finland snowboarding in 1932, and the list goes on.  

Many of these stories are just considered part of snowboarding’s disputed folklore. Until recently, Western snowboard historians were apparently unaware of any community that was actively riding snowboard-like devices when snowboarding’s modern era began in the 1960s. Then, in January 2008, while working on the O’Neill film Legends, snowboarders Jeremy Jones and Stefan Gimpl journeyed to Turkey’s Kaçkar Mountains and were introduced to people in a remote village who ride sideways on a flat, rectangular, toboggan-like device called a lazboard. The lazboard has a balance rope attached near the front and the rider holds a stick with the rear hand to assist in steering. According to legend, the practice began some 400 years ago for fun and it made traveling in deep snow easier. Ninety percent of the town rides and no one has ever skied. Based on current research, this community—which had been featured on Turkish television before the O’Neill crew was introduced to it—has been actively riding snowboard-like devices for a continuous period longer than any other population.

Curiously, the Turkish boards bear a strong resemblance to a controversial “sled” patented in 1939 by Gunnar and Harvey Burgeson and Vern Wicklund. The curved sled has a grooved rubber pad, a strap for the rear foot, a rudder, and a rope on the front. Like the Turkish riders, Wicklund used a stick for steering. According to The Snowboard Journal, Wicklund created the device as a teenager circa 1917 in Cloquet, Minnesota. In the late 1930s he attempted to sell the boards, but was never able to find a financial partner and the idea was dropped by the dawn of World War II. Yet, despite being referenced in at least five 1960s single-plank patents, including the legendary Snurfer, Wicklund’s board was virtually unknown to most members of the snowboarding industry during the sport’s post-1970s explosion. Then, at the 2000 Snowsports Industry of America (SIA) Trade Show in Las Vegas, Burton Snowboards produced the original Wicklund patent, a Wicklund sled, and a film of Wicklund riding at the Nordic Hills Country Club in Oak Park, Illinois in 1939. Though Wicklund rode his “sled” into his 40s, and the board is a predecessor to the modern snowboard, there’s no evidence the invention had any influence on modern snowboarding. 

After World War II, more Wicklund-like boards were patented, including O. J. Lidberg’s 1948 Glider Sled, which suggested the use of a stick for steering, and Arthur Juntunen’s 1949 Toboggan, which did not. Both incorporated balance ropes on the front. But the explosion of single-plank inventions didn’t happen until the 1960s, when several snowboard-like patents were granted. Carl E. Hagen’s 1967 Snow Board looks like a toboggan, but the front and back are turned up at sharp angles. Craig T. Christy’s 1967 Snow Surface Rider is basically a skateboard for the snow with a rudder on the bottom and blocks on the deck so riders could brace their feet. Joel Salisbury’s 1968 Snow Sled looks like a small surfboard, while John Fulsom’s toboggan-like 1968 Snow Ski Board curves upward on the front and has rudders on the bottom. James L. Rippetoe’s 1968 Slalom Snow Ski is based on a water-ski design, with the front foot facing forward and the rear foot turned at a 45-degree angle to the length of 

the board. Victor T. Berta’s 1969 Snowboard has magnets to help keep boots in place and Ronald Carreiro’s 1971 Snow Surfboard bears a resemblance to a small rounded wakeboard with a braking device on the bottom. None of these devices really dented the marketplace.

One invention, however, did: Sherman Poppen’s Snurfer (see “Sherman Poppen: Snowboarding’s Godfather,” in the June 2008 issue). Poppen created the Snurfer on Christmas morning in 1965 by cross-bracing two skis together. He later attached a rope to the front and licensed the invention to Brunswick, and years later JEM. Launched in September 1966,  the Snurfer was a hit as more than 750,000 were sold nationwide during the 1960s and 1970s. More than any other invention, the Snurfer inspired a generation of kids to surf the snow, including future snowboard innovators Jake Burton, Chris Sanders, Bob Weber and Jeff Grell.

Toms Sims and the Skiboard

A New Jersey native and skateboard icon, Tom Sims is one of snowboarding’s most important figures. His snowboard company was one of the industry’s top brands from the late 1970s through the mid 1990s, and he was one of the sport’s first stars. Sims doesn’t consider Wicklund’s sled, the Snurfer or the lazboard snowboards. “When you have a rope on the front of a board, it is no longer snowboarding,” says Sims. “When you are dragging a stick for balance behind you, it is no longer snowboarding ... Snowboarding is riding a single board down a mountain with your hands free.”

Sims has claimed for decades that he invented snowboarding, though no patents bear his name. His assertion rests on the fact that in December 1963—as a skier and skateboard fanatic who was already fashioning his own skateboards—he made a three-foot piece of rectangular wood with aluminum sheeting into his first “skiboard.” The crude plank allowed him to mimic skateboarding on the snow and he continued to modify his boards throughout high school. After a brief stint at New Hampshire’s Hawthorne College, Sims moved to Santa Barbara in 1970, right before the skateboarding scene exploded. He ran a small skateboard shop and eventually morphed it into one of skateboarding’s leading manufacturers. In 1976, he was skateboarding’s world champion and co-holder of the high jump record, and was also making prototype skiboards.

In 1977, Maryland-based Bob Weber contacted Sims Skateboards, talking to both Sims and his employee, New Jersey native Chuck Barfoot. Weber had been working on his own version of the snowboard and needed a partner. He’d already trademarked the term “Skiboard” in 1975, patented his own variation of the snowboard (called a Mono-Ski) in 1975, and, according to at least one account, had been selling a different patented version of his skiboard by mail order circa 1977. Weber, Sims and Barfoot worked together to create the legendary Flying Yellow Banana Skiboard, which was launched to the public during the 1978–1979 season. The board consisted of a large plastic shell with a skate deck mounted on top. Though it wasn’t exactly what Sims envisioned, it enabled Sims and Barfoot to get a board on the market while they modified their prototype skiboards.

The Flying Yellow Banana didn’t threaten the ski business and Sims quickly discovered that selling a product in a hot industry like skateboarding was considerably easier than creating a market for a new product. “I sent Chuck Barfoot and Bob Weber on a sales trip to Utah to try to sell our snowboards,” he recalls. “Chucky was excited that he got two stores to think about maybe taking some boards on consignment. That was the success of the sales trip: two stores considering putting some snowboards on consignment. That’s how tough it was.”

Dimitrije Milovich and the Winterstick

In 1970, Dimitrije Milovich read a letter to the editor concerning “snow surfing” by Bayonne, New Jersey native Wayne Stoveken in Surfing magazine. Born in Holland, Milovich grew up in White Plains, New York, and upon reading the letter, found the surfer who had been making boards since 1964. That winter, he borrowed one of Stoveken’s boards—a six-foot, 20-pound piece of redwood—and tried it out at a local ski area. “I was hooked,” he told the Deseret News in 2003. “That was the coolest thing I ever did.”

Stoveken taught Milovich how to build boards and they received two Snow Surfboard patents in 1974 that are generally considered the first modern snowboard patents. In 1972, Milovich dropped out of Cornell University and moved to Salt Lake City to enjoy the champagne powder. That winter, he was allowed to try out his prototypes at Snowbird and made ends meet by handing out towels at the resort’s sauna. Stoveken would follow in 1974 and the two opened a shop in Salt Lake, where they built and sold a few boards. They called them Wintersticks.

Wintersticks had foot straps, leashes and no rope. Milovich was the first snowboard maker to use fiberglass, a polyurethane foam core, a P-Tex bottom and metal edges; he quickly discarded the latter, as they served no purpose in Utah powder. The early Wintersticks received national attention in SKI in 1974 and Newsweek in 1975. “Dimitrije probably was the first to actually build a rideable modern snowboard,” says Sims. “When he marketed those, that really raised eyebrows. [It proved] that snowboarding was much more than Snurfing.” 

When orders for the prototypes started to come in, Milovich formed the Winterstick Company with Don Moss and Renee Sessions during the 1975–1976 season. (Homesick for the Jersey shore, Stoveken had moved back East. He passed away in 1978 from a respiratory illness.) There were two Winterstick designs: the round tail and the swallowtail, the latter having a large split in the rear that helped it sink deep into powder and also acted like a fin for control. “They helped push things,” Burton says of Winterstick. “They had some great powder riding.” 

Milovich tried to sell his Wintersticks at the SIA and NSGA shows in 1977, but potential buyers were not interested in the boards. “At the 1977 SIA Trade Show, we were sure all we had to do was show up and we would get dozens, if not hundreds of orders,” Milovich told Slug Magazine in 2002. “We had a film and posters, but of course we didn’t sell anything. We were pretty heartbroken. That was our first introduction to the market.” Nonetheless, he pressed forward and during the 1978–1979 season Wintersticks were being sold in 11 countries. By the early 1980s, the boards were a small cult phenomenon in Europe, France in particular, where Regis Roland popularized them in the classic film Apocalypse Snow.

Jake Burton Carpenter and Burton Boards

When Jake Burton Carpenter was 14, his parents bought him a Snurfer. Already a proficient skier, the Long Island teenager liked the single-plank design, the lack of uncomfortable footwear, and the board’s surfing sensation. While he was a competitive skier—he had a shot at making the University of Colorado at Boulder’s NCAA championship ski team before fracturing his collarbone in a car accident—Burton always preferred Snurfing to skiing. “You just have so much more feel,” he says. “You’re riding as opposed to skiing. That just appealed to me from the start.” 

After graduating from New York University with a degree in economics in 1977, Burton worked for a mergers-and-acquisitions firm. But he had also been tinkering with different Snurfer-like devices for years and was convinced there was a viable market for them. After a falling out with his boss, Burton left the financial field behind and moved to Londonderry, Vermont during the 1977-1978 season to form Burton Boards. He brought his boards to market during the following season and sold a paltry 300 units. Having blown through a $100,000 inheritance, that summer he was back on Long Island teaching tennis during the day and tending bar at night. “That was rock bottom right there,” Burton says. “Everybody rejected (snowboarding) sort of out of hand. I visited skateboard shops, surf shops, ski shops, windsurfing shops, and nobody wanted any part of it.” 

During the 1979–1980 season, Burton was back in Vermont hawking his boards. He sold 700 units and figured the 133 percent increase was a trend. “For years the company doubled its business,” Burton recalls. “Even though financially we were very much behind the eight ball, from the perspective of having confidence about what was going on, I felt a lot more positive after that.”

Several hundred other snowboard manufacturers emerged over the next two decades. Some of the notable early entrants include Washington-based Mike Olson’s GNU Snowboards,  Rhode Island’s Steve Derrah, who extended his Flite skateboard operation into snowboards, California’s Jack Smith’s A-Team sand and snowboards, and Chris and Bev Sanders’ Avalanche Snowboards. Additionally, Barfoot left Sims in 1981 and formed Barfoot Snoboards.

Under-capitalized hobbyists, who lacked the business savvy necessary to succeed, ran most of the snowboard companies that materialized during the 1980s and 1990s. “We had companies that would be a guy with a press in his garage that made 100 snowboards,” laughs Lee Crane, former editor of Transworld Snowboarding. “As the industry changed and people got more serious about the business, shops realized the guy with 100 boards from the garage wasn’t going to be able to support it.” The typical snowboard company was out of business in a few years.

The first contests and stars

The first single-plank contests were the Snurfing competitions held at Block House State Park in Michigan in conjunction with the Muskegon Community College Winter Carnival during the late 1970s. “I was one of the first national champions,” says Paul Graves, who took up Snurfing as a 12-year-old while living in New Jersey in 1966. “But I like to put that in perspective. There was no true ‘national’ aspect to the sport then. It was a bunch of mostly guys, drinking a bunch of beer, getting high, hiking out in the woods, and running this course. But it was a ball.”

The first national snowboarding contest was held in April 1981 at Ski Cooper, in Leadville, Colorado. Organized by Richard Christiansen—a landlocked surf bum who ran a surf shop in Boulder and was interested in the burgeoning snowboarding scene—the King of the Mountain contest attracted a couple dozen competitors, including Burton, Sims and Jack Smith. The contest had three categories: Slalom, Freestyle (tricks and a jump) and Downhill. Scott Jacobson won the overall, with second and third place going to Sims (who took first in the slalom) and Burton respectively. Though Christiansen ran three more annual competitions at Colorado’s Berthoud Pass, the King of the Mountain event ceased operations before the sport’s real growth years. 

In February 1982, Graves, who was now running the Snowboard East shop in Woodstock, Vermont, organized the first National Snowsurfing Championship at Suicide Six. 125 riders showed up, including Burton and Sims, and the contest was covered by Sports Illustrated, the Today Show, and Good Morning America as Sims captured first place in the downhill and Burton rider Doug Bouton took the slalom and the overall. After the first year, Graves asked Burton to take over the event and for the next two years he hosted it at Vermont’s now-defunct Snow Valley ski resort. (Tom Sims won the slalom, downhill and the overall at the first Snow Valley event.) In 1985, Burton moved the contest to Stratton, where it was rechristened the U.S. Open Snowboarding Championship. Sims again won the slalom. Today, the U.S. Open attracts more than 30,000 spectators and is considered snowboarding’s most prestigious event. 

Not content to be a participant, Sims hosted the first World Snowboard Championships in 1983 at California’s Soda Springs Ski Bowl, where he introduced the halfpipe to competitive snowboarding. The skateboard-influenced event would usher in snowboarding’s freestyle movement and change the face of the sport, but controversy ensued when Burton’s team threatened a boycott. The halfpipe was a West Coast phenomenon at the time, and the last-minute inclusion of the event, which Burton riders had not practiced, put Burton’s team at a distinct disadvantage. The halfpipe event happened, and five years later the halfpipe became a staple at Burton’s U.S. Open. Who won the Worlds? Sims took first place in the slalom and the overall. The World Championships relocated to Breckenridge in 1986, and while it had a certain degree of cachet, particularly during the late 1980s, the event lost much of its luster during the 1990s as the Sims brand name kept changing hands.

Unique among snowboard contests is the Legendary Mount Baker Banked Slalom, first held on Super Bowl Sunday in 1985. Hosted by Bob Barci, with help from Tom Sims, the race took place on “The Chute,” which has gullies that resemble halfpipes. The course gates were placed on the chute’s walls, creating considerable challenge. The atmosphere was laidback, contestants vied for pride and a small cash prize, and Tom Sims won. The Mount Baker Banked Slalom’s atmosphere, combined with its difficult course and infamous duct-tape trophy, has made it a favorite among riders. It’s also served as something of a proving ground, as many of the winners have been some of the sport’s biggest names, including Shaun Palmer, Craig Kelly, Rob Morrow, Ross Rebagliati, Terje Haakonsen and Victoria Jealouse. 

“The actual events themselves seemed to stimulate innovations,” says Sims. “The contest results were a big deal in the early days and, especially from the Burton and Sims perspectives, having superior equipment was important so we could dominate at the contests.” 

The contests also created the sport’s first superstars. Tom Sims dominated the early contests and stunt-doubled as James Bond in A View To A Kill’s opening snowboarding scene. Terry Kidwell became the “Father of Freestyle” in the early 1980s by introducing a series of tricks, including hand plants, 360s and method airs. Damian Sanders and Shaun Palmer were the wild children, looking like members of hair and punk bands respectively. They were charismatic, partied like rock stars, won contests, and quickly became heroes to the sport’s core young male demographic. Women riders really didn’t make a big impact during the mid-1980s, but Shannon Dunn and Tina Basich earned mainstream attention in the 1990s, while Michelle Taggart quietly became the most decorated female rider of the decade and British Columbia native and former ski racer Victoria Jealouse earned legendary status for her big-mountain riding in snowboarding films.

Snowboarding’s most revered rider was Craig Kelly. The somewhat reclusive Washington native was one of snowboarding’s best in the late 1980s, racked up several titles, and walked away from competitions in the early 1990s to focus on big-mountain backcountry riding, where his movie appearances made him a freeriding god. Sadly, Kelly died in an avalanche on January 20, 2003 while guiding on Tumbledown Mountain in British Columbia. Snowboarding had lost its first hero. 

Banned from the resorts

When Winterstick, Burton and Sims started their companies, snowboarding was generally relegated to the backcountry. Some resorts allowed it on a case-by-case basis, but often boarders had to hike to ride in secret areas. The first halfpipe, in fact, was not discovered at a resort, but behind the Tahoe City dump in 1979 when Mark Anolik was looking for a place to snowboard. 

Yet, snowboarding couldn’t grow without resort acceptance, and in the early years that acceptance proved difficult. Many ski areas claimed that snowboarding wasn’t covered under their insurance policy, though it’s been suggested that such assertions had no merit. Nonetheless, the famous Stratton mountain case, in which skier James Sunday was awarded $1.5 million in 1977 as a result of a skiing accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, scared a number of resorts into banning everything but skis. Additionally, many resorts saw little reason to accept a few snowboarders.

Smaller resorts were often the first to allow snowboarding, in part because they needed the business. Larger resorts were a more difficult sell as they didn’t want to annoy their skiing constituency. Snowboarders ride the mountain differently and that irritated skiers. Additionally, snowboarding appealed to teenagers who acted like, well, teenagers. They ducked lift lines, made counterfeit lift tickets, went out of bounds (the early boards didn’t work well on hardpack), and got drunk and high in the woods. In other words, they were just like the ski bums of decades past. But snowboards marked them as skier enemies. 

Regardless, money talked. According to the National Ski Areas Association, between the 1978–79 and 1984–85 seasons, industry-wide skier visit totals grew by only 2.3 percent. With skier visits relatively flat, and snowboarding growing slowly but consistently, the writing was on the halfpipe wall. Despite being dubbed the “Worst New Sport” of 1987 by Parade magazine, resorts accepted snowboarding’s overtures, thanks in part to the diplomacy of Burton’s Paul Alden and Avalanche’s Bev Sanders. According to the United States Ski Industry Association, approximately 40 resorts allowed snowboarding during the 1984–1985 season. By 1990, that number had increased to 476.

Burton booms while other firms founder

During the 1980s, several snowboarding companies started to run into financial problems. Winterstick closed in 1982, re-launched in 1985 and closed again in 1987, just before snowboarding started to experience exponential growth. The Winterstick trademark, abandoned by Milovich in 1983, was subsequently resurrected by another company with no involvement from Milovich.

Most of the other early movers didn’t fare much better. A-Team and Flite perished. Avalanche was sold and is a niche brand. Barfoot closed up the snowboarding side of his business, though he’s now producing a small run of handmade snowboards available via mail order. In 1986, Sims began licensing out his snowboard business, but the deals (all four of them) proved problematic and hurt his ability to deliver product and react to market changes. Today, he licenses his name to Collective Licensing, which distributes Sims snowboards and skateboards to Sports Authority. Burton aside, Olson’s GNU is the most successful of the early entrants, though GNU and sister brand Lib Tech were acquired by action sports company Quicksilver in 1997.   

While several manufacturers were plagued with problems, Burton was not. The consummate businessman, Burton skillfully navigated the snowboarding business terrain. When Rossignol’s Vermont division had financial problems, he hired several of their top people and built a solid management team. Burton wasn’t high on team competitions, but when he realized competition was an important part of snowboarding, he embraced it. Freestyle and halfpipe riding didn’t interest him, but when he saw that was where the sport was headed, he signed freestyle champion Craig Kelly away from Sims. He also poached Shannon Dunn from Sims and pillaged the Barfoot team for top riders. 

Burton penetrated the European market in the mid-1980s and struck a deal with an Austrian manufacturer, which allowed him to produce boards more cheaply. He obtained financing through capital investment from his wife’s family and some private bank loans, which provided him the liquidity necessary to produce enough product for the burgeoning late-1980s market. Meanwhile, his competitors were back-
ordered. No snowboard manufacturer had Burton’s combination of business prowess and capital, and the ski companies weren’t interested. “I almost literally lost sleep over the fact that somebody like Rossignol was going to start making snowboards and that was going to be the end of me,” says Burton. “But it’s incredible that they all gave me a ten-year head start. I had ten years of business before any of those guys got involved, which gave me and gave Burton an opportunity to establish an industry and a company and get fairly well capitalized and organized.” Why didn’t the ski industry jump on the bandwagon? Lack of foresight, says Chuck Barfoot. “Basically, the ski companies were laughing at us,” he told the Santa Barbara Independent newspaper in 2008. “Little did they know what snowboarding would become.”

Snowboarding goes gold in the 1990s 

With the vast majority of resorts now accepting snowboarding, the sport experienced rapid growth during the 1990s. According to the National Sporting Goods Association, the number of riders rose from 1.5 million to 4.3 million between 1990 and 2000, while the number of skiers dropped by 4 million. Snowboarding was often tagged as the fastest-growing sport in the U.S., Jake Burton appeared in an American Express commercial, and ESPN brought more attention to the sport with Snowboarder TV and later the Winter X Games. The sport’s image also became even more rebellious and a bit darker as teenage participants embraced the grunge scene. Since 1990, the 12- to 24-year-old age group has accounted for 75 to 80 percent of the sport’s market, and snowboarding’s image has consistently reflected this group. 

The industry’s growth resulted in Burton’s nightmare materializing as Rossignol, Salomon, Volant, Atomic and K2 all started snowboard production during the late 1980s and early 1990s. But most of the ski companies, with the exception of K2, were too late to the dance. Their brands lacked authenticity and couldn’t damage Burton’s position. They did, however, have enough capital to take significant market share away from the smaller companies and further entrenched Burton as the market leader. 

Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee took notice of the sport’s popularity and youth appeal. The IOC wanted snowboarding at the 1998 Winter Olympics, but there was a problem. The international governing body for snowboarding competitions was the International Snowboarding Federation (ISF), which had risen from the ashes of the National Association of Professional Snowboarders in the early 1990s. When the IOC decided it wanted snowboarding, the International Ski Federation (FIS) resisted, as snowboarding was considered a threat to skiing. To appease the FIS, the IOC gave it administrative power over Olympic snowboarding and the ISF was left outside.  The move infuriated the snowboarding community. After being treated like an unwanted child by the ski industry for nearly two decades, competitive snowboarders now had to deal with the FIS if they wanted to compete in the Winter Olympics. Jake Burton, by now the most influential person in the business, said he was never even contacted about the 1998 Winter Olympics and years later, Shannon Dunn would reveal that the U.S. Olympic team coaches didn’t really snowboard. 

When snowboarding debuted at the Winter Olympics in Nagano, the riders appeared to have the last laugh. Norway’s Terje Haakonsen, regarded as the best snowboarder on the planet, refused to participate. Dunn and Cara Beth-Burnside refused to wear their U.S. Olympic uniforms at a breakfast in the Olympic village. Canadian Ross Regabliati won snowboarding’s first Olympic gold medal in the giant slalom, only to have it stripped because a drug test revealed marijuana in his system. The decision was overturned (marijuana is not considered a performance-enhancing drug), but the incident reinforced the perception of snowboarders as cultural outcasts. 

The 2002 Winter Olympics, however, demonstrated why the IOC coveted the sport. Crowds swelled to 30,000 in Park City with nearly a third of all U.S. households watching at least one snowboarding event. U.S. medalists made the late-night talk-show circuit and Jake Burton gave the Today Show’s Katie Couric a snowboarding lesson on TV. The success of the U.S. team further popularized the sport in the U.S. and participation levels soon rivaled alpine skiing. Four years after Park City’s success, in the ultimate case of irony, skier Bode Miller was the Olympic bad boy who partied too hard and came up empty-handed while snowboarder Shaun White dazzled audiences as he captured halfpipe gold, became the hero of the Games, and made the cover of the Rolling Stone.  γ

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The author would like to thank Scott Starr for providing confirmation of some historical dates, John Allen, John Fry, and Marlies Fry for their helping to uncover information about the knappenross, and especially Colin Whyte for his comments and suggestions on this article.

For a dozen years, Denver billionaire and Hollywood heavyweight Marvin Davis owned the Aspen Skiing Company, to the dismay of many locals.

By Jay Cowan

Some said that no one in Aspen had entertained like that since the silver baron days. Others said it depended on what you found entertaining. Either way, when Twentieth Century Fox owner Marvin Davis threw big annual New Year’s parties at his Little Nell Hotel in the late 1980s, “It was just over, over, over the top, with stars and important people and lavish entertaining,” recalls longtime Aspen socialite and owner of The Residence hotel, Terry Butler. “He loved what money could buy. The centerpieces on every table were three feet high, the décor was jewels and flowers and flash.” 

It was impressive for the time, in an old school kind of way. Glamorous guests included Sean Connery, Sly Stallone and Barbra Streisand, mingling with Oprah Winfrey, Steve Ross and Lee Iacocca, being served champagne, caviar and flambés in the increasingly Stoli, sushi and cocaine world of Aspen. Locals had grown accustomed to extravagant lifestyles and partying on a level that made Davis seem almost anachronistic by the time he arrived. The community was less concerned about his social life than by his business tactics, and had reacted with nearly unanimous horror when he bought Fox and the ASC in 1981.

Formed in 1946 by Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke and Austrian ski star Friedl Pfeifer, the Aspen Skiing Corporation opened business on Aspen Mountain on December 14 of that year with what was called the world’s longest chairlift, stretching 6,800 feet. But it struggled to make money for years and only finally succeeded after native Aspenite D.R.C. “Darcy” Brown, an original investor in the corporation, took over as president and general manager in 1957. 

Twenty years later, business was golden and when Brown received an offer to sell in December 1977, he recommended it to his board. Twentieth Century Fox would buy all the shares at a hefty price, offering the first-ever return on investment to shareholders. Fox, cash-heavy from its first Star Wars film, was diversifying as it made other real estate buys that included Pebble Beach Resort, and Brown felt they would be a good fit for the ASC. The man who replaced longtime Aspenite Tom Richardson as CEO, Harry Holmes, lived in and also ran Pebble Beach, but left the ASC board of directors intact and poured money back into its operations.

Enter Marvin Davis, a Denver-based, billionaire wildcatter who was the basis for his friend Aaron Spelling’s hit TV show Dynasty. Davis sold his oil business for $600 million, morphed into a corporate raider and with a partner, oil-trader and financier Marc Rich, bought Fox for $720 million in 1981. Word immediately circulated around Aspen that Davis would be selling and spinning off Fox assets such as the ASC, Pebble Beach and others. The ASC brass was told it wasn’t true, but it was.

Darcy Brown later said in an interview that, “My only real regret is selling to Twentieth Century, not knowing that Twentieth Century was going to be taken over by Marvin Davis.” He accused Davis of “milking the company” by selling assets and pocketing the profits instead of returning them into the company. 

For his part, Brown hadn’t been universally beloved. He could seem patrician and distant and didn’t always care what locals thought. Most assumed it was because he didn’t have to, as he guided the ASC into unpopular ticket price hikes and support for local projects (such as expanding the airport) that weren’t well received. With all of that, however, he was “one of us” to many in the community, which Davis definitely was not. The curmudgeonly Brown began to seem not so bad compared to the new ruling order, a consequence he probably enjoyed. 

Davis once said of the entertainment industry, “I love this stuff, the people and the glamour. This isn’t just a business. It’s a helluva lot of fun.” He didn’t feel the same about other Fox assets and quickly began unloading them, including the ASC purchases of Breckenridge ski area, a substantial interest in Whistler Blackcomb, and several Aspen lodges ASC owned for employee housing. Davis ignored any long-term strategy in favor of a quick return on his Fox acquisition.

In 1983, Davis’s Fox partner Marc Rich was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department on 65 criminal counts for violating the Iranian oil embargo during the 1980 hostage crisis. Rich, whose ex-wife Denise still owns a home in Aspen, fled to Switzerland to avoid extradition. Davis bought out Rich’s interest for $116 million and flipped it for $250 million to Rupert Murdoch in 1984.

Aspen meanwhile was deep in an ongoing bout of existential angst centered on how much of its soul it was willing to sell to further its success. For many it seemed as if suddenly an entire way of life, not just the SkiCo, had been auctioned off with no local input and was at the mercy of all those forces they had spent years fighting. Davis’s ethics were much more in tune with making money than making a community. Marc Rich was apparently a major-league criminal. And Murdoch was infamous for his string of sensational tabloid newspapers in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

Davis spun off the ASC to a subsidiary of Aetna Life and Casualty in 1983, and then to a limited partnership of his called Miller, Klutznick, Davis and Gray, as a string of disgruntled local executives quit along the way, citing the ongoing changes of ownership. The ASC had begun to seem like just another commodity, destined to be constantly traded like so many pork bellies. Then it was taken private for the first time since 1946 and rechristened the Aspen Skiing Company. The Davis partnership kept a 51% interest and sold the rest to the Lester Crown family in 1985. But they continued to hemorrhage managers with Jerry Blann—who had taken over as CEO from Harry Holmes—quitting at the end of 1987, feeling betrayed by ownership over a ticket-pricing controversy.

In a later Vanity Fair story, Marvin Davis recalled, “It took us about six months to figure out what we wanted to do,” with the ASC when he bought Fox. “We decided to build a beautiful hotel, the Little Nell. Then some French firm came to me with the idea of having gondolas so a guy didn’t have to freeze his ass off going up the hill. We wanted to make it one of the best places in America and I think we did.” The Silver Queen gondola debuted in December 1986, transforming the ski experience on Aspen Mountain, while the luxury Little Nell Hotel broke ground that year and opened in 1989.

Putting aside the hubris of Davis claiming to have made the already top-ranked Aspen “one of the best places in America,” some important upgrades were accomplished during his tenure. Current SkiCo president and CEO Mike Kaplan, who wasn’t with ASC during the Davis years, says, “I think they were responsible for focusing the company in Aspen and selling off assets outside of the Roaring Fork Valley, building the Nell and the gondola, and ushering in the era of high-speed quads.”

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the Marvin Davis years in Aspen is that, though people remember the lavish New Year’s parties and all the wheeling and dealing he did with the ASC, there are no stories about him personally. At 6’4” and 300 pounds, he was a large man and sometimes caricatured as the typical American fat cat. So he didn’t go unnoticed in Aspen as much as he simply wasn’t often there, preferring to spend time at the family’s home in Los Angeles. And when he was in Aspen, he didn’t hang out or party with the locals. His relationship with the community was purely professional.

Davis’s other inescapable impact was to dial up Aspen’s visibility as “Hollywood in the Rockies.” It would have seemed almost impossible to do in a town that had been awash with stars since the early 1950s. But the Davis influence, like Davis himself, was big. He and his wife Barbara were generous philanthropists who hosted extravagant charity events, and Fox as well as Warner Brothers owned large houses in Aspen for entertaining their talent. A-list stars including Kevin Costner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Melanie Griffith, Sally Field and Don Johnson soon arrived along with power players the likes of Michael Eisner and Michael Ovitz. 

“The news spread fast in Hollywood that Marvin Davis’s Aspen was the place to play,” the Vanity Fair story breathlessly reported. “You name ’em, they were there,” said Davis.

“Davis definitely encouraged more of Hollywood to come here,” says Terry Butler. “And after the gondola was built, they started bringing planeloads of stars in. They could wear their pretty clothes and go to the top of the mountain and didn’t even have to know how to ski that well, since they could ski the top, which was easier terrain, and download on the gondola. The mountain changed and the town changed.”

In 1993, the Crown family of Chicago bought out Davis, assuming 100% ownership of the ASC. They retained Bob Maynard, who had replaced Blann in 1988; Maynard had run Keystone and Robert Redford's Sundance. Since then, there has been none of the executive turmoil that marked the Davis reign—only two CEOs have held the post, each for at least a decade, since Maynard retired in 1996. The Crowns' long-term commitment to the company and genuine involvement in the local community have been widely acclaimed as the best thing that could have happened to Aspen. The Davis era was a wild ride no one wanted to repeat and ultimately, many felt his greatest contribution to town was selling the ASC to the Crowns.  

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The rise and fall of the top alpine ski racing nations is visible in this unique new chart, created by former French coach and resort analyst Alain Lazard, longtime northern California resident and ISHA member. Lazard has mined masses of data since World War II. The colored trend lines in the chart have been smoothed by using five-year moving averages. For the period 1948–1966, before the creation of the World Cup, Lazard used results of the Winter Olympics and the FIS World Alpine Ski Championships. After 1967, the charted lines are based on Nations Cup points—the number of World Cup points aggregated by individual racers of a national team. The World Cup point formula has been revised five times since 1967, so Lazard has used percentages rather than total points to chart the lines. 

Only three countries have won the overall Nations Cup: Austria (37 times), Switzerland (7) and France (5). The early years were dominated by the French, as reflected in their Nations Cup wins in five of the first six seasons. The Austrian team took over beginning in 1973, followed by Swiss superiority during most of the 1980s. A resurgent Austria charged back to the top in 1988; it has never lost since, in a long streak of 28 consecutive Nations Cup triumphs. Austria’s team dominance of alpine ski racing reached its zenith in the late 1990s and 2000s, when its Nations Cup point total was regularly double that of the second place finisher.

The U.S. ski team’s best Nations Cup performances occurred in the winters of 2005 and 2006 when it placed second, and 1982–84 when it placed third three seasons in a row. Its best performance season, arguably, was 1982 when the U.S. won the women’s Nations Cup.

The highest relative score was registered in 1967, the first year of the World Cup, when France accounted for 44.8 percent of the points awarded. Jean-Claude Killy’s dominance was reflected in his capturing 16.2 percent of the points scored by all men from all nations. The next best was in 1974 by Annemarie Moser-Proell with 14.7 percent of women’s points, and Nancy Greene with 12.4 percent in 1967. In 1977, Ingemar Stenmark captured 10.8 percent of all total men’s points during the season.

The idea for the Nations Cup of Alpine Skiing was conceived by ISHA chairman John Fry in 1966.

Above: Adam and Irwin Shaw in 1953, walking into the village of Klosters.

Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) was an American writer. He’s best known for his novels The Young Lions, whose film version starred Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando; Rich Man, Poor Man, adapted into the first-ever television mini-series; and short stories such as The Eighty Yard Run, Act of Faith, and Girls in Their Summer Dresses. His seminal anti-war play Bury the Dead, originally staged in 1933, is still produced around the world today. 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Shaw saw action in North Africa, France and Germany during World War II. He moved to Europe in the early 1950s with his wife Marian and young son Adam, living first in Paris before discovering the Swiss village of Klosters, which he made his permanent home. In this article, Adam remembers the days when the sport was simpler and the Alps were studded with stars who didn't take themselves seriously.

By Adam Shaw

All photos courtesy Adam Shaw / www.irwinshaw.org

In the angry days through which the world was passing, there was a ray of hope in this good-natured polyglot chorus of people who were not threatening each other, who smiled at strangers, who had collected in these shining white hills merely to enjoy the innocent pleasures of sun and snow…The feeling of generalized cordiality…was intensified by the fact that most of the people on the lifts and on the runs seemed more or less familiar…Skiers formed a loose international club and the same faces kept turning up year after year. —Irwin Shaw, “The Inhabitants of Venus”

My father wrote this in 1962. A week later, in the middle of the Drostobel—one of the seriously steep runs that rise above Klosters—he whacked me across the back of the legs with a ski pole. 

He was 49 and in his prime, I was 12. He’d never hit me in anger before, and he never would again. I’d cut to a stop above him on a patch of ice, and clipped his skis. He’d grabbed a piste marker, but I’d slid a quarter of a mile down to the Drostobel’s tree line. 

He bulled his way down the run to me. “You coulda killed us!”

I stared at the tips of my Kneissls, a gift from a rotund Frenchman who designed cars, some of them famous.

“Showing off,” Irwin shouted. “That’s what happens when you show off!”

Before Prince Charles and other “royals”—not to mention Hollywood stars like Greta Garbo, Gene Kelly, and Lauren Bacall—brought a certain kind of newfangled fame to Klosters, it was just another village with a few ski lifts…nothing fancy like St. Moritz, Gstaad, Cortina or St. Anton. And for me, it was just home—the place where I grew up. 

When my father and mother bought a half-acre of hay field from Mr. Brosi in 1955 and built a house there, cows outnumbered people. Chalet Mia (named for the three of us, Marian, Irwin and Adam) had pink shutters—the locals thought this was nuts—and one side of the roof was longer than the other, in the Basque style. It would be the only house they’d build in their lives. We all learned to ski on wooden Attenhofers, with screw-on edges and bear-trap bindings. Then Walter Haensli, a neighbor and ex-ski racer who married an American heiress, got the right to import Head skis. My parents each got a pair, and I borrowed my mother's—black with white lettering—to win my first race at age seven. 

The old man had spent a few unmemorable days in Sun Valley right after the war. But now, patient souls by the name of Hitz and Clavadetscher got him back on track: “Ya, Herr Shaw…mitt de knees you must go DOWN und den UP, und den down mitt de knees…Und de shoulders, de shoulders must be looking down de mountain…down.”

In those days, skiing was as much a voyage as a sport, and that appealed to the old man.

Imagine growing up dirt poor in Brooklyn before the Great Depression. Imagine landing in Normandy in 1944, and liberating the Dachau concentration camp. Then imagine standing on top of the Gotschna on skis, and with a newly built chalet visible down in the valley. 

Imagine standing there with Peter Viertel, your old buddy from California, and Jacques Charmoz and Moshe Pearlman. Peter saw combat with the U.S. Marines in the South Pacific and later ran agents into Germany for the OSS; after the war, he was a screenwriter and novelist. Jacques raced for France in the 1936 Winter Olympics; during the war, he was a pilot in the Free French Air Force and, later, flew the last French general out of Dien Bien Phu. A British major who risked being shot for treason for helping Israel get guns, Moshe later served as David Ben Gurion’s first spokesman and wrote a book on archeology called Digging Up The Bible. Imagine their disbelief, their sheer sense of luck, and of joy, at simply being on top of a Swiss Alp, alive after the war and with all body parts intact.

Over three decades, the group at the top of the Gotschna, or at our dinner table, included Swissair pilots,  Kiwi sailors, regal Spaniards, French ex-Prime Ministers, ambassadors sitting out diplomatic storms and barons of industry, who, before the term was coined, showed off their trophy wives. I remember well the Greek shipping magnate whose most beautiful daughter was destined to tragedy, and various spies whose covers as bankers or businessmen fooled no one. There were, of course, actors with Oscars, agents with chutzpah, writers who could ski and writers who could write—like James Salter, who could do both in a class quite his own (Downhill Racer, The Hunters, Solo Faces, A Sport and a Pastime). And, at one time or another, almost everyone met Dr. Egger, a truly fine and old-fashioned doctor who, faced with broken bones, first would whip out his stethoscope and say: “Ya, now you inspire, and now you expire…” 

 

On some winter afternoons, on the mild slopes of Alpenrösli or Selfranga, you might find a Harvard professor whose Nobel Prize did nothing for his balance, or various “belles,” including one particularly well-known for her Mafia ties. You’d recognize many of them, like Virginia Hill, the ex-girlfriend of mobster Bugsy Siegel, but I think name-dropping is like blowing your nose with stolen money, so you’ll just have to take my word as to the others.

For Irwin, no matter how glorious the weather, how deep the fresh snow, mornings were meant for the typewriter. Skiing en famille began at noon, in front of a wood chest in the front hall, with a grab to retrieve mittens, goggles and wax. We’d then latch our skis to a rack on the back of a VW Beetle and grind up the hill past the old Hotel Pardenn, turn left at Nett’s grocery store, turn right onto the Bahnhofstrasse, past Mr. Meilhem’s bank and APorta’s bakery, left again at the Chesa, and right at the old Apotheke to park at the Luftseilbahn. 

Depending on who was around at the top, and their skiing ability, the decision was taken to traverse over to the Furka and ski down to Küblis, or, if the visibility wasn’t good, to make the shorter run down Kalbersass through the pines, to the Schwendi. With the callowness (and legs) of youth, I called that "social skiing," pleading for the Drostobel or the Wang.

The Gotschna and the Parsenn, and later the Madrisa, were our local playgrounds. Skis were long, and runs were not flattened into antiseptic boulevards by snowcats. To enjoy the virgin faces on the north side of the Weissfluhgipfel, down towards Fondei, or the steep chutes and glades down the backside of the Bramabuel in Davos, you had to know how to turn ‘em both ways. In those days Klosters was to St. Moritz and Gstaad, what Montauk was to Southampton.

For the old man, skiing was also a reward for pages batted out on his green Olivetti portable. Unlike handball, which he had played in Brooklyn and at which he was awfully good, skiing gave him time and space to work up a sweat without points or scores. Everyone was a winner on the mountain.

If one of the chums at the top of the cable car—often Robert Ricci of haute couture renown or Freddy Chandon (you’ve surely drunk his champagne….)—had a ski teacher in tow, they’d choose the runs. If not, the best skier took the lead. 

I still remember the bite of good edges on spring snow on March mornings in the late Sixties, between the Meierhoff shoulder and Totalp, with the grip then mushing into a spray of slush at the front side of a shoulder. This was before the freak avalanche passed under our feet and took out the train and the road leading to Jakob Kessler’s terrace at Wolfgang.

It was an innocent era. No one except downhill racers wore helmets, the Casa Antica opened with 45s lent by Marisa and Berry Berenson, Angelica Huston wasn’t a star yet, John Negroponte was years away from telling tall tales at the United Nations, and Joël De Rosnay didn’t know he’d be a world-famous scientist.  The big lip (Minsch-Kante) below the Hundschopf on the Wengen downhill wasn't yet named for Klosters' station-master son, Josef Minsch, because he hadn't crashed there yet. But Salka Viertel already made the best chocolate cake in the world, even if Deborah Kerr or Orson Welles were not coming to tea that afternoon.

In the Seventies, the group had a few more birthdays in the legs and knees, and the choice of runs reflected this. One day, on the way to Serneus, Annie, Geza Korvin’s wife—he’d played the Captain in the 1965 movie Ship of Fools—fell into a small ditch, followed in close order by Peter O’Toole’s British brother-in law. The tall Englishman lay there, flopped down on top of her, quite unable to move. After a while the lady firmly said: “Derek, either f*** me, or get off of me!”

In the summer there was tennis on the red clay courts opposite the Silvretta Hotel, and picnics up near the Vereina glacier. Summer was the season for Garbo’s walks along the Landquart torrent with a straw hat over her ears and an incongruous “frowner” on her nose. One day, at lunch, she girlishly insisted on calling one of America’s most brilliant, and controversial, writers “Vigoredal” as though she didn’t know who he was. Gore loved it.

My father had a hip replacement operation in 1979, and we skied one last time the next winter. Savvy old athlete that he was, he knew when the legs couldn’t be trusted, so he quit. But until then, though he loved powder, he skied his best in the spring, on corn snow, with a whole hill for space and no goggles to fog up. On such Klosters mornings the world was just wind in his face and sun on his back; talent felt inexhaustible, good reviews seemed guaranteed, and wives were deemed faithful and friends true. 

Adam Shaw is a freelance writer, ex-reporter for UPI and the Washington Post, and author of Sound of Impact: The Legcy of TWA# 514. He lives in the French Alps and works as a flight instructor and mountain and airshow pilot.

To learn more about Irwin Shaw, visit www.irwinshaw.org. You can see photos of Shaw’s skiing life in Switzerland on the “Klosters” page, and on the “Memories” page, you can read an excellent profile on Adam and Irwin Shaw, titled “Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggarman, Skier” (Skiing, October 1977). One of Shaw’s best short stories, The Inhabitants of Venus, can be found in The Ski Book (Bookthrift, 1985).

After a stunning comeback this past winter, Lindsey Vonn surpassed Austrian racer Annemarie Moser-Proell’s record number of alpine World Cup wins. Who’s the greatest? The new record ignites a debate that won’t be resolved anytime soon.

Lindsey Vonn on the downhill course at Cortina d'Ampezzo on January 18, 2015. She won the event, tying Annemarie Moser-Proell's record. The next day, Vonn won the Super G. Photo By Agence Zoom / Christophe Pallot.

 

By Edith Thys Morgan

When Lindsey Vonn crossed the Super G finish line in Cortina for her 63rd World Cup win on January 19, she knocked Annemarie Moser-Proell off the top step of the podium for total World Cup wins. At press time in early March, she had racked up two more first-place finishes for 65 and counting.

But these landmark victories did nothing to answer this question:  Who’s the greatest all-time skier in the history of women’s World Cup racing? For those who measure such things, Vonn’s record-setting win only fanned the flame of a discussion that won’t be resolved anytime soon.

 

A dominant champion and colorful character on the women’s tour from 1970 to 1980, Moser-Proell clinched five World Championship titles as well as the 1980 Olympic downhill gold at Lake Placid. During her best years, she scored victories in all disciplines during the same winter — and from 1972 to 1974 notched eleven consecutive downhill victories. She retired in March 1980, with 62 wins, after 11 seasons on the World Cup tour.

 

Those who favor Moser-Proell, despite Vonn’s record-breaking feat, point to three factors that garner her the top spot: winning percentage, overall titles and the Super G. Vonn competed in 332 races to claim her record, while Moser Proell took a mere 174, a winning percentage of 19 and 35 percent, respectively.  As for overall titles, Vonn is two behind Moser-Proell’s tally of six — but she came crushingly close to matching Moser-Proell’s five consecutive titles (1971–75) in 2011, when she lost what would have been her fourth consecutive title by a mere three points to her closest friend and rival, Maria Hoefl Riesch. Vonn won her fourth overall title the following year.

INTERNATIONAL DEBUT 

Probably the biggest single point of contention is the Super G factor. Both Vonn and Moser-Proell won in all events available to them at the time. Both excelled at speed events, but Moser-Proell’s dominance included GS. The addition of Super G to the World Cup schedule in 1982–83 offered many more events that favored speed skiers, and indeed, 22 of Vonn’s victories were in Super G. As Cindy Nelson points out, there is no question that Moser Proell would have excelled at the event: “She had Tamara (McKinney) feel with Lindsey size, and was best on rolling terrain when she could accelerate. She would have been incredible at Super G.” 

During the shorter span of her career, Moser-Proell was the singular dominant force in women’s skiing. Vonn’s success over eleven years (2004–2015), which included intermittent streaks of dominance in the speed events, is more aptly defined by her dogged persistence, comebacks and longevity, all of which continue to impress. Both transcended the ski world to become legends in their own countries. For Moser-Proell in ski-crazy Austria, that meant elevating herself above the male ski heroes of the day—working, playing and winning at their level and beyond. For Vonn, it meant breaking into the mainstream consciousness in a country that knows and cares little about alpine skiing. It meant capturing and then enduring the white-hot glare of media attention during the most emotionally vulnerable part of her career, and ultimately winning the respect of skeptics and detractors. 

Each in her own day set a new standard among her peers. At the very least, before making any proclamations one needs to look at their paths and understand their respective eras. Here is a closer look at how Vonn and Moser-Proell each achieved 60-plus wins. 

 

FIRST TURNS

Lindsey Caroline Kildow, born in 1984, learned to ski at age two and was soon thereafter training nightly at Buck Hill in Minnesota under the tutelage of her highly competitive father, Alan, and renowned ski coach Erich Sailer. She moved with her mother to a condo in Vail at age 11, and ultimately the entire family, including four siblings, followed so that she could devote herself to ski training. Right away, coaches at Vail were impressed by her technical mastery and introduced her to speed events, in which she rapidly excelled. By age 11 she was skiing year-round, and by 12 was sponsored by Rossignol, the same ski brand used by her early role model Picabo Street.

Annemarie Proell, born in 1953 as the sixth of eight children, lived in her parents’ farmhouse several hundred meters above the tiny village of Kleinarl, Austria. She started skiing at age four on homemade skis and was the first of her family to ski race. (Her sister Evi had a brief World Cup career.) Her parents, despite being Austrian, had “Keine Ahnung” (“no clue”) about ski racing and could provide neither ski clothes nor good equipment. The local priest recommended her to the regional ski association. After winning her first local championship at age 13, she wrote a letter to a ski company asking for equipment and was denied.

 

At age 14, Vonn and teammate Will McDonald became the first Americans to win the Tropheo Topolino youth competition in Italy. At age 15, Vonn started traveling with the U.S. Ski Team and was by then doing her studies on the road through the University of Missouri Online. She raced her first World Cup in 2000 at age 17. Her first podium came at Cortina in 2004, in her 46^th World Cup race. Her first win came on December 3, 2004 at age 20. By that age, Moser-Proell had 27 wins and three overall World Cup titles under her belt. 

Moser-Proell made her World Cup debut in 1968 at age 14 (then the minimum age to race FIS), falling three times and finishing last at Badgastein. She joined the Austrian Ski Team the following season under the direction of coaching legend Charly Kahr. Her first podium came that January, at age 15 in Saint Gervais, with a second place in downhill. She won her first race, a GS at Maribor, the following season, at age 16, and also captured bronze in giant slalom at the 1970 FIS World Alpine Championships at Val Gardena. At age 17 she won her first downhill World Cup race, and clinched the first of six overall titles in Are, Sweden. Her seven victories that season included all three disciplines on the World Cup at that time—downhill, slalom and (one-run) giant slalom.

 

HARD KNOCKS

Beyond her skills and competitive drive, coaches remember Vonn’s frequent hard crashes, big high-speed yard sales from which she typically walked away. Her first time in the spotlight was her body-wrenching crash in training at Sansicario during the 2006 Torino Olympics. Despite hospitalization she returned to race, finishing 8th. 

The longevity of her career is thanks in part to enhanced safety in ski racing venues. The frozen hay bales and picket fences that lined World Cup courses in the 1970s have been replaced with the highly effective A and B netting that line today’s venues. Moser-Proell steered clear of the hay bales by being a canny competitor, keeping her own line secret during inspection, and even skiing off course during a training run to observe and find the perfect line. 

 

WELL-ROUNDED

Both Vonn and Moser-Proell won in all disciplines available to them — four for Moser-Proell and five for Vonn. It took Vonn 11 seasons to win her first GS, of only three total. Moser-Proell’s GS was nearly as strong as her DH, and she notched 16 wins in that event. Vonn and Moser-Proell share a relative weakness in slalom, with two and three wins respectively. Both were up against specialists in their day, though with more races in the modern World Cup schedule (17-29 races per year during Moser-Proell’s reign, versus  33-38 during Vonn’s), the task for all-arounders to manage the training, rest and gear required to compete in five distinctly contested events (versus three in Moser-Proell’s era) is considerably more challenging.

 

EXPERIENCE COUNTS

Vonn has won on the Lake Louise course 14 times. Moser-Proell’s most wins came at Pfronten, which she won seven times, including her last World Cup downhill in January 1980 — the only speed event missed that season by her archrival, Switzerland’s Marie-Theres Nadig. With the tour returning to classic courses annually, as it has in Vonn’s entire career, experience becomes a compounding advantage. During Moser-Proell’s reign, some of the classic downhills on the tour were not run every year, and racers did not ski the hill for Super G as well, giving experienced racers less of a relative advantage. On the flip side, all racers and especially women retired much younger during Moser-Proell’s era, so she did not have to maintain her dominance through multiple waves of young, fresh stars as Vonn has.

 

GETTING PHYSICAL

Vonn was not athletically gifted in her early years; she was a tall skinny girl and self-described klutz who came into her strength late. That shifted when her father hired a strength coach from the San Francisco 49ers and exploded when she signed with Red Bull in 2005 and became part of their Athletes Special Projects, run by former Austrian downhill trainer Robert Trenkwalder. Per Lundstam, a trainer for the U.S. Ski Team from 1994–2010 and now with Red Bull recalls: “Once she got it into her head to use her physical abilities as a tool she embraced it and thrived.” Vonn, at 5’ 10” and 165 pounds, simply out trains the competition, with high-volume workouts and the most advanced sports science and facilities in Austria and at home.

Moser-Proell also started out as skinny girl who grew mighty in stature. While Vonn’s strength is built through methodical process in the gym, Moser-Proell’s came first from necessity (working on the farm and climbing home after school). Though never known for her athleticism, she skied herself into shape and used the après ski-loving, work hard/play hard image to underscore her overwhelming strength.

OLYMPIC TRIALS

After an impressive sixth place in combined (the best U.S. result for the women’s team) in her Olympic debut at the 2002 Games at Salt Lake City, Vonn came into 2006 as a top U.S. medal contender in the speed events. However, teammate Julia Mancuso stole the show with a gold medal in the GS. Moser-Proell was also upstaged in her first Olympics in 1972. Even as the Austrian team threatened to pull out of the Olympics following Karl Schranz’s ban, Moser-Proell was the clear favorite in both the DH and GS. But Switzerland’s Nadig won gold in both events. Both Moser-Proell and Vonn sat out an Olympics at the peak of their careers — Vonn in 2014 and Moser-Proell in 1976. 

 

POINTS

The current scoring system, where race points are awarded to the top 30 finishers, starting at 100 for a win, was implemented in the 1991–92 season. In Moser-Proell’s era, 25 points were awarded for a win, and points only went to the top 10. Under the modern scoring method,  a consistent racer can amass points even while finishing outside the top 10. 

 

THE COMBINED FACTOR

Moser-Proell's tally is boosted by seven "statistical combined" events that were calculated from separate — and already individually tallied — slalom and downhill races, a so-called “paper race.” Meanwhile, Vonn's five combined victories represented a new, stand-alone event that consisted of one downhill and two slalom runs.

 

PERSONAL BUSINESS

Lindsey Kildow’s career was first managed by her father Alan and then by her husband, fellow ski racer Thomas Vonn, whom she married in 2007. Thomas became the ultimate “rep,” meticulously managing every detail of her career. The couple divorced in 2011. As author Nathaniel Vinton describes in his 2015 book The Fall Line, the divorce “coincided with Lindsey’s rapprochement with the man who had most opposed the relationship to begin with: her father, Alan Kildow, who threw his energy into the brass-knuckled litigation that lasted more than a year.”

Moser-Proell also established a close racer/rep relationship, marrying her ski technician, Herbert Moser, in 1974. They remained together until his death in 2008. 

 

FAME

Vonn embraces the media, particularly after posing for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition in February 2010, the year she struck Olympic DH gold in Vancouver. She is featured in ads for everything from Under-Armour to
Alka-Seltzer. Her relationship with golf superstar Tiger Woods has vaulted her into another realm, with red carpet Hollywood appearances, a fashion spread in Vogue, cover stories in People and other U.S. magazines and a year-round media presence. Fame in the United States came much later than in Europe, where she endeared herself to fans by conducting interviews in German. In 2010 she won the Laureus World Sports Awards “Sportswoman of the Year” and captured the Best Female Athlete ESPY in 2010 and 2011.

When Moser-Proell won her first overall World Cup in 1970–71, 10,000 people showed up to celebrate in her hometown. Even today, 35 years after her last victory, Moser-Proell, Austria’s Sportswoman of the Century, is among the most highly regarded and loved athletes in Austria. 

Vonn’s global fame, however, eclipses that of Moser-Proell, who was never comfortable speaking to the press in English. Her Cafe Annemarie restaurant at Kleinarl, renamed Café-Restaurant Olympia after she sold it following her husband’s death in 2008, remains a tourist attraction and she appears at major ski events. Though still much loved and revered in her home country, her fame outside of the ski world (she was named a Legend of Honor at Vail in March 2014), does not extend much beyond Austria.

FORTUNE

Vonn’s rewards, in addition to annual multi-millions from contracts with her sponsors, include prize money, which is now awarded at each World Cup race. In 2012, when she won 12 events and the overall title, she topped the list for men and women with $608,000.  In 1976 the Olympics laws were rewritten, allowing leniency to athletes who had received money from sponsors, and acknowledging the under-the-table deals common with top European skiers. Though the money exchanged was far less than today, and prize money was not allowed, Moser-Proell’s version of rock-star status included her own technician, a fast Mercedes, and, best of all to the avid hunter, access to private hunting grounds. 

 

IMAGE

Just as Vonn is never interviewed without her Red Bull hat on her head or can in her hand, Moser-Proell was closely associated with the cigarettes she enjoyed, whether while partying late at night, or having a smoke just before or after her run. It was at once a ritual of relaxation and of asserting the Alpha role of “La Proell,” as she was called by the French racers and then by international media.

 

THE COMEBACKS

Both Vonn and Proell took a break at the peak of their careers. Vonn took an involuntary break after her injury in 2013 and the re-injury that kept her out of 2014 Sochi Games. She remained a fixture of the team throughout, but did have to contend with the emergence of a new superstar, teen wonder and Olympic champ Mikaela Shiffrin. Moser-Proell voluntarily retired in 1976, despite the Olympics in her home country, to take care of her ailing father, who passed away later that year. Financial concerns, among other factors, brought her back to the sport the following season, though she was required to requalify for the Austrian team.

 

ON-SNOW TRAINING

Vonn, like most current World Cup racers, skis year-round on glaciers and in the southern hemisphere during her off-season. Despite the prevailing wisdom of the time (that too much skiing, and training at high altitude, was detrimental), Proell did make the 40-minute drive to Kaprun to take the tram to the Kitzsteinhorn Glacier, which opened for skiing in 1965. Summer skiing allowed Salzburg teams to disrupt the longtime dominance of Tyrol, and led to further glacier skiing developments throughout Austria.

 

THE GEAR

For contractual reasons, Vonn switched to Head Skis the summer before the 2010 season, inheriting not only Bode Miller’s skis, but his prized technician Heinz Haemmerle. Vonn’s size and strength allowed her to take advantage of the trade-off between the speed offered by longer, stiffer men’s skis versus the maneuverability of shorter women’s skis.   

Moser-Proell skied for Atomic throughout her career, living as she did in the village so close to the Atomic factory in Wagrain. However, tensions in Wagrain rose in the fall of 1974 when Proell briefly considered a switch to Kästle. Upon her return in 1976 she signed on with Atomic through 1980. The newspapers reported that she had “$5 million reasons” to come out of retirement, alluding to the money provided by her sponsors Atomic and Dachstein. Moser-Proell’s size, strength and technique allowed her to ski on 225 cm men’s downhill skis as well, though only when the courses and conditions suited them. 

Moser-Proell did experiment with a steel plate underfoot, but she preceded the era of Derbyflex and integrated binding plates. Vonn’s racing career started after the development of hinged gates and shaped skis, while Moser-Proell predated both of those changes (hinged gates were fully adopted on the World Cup in 1981 and shaped skis appeared in the Nineties). Vonn is reported to travel with 50 skis. Moser-Proell’s quiver, all carefully selected and tested, included three pairs per event, plus two for freeskiing.

 

THE LEGACY

Christin Cooper, who won a silver medal in GS in the 1984 Winter Games, makes the case for Moser-Proell being the original skiing feminist, who paved the way for the opportunities, commercial exposure and equal access that racers like Vonn, Lara Gut and Julia Mancuso now enjoy. “Moser-Proell broke new ground in those areas, and only she had the cred at the time to do it,” says Cooper. “She modeled gnarly, unrepentant competitiveness before women athletes had come to own that space with pride and confidence.”

Vonn, in turn, has taken full advantage of what Moser-Proell started and is creating her own legacy in the sport. "She's the best thing that has happened to skiing in a long time," adds 1968 Olympic triple gold medalist Jean-Claude Killy of France. "An unbelievable athlete…and great ambassador for our sport."

Rather than arguing who is better, perhaps it is more fitting to pass the baton from one great champion to the next, as if to say, “It’s your turn, Lindsey. Run with it and see how far you can go.” 

 

Edith Thys Morgan is author of Shut Up and Ski: Shootouts, Wipeouts and Blowouts on the Trail to the Olympic Dream. She raced on the World Cup for six years as a Super G specialist, finishing 9th at the 1988 Winter Olympics.

     To read more about Annemarie Moser-Proell, see “Where Are They Now?” in the March-April 2013 issue of Skiing History. 

Special thanks to ISHA editorial board member Patrick Lang for contributing to this article; to John Fry, who composed the "Top Ten Women Racers" sidebar; and to Tom Kelly at the U.S. Ski Team and Mo Guile at Agence Zoom for photography.

Bode Miller learned to ski on slopes that his grandparents, Jack and Peg Kenney, cleared after World War II on the family's New Hampshire land. From interviews and journals, the author tells the tale of a small ski area with a big legacy. By Nathaniel Vinton

 

Jack Kenney (above, in an undated photo) started Tamarack Lodge in December 1946 with a rope tow and a single slope. Photo courtesy of the New England Ski Museum

The ruins of the old ski area have been all but absorbed by Kinsman Mountain. All that remains to memorialize those long-ago New Hampshire ski days is the rusty steel guts of an old car engine that had powered a rope tow. Mike Kenney says it’s a Ford Model T, and an automotive historian would probably marvel at the brittle belt still hanging on as the moss and pine needles creep in.

It is an artifact of a ski area that U.S. alpine racer Bode Miller’s grandparents tried to establish on land they bought in the town of Easton almost 70 years ago. The motor is tipped over on its side, split into two main pieces. It rests in a small clearing on the family’s storied property, right by the Franconia town line.

The most decorated male ski racer in U.S. history learned to ski, at age two, just down the trail in the yard behind the family’s Tamarack Tennis Camp. From there, it was three quarters of a mile up a different trail to Turtle Ridge, the off-the-grid cabin his parents built in 1974. (It has recently been renovated and is now home to Miller’s younger sister, Wren, and her family.)

Miller was born in 1977 and spent every winter skiing, sledding or otherwise navigating the icy paths on his family’s rural property. In 1992 he went off to Carrabassett Valley Academy in Maine, and then to global fame. Now he is 37, aiming to give Kitzbühel another shot in 2015. Recovering from November back surgery, he expects to compete in February in the FIS World Alpine Championships in Beaver Creek, Colorado.

When he’s not traveling, Miller now lives in California, but he was back at Tamarack on August 23, 2014, hosting a golf-and-tennis fundraiser for the Turtle Ridge Foundation, his charity supporting adaptive and youth sports programs. In the doubles tournament Miller was paired with his father, Woody. Meanwhile his mother, Jo, agreed to lead me up to see evidence of the ski area her parents had tried to launch.

Jack and Peg Kenney had gotten to work on the endeavor in 1946, shortly after purchasing 450 acres, a farmhouse and the barn. The Kenneys possessed an irrepressible entrepreneurial spirit and were avid skiers. Peg—her maiden name was Taylor—had been a racer with Olympic aspirations. They hoped to draw tourists up to the Franconia area. (Jack's original partner in the venture was a Navy friend, Bob Allard; Kenney bought him out after the first season.)

“If you took this innkeeping business seriously you would be charging into a padded cell in less time than it takes for a cancellation,” Jack wrote in a diary entry dated December 12, 1946. “Your worries encompass every thing from the major item of snow to trivia such as how the pie will turn out. I honestly don’t see how a serious-minded person could last long. Your nerves would snap.”

Just six miles away was the Cannon Mountain tramway, built in 1938. Adjacent to that was the Mittersill ski area, established a few years later by Austrian Baron von Pantz, whose resort would boast of colorful European ski instructors like Sig Buchmayr and Swiss born Paul Valar. But the Kenneys were hoping to draw people to their little inn and ski slope, and Jack’s journal entries are full of pride and romanticism.

“We are ideally suited for this life as we have a sense of humor and we can see how little control we have over the elements and the fortunes,” he writes. “You are whipped mercilessly by so many things: the weather, high prices, cancellations, etc. It’s an ever-changing business and very uncertain.”

The diaries are now in the possession of the eldest of Jack and Peg’s five children, Jo. She was born in 1949 and now lives in her parents’ funky old house in the woods above Tamarack. She says her parents were “doing what they wanted to do” and were “not really concerned about what the upper classes thought."

“He charged a dollar a day, I think,” Jo says of the ski tow. “He writes about it in his diary, which is hysterical. He wrote articles in the Boston Herald for years—funny things. He was really into promoting the area. North Conway at that point had all the light, and Stowe.”

The remains of the rope tow were something I’d heard about while doing research for my new book, The Fall Line (see page 35). The book tells of Miller’s unlikely rise to the top of alpine skiing, but although Miller thrived as an outsider on the World Cup, he inherited a rich skiing tradition.

“It’s probably the richest ski culture in the country, in this area, where I grew up,” Miller told me at the Tamarack event last August. “Everyone around here knew about racing. It’s a bit like being in Austria. Within my family, my uncles made it to pro, so we always had this thing where it wasn’t like racing was something that just kids did.” 

The Kenneys were avid skiers—Jack a Dartmouth graduate, and Peg an Olympic hopeful. Their kids all became skilled and dedicated skiers. When Bode was growing up, his uncles and other family members could explain to him the different echelons and qualification measures that governed American skiing. (Two of Miller’s uncles, Peter and Mike, both raced on the U.S. Pro Tour; two other uncles, Bill and Davey, were also skilled and dedicated skiers.)

“It was clear there were steps all the way to the top,” Bode recalls.

Helping young Bode get up some of those critical early steps was his grandmother, Peg. When Bode was in his early teens, she loaned him money at the start of each winter for season passes at Cannon Mountain, where he would spend truant days skiing alone, discovering his distinctive turn.

“Two hundred and sixty bucks," Miller recalls of the loans, which he’d pay off fixing the Tamarack courts. “I’d pull tennis court nails on our clay courts, and roll up the lines, and sweep the courts and fix fences and mow lawns. She’d end up paying for the whole thing, but I ended up paying for usually about half of it, but I was usually one season behind.”

In his 2005 memoir Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun, Bode Miller writes about how his grandparents “met on skis” in late 1944 at Sugar Bowl, California, with Peg just out of UC Berkeley and Jack on leave from the Navy, having seen action in the South Pacific. Within two years they were at Tamarack, trying to inaugurate their little ski area.

“I had a fine time laying pine boughs across gullies over roots on the bottom of the ski slope,” Jack Kenney writes on December 1, 1946. “Cut out some of the hill to the left of the tow—I think that is going to be a fast, interesting run.”

The same entry describes his fears about whether the new rope tow will work. There are mechanical adjustments to make, and he has a feeling it won’t work, but he accepts reservations anyway.

“A party calls long-distance from Boston to reserve 6 in the bunkroom after Christmas,” he writes in the same entry. “Call Joe about 5 cord of slabwood at $7 per cord—he can’t hear me. We all get laughing and I scream at him. Peg comes up to the room pulls over her pants and jumps into bed with me and we love—she asks me if I’m happy. I am and very serene. She is happy but a worrier.”

The Kenneys prepared food at the farmhouse and did what they could to ready the slopes despite early-season fears over inadequate snow. They sent out marketing material—“Excellent Skiing, Outstanding Food, Gay Informality,” their brochure read. And they enlisted friends to help them build a small wooden structure meant to house the rope tow’s engine and offer skiers a little mid-mountain retreat. 

In Jack Kenney’s diaries, mixed in with the food bill totals and worries about snowfall, there is just enough time for reflection, as is the case on January 5, 1947. That day the rope tow finally starts working properly, and Jack records “a sudden surge of satisfaction and joy” over what they are accomplishing. 

“Life can be beautiful! It even is at times,” he writes that day. “Today at about 5 p.m. the first person hoved into view coming up on the enigmatic rope tow. What a thrill that was. We have been moaning, sweating, belaboring and bitching about that damn thing for weeks.” 

This comes under an entry topped with jubilant block letters: SKI TOW RUNS!! GROSS INCOME FOR TWO WEEKS: $1021!! He records his vision of a fully operational ski area, presumably with his ski-racing wife offering personalized lessons. The ski area doesn’t have a name; it’s simply part of Tamarack Lodge.

“Now imagine what will happen if we get the ski tow operating, the warming shelter going and ski lessons continuing,” he writes on January 5, 1947. “We will have five sources of income: the lodge transportation, ski tow, ski lessons, and the warming shelter (sandwiches, hot drinks and other food).”

The ski area was a constant struggle, and Tamarack’s other facilities were under-utilized in the summer, so by 1952 Jack and Peg had envisioned the tennis camps. They had the market to themselves, and within a few years the Tamarack Tennis Camp was the family’s main commercial focus, along with a tennis court building-and-maintenance company that’s still going strong. They shut down the ski area sometime after the late 1950s.

Today Tamarack Tennis Camp is thriving under leadership of Wren and her husband, Chuck Weed—whom she met at the tennis camp when they were 10—along with the rest of the family. In addition to the regular seven-week summer camp season, they offer tennis weekends for adults, host the Brandeis College tennis team for a fall training weekend, and rent the lodge for two weeks in January to the University of New Hampshire ski team, which trains at Cannon. 

After all these years, the place retains a rustic, low-key vibe. It was recently lauded in an article for The New Republic by Michael Lewis, the acclaimed author of Moneyball and Liar’s Poker, who wrote that Jack Kenney “ran his tennis camp less as a factory for future champions than as an antidote to American materialism.” 

Future ski historians will owe a debt to Jo Miller, who rescued many of the trophies, papers and other mementos of her son’s nearly 20-year career in elite, professional ski racing. At her home she keeps scrapbooks full of early press clippings, award certificates and curiosities. She also arranged for Bode to display five of his six Olympic medals and three World Cup trophies at the New England Ski Museum, adjacent to the base of the Cannon Mountain tram.

On a piece of paper from a 2001 training session in New Zealand, a coach has recorded Miller’s times on a full-length GS course as he edges out his teammate Erik Schlopy; another scrapbook contains a 2006 article from an Austrian men’s magazine featuring one of Miller’s ex-girlfriends in her underwear, ice cubes balanced in her cleavage; and there is a U.S. Ski Team worksheet—a five-year-plan that Miller’s coaches made him fill out at age 22; in the final box, he has written a simple goal: “stay the ultimate one!”

Skiing is still a family affair to Bode Miller, and perhaps even more than ever. His primary coach on the U.S. Ski Team staff—if an athlete as intensely independent as Miller can be said to have a coach—is his uncle, Mike Kenney, who is known on the World Cup for climbing tall trees along the tour’s downhill courses to get better footage of his nephew and other team members for the scientific digital video analysis that is part of modern World Cup strategy.

Miller has also made a point of bringing his young children to see him race. When on the World Cup with him they might stay in his luxurious motorhome; the chauffeur typically parks the bus in the television truck compound near the race finish. Both children were also with him at the August charity function.

“The tennis camp was very firmly established by the time I was here,” he says. “The fact that [my grandparents] were ski lodge entrepreneurs was lost on me. The rope tow, I didn’t really know about that until I was older.”

It’s true that the skiing culture ran deep in the Easton Valley. Cannon Mountain hosted World Cup races during the tour’s inaugural 1966–67 season. Sel Hannah, one of the founders of the American ski industry, lived nearby; one of his daughters, Joan, won bronze in giant slalom at the 1962 world championships. In 2005, Miller bought the Hannah family’s 630-acre potato farm in Sugar Hill, but he sold it recently after putting considerable improvements into the property. 

The U.S. Ski Team recently signed on to invest in alpine racing infrastructure at Mittersill, which was resurrected in 2009 after lying dormant for decades. More than $3 million will go into snowmaking and trail building as part of an agreement with the Franconia Ski Club, Cannon Mountain and the Holderness School.

The national team wants it to become a center for serious super G and even downhill training, in case there’s another original talent out there in the woods, just waiting for the right opportunity. No one is expecting another racer like Bode Miller to come along—he’s a one-of-a-kind talent. Then again, he doesn’t need replacing yet anyway. He’s still got a few more races left in him—a few more chances to shake off the rust and represent Kinsman Mountain on the world stage. 

Nathaniel Vinton is the author of The Fall Line: How American Ski Racers Conquered a Sport on the Edge. The book is being published in February 2015; for a review, see page 35. 

How concern for the national health and military preparedness led France to build the infrastructure for Chamonix, 1924.

By E. John B. Allen

 

The generation of men and women who took to recreational skiing on the Continent prior to the World War I looked to Scandinavia as the fount of all things skiing, northern countries with a five-thousand-year head start in utilitarian and sporting activities. The Continent’s military noted the effectiveness of Norwegian ski troops and eventually emulated the notion, Russian, German, Austrian, Swiss and Italian regiments were experimenting with ski troops in the 1890s. The English were contemplating training ski soldiers to guard India’s Himalayan frontier.

The French soon followed. Toward the close of the 1800s, Italian-French border relations had taken on a wary unease. The Revue Alpine of 1901 noted that France and Italy had designated frontier zones in which civilians were not allowed. It was natural then that French military officers stationed in the alpine forts had begun by 1891 to consider using ski troops to patrol the alpine border.

Four French officers made attempts to introduce skis to the military: Lieutenants Widmann, Monnier and Thouverez, and Captain Francois Clerc. Widmann was Swedish, Monnier had skied in Norway, Thouverez was with France’s 93^rd Mountain Artillery, and Clerc commanded a company in the 159th Infantry Regiment. These four wrote to the French Ministry of War, prodding them toward establishing ski troop detachments.

The major obstacle to the idea was the general ill health of the French mountain people—the population habituated to the altitude and climate from which the crucial recruits must necessarily be drawn. French villagers of the time survived in primitive and unsanitary conditions that were especially deleterious in winter. Tuberculosis and influenza were rampant, along with the afflictions of goiter and rickets. The romantic patina often applied by writers of village life in the Alps before the intrusion of tourism and urbanization ignored the struggle for survival against disease, malnourishment and unsanitary conditions that were endemic a century ago.

The health problems were acute enough that governmental efforts to improve them took on a note of urgency. In 1902 the French Assembly passed a public health law. How it was carried out depended on the efficiency of each region’s Hygiene Council. In Grenoble, for example, the Isère council took up anti-tuberculosis measures right away according to the 1902 archives of the Grenoble Counseil d’Hygène. Problems with drinking water and sewage disposal continued, however, until addressed in 1908.

A French law of April 15, 1910 gave to the high altitude, climatic stations the right to charge vacationers a residence tax under the condition that certain hygienic conditions be guaranteed, a closed sewer system, etc. These rules were modified and finally set down by France’s Academy of Physicians in May 1913.

Both French national and regional governments were also deeply desirous of supporting and maintaining the growth of mountain tourism. Government health initiatives were driven increasingly by economic as well as military and public health considerations. The steep growth of winter sports devotees early in the 1900s occasioned sharp scrutiny during the winter months by local health commissioners. A not inconsiderable amount of money was at stake. The fortress town of Briançon, for example, hosted 50,000 visitors in 1909, a figure that rose to 65,000 by 1911, according to La Montagne, the publication of the Club Alpin Francais (French Alpine Club, or CAF). Mountain tourism was growing to the extent that huts owned by the French Alpine Club were being replaced here and there by small hotels catering to sportsmen.

There was also a second growing stream of city people who came for “the cure,” a better chance to recover from tuberculosis or influenza. Allotte de Fuye, an early alpinist-skier, wrote in 1891, “Doctors will very quickly understand…that influenza cases…should be sent fleeing from the pestilential centers to breathe the revivifying air…with no trace of microbes.”

There were no flu vaccinations in that day. In the next quarter century, the flu mercilessly wiped out a hundred million people around the world  in recurrent epidemics.  In the West, more individuals died as a result of the 1918 flu epidemic than were killed in World War I to that point. People paid great attention to scientific studies promising a healthier environment at higher altitudes. A report in the 1884 Annuaire de l’Oservatoire showed that a cubic decimeter of air could have a widely-varying bacteria count: 55,000 in the Rue de Rivoli, Paris; 600 in a Paris hotel room; 25 at 560 meters altitude in the French Alps and 0 at 2,000 to 4,000 meters. Clearly, such studies supported the belief in the healing and hygienic advantages of health-cum-sporting stations.

The health problems of the mountain population had to be dealt with, first and foremost. Along with disease, alcoholism was frequently given as a reason for their ill health.  But alcoholism was probably not a problem on a level with that of winter living conditions. Maintaining sufficient warmth to sleep comfortably, in the context of sparsely available firewood forced the villagers to use body warmth of their domestic animals. Mountain farmers simply moved above their stables from December to April. The degeneration of the mountain population, Clerc wrote, “is not due to alcoholism…but to the fashion of living in winter.” The captain had recruited in these villages, had gone into “these dens [where] one cannot breathe after a few minutes.”

“Five months stable living,” commented another observer of winter conditions in the French alpine villages. Val d’Isère was Val Misère: “snow, always snow, then snow again and after three days no hope; the beasts are shut up for six months. For a month now the snow has kept us in our houses and all work stops. We await March and April,” was the summation appearing in the 1903-04 Revue Alpine.

Malnourishment was also severe. In 1905, Captain Clerc noted that “in certain high villages…one is unhappily impressed by the rickets of the race. In five male births, one has trouble in a few cantons to find a [20-year-old] fit for service.” A survey by the military showed that a great number of  conscripts from mountain villages had failed to grow to a mature height of more than five feet. Another result of poor diet was that four per cent of the population of mountainous Savoy, long known as “the fortress of goiterism,” suffered from the affliction. Recruits at the Briançon garrison were taken to see the unfortunates, “emblems of beauty,” as one wrote on a postcard home.

The immediate military threat from Germany became stronger toward the close of the 1800s. With the defeat of 1870-71 always in mind, the national need for a pool of youth strong enough to withstand warfare both in summer and in winter spurred the French to found a number of sporting associations to promote healthy, athletic pursuits for youngsters. The Ferry laws of 1881 made military exercises compulsory in schools and may have given the impetus to the burgeoning number of sports clubs engaged in shooting, gymnastics, running and swimming. Although a report from the Jura noted that, while there were 105 shooting clubs in the region compared to eight ski clubs, skiing nevertheless became part of this movement to combine sport, morality, health and patriotism. 

The Cercle de gymnase de Serres was founded in 1876 for “honest recreation and to encourage sentiments of virtue, fraternity and patriotism.” In Gap, Les Etoiles des Alpes was founded in 1884 “to give youth a civic education as preparation for military service.” One sports organization published a statement in 1911 stressing development of the “physical and moral forces of the young, [to] prepare in the countryside robust men and valiant soldiers and create among them friendship and solidarity.”

This is exactly what the French Alpine Club implied in its motto Pour la Patrie par la Montagne. Its leadership sought to persuade mountain villagers that skiing was not just some wealthy acrobatic sideshow. The French Alpine Club’s Winter Sports Commission, created in 1906, was given official charge of French skiing a year later on the condition that the commission recognize the importance of “skiing’s patriotic and military importance and, its moralizing force as a sport.”

The sentiment was based on the belief that, at the turn of the 20th century, the Norwegians had taken to skiing “as part of their regeneration” during their bloodless but acrimonious and bitter struggle for independence from Sweden. Thanks to a general belief that physical exertion could halt the degeneration of the French mountain people, skiing was transformed from a pastime of the adventurous and wealthy into a means to ensure “strong men and strong soldiers.” Herein lay the true purpose of what was billed as CAF’s first Winter Sports Week, yet the diplomas were for a Concours International de Ski. It was held at Mont Genèvre, near Briançon on February 9-13, 1907. Designed as propaganda for military preparedness, it also had the effect of bringing skiing to civilian notice. The French Alpine Club and the French military both pushed skiing as a means to “better the nation’s defense at the same time as bettering the alpine population.” Both Clerc and subsequent commanders at Brançon, Captains Rivas and Bernard, encouraged soldiers who had received ski training during their periods of military service to return to their villages and teach children to ski. This would drag the villagers out of their winter hibernation and ensure a supply of able ski troop recruits. Rivas, for example wrote in 1906 that he was delighted that 15 out of 18 demobilized servicemen were making skis in their own villages that year.

The French Alpine Club made skiing as a patriotic fitness crusade. “The amelioration of the race haunted us,” wrote Henry Cuënot, the leading CAF spokesman as president of its Winter Sports Commission, looking back at the club’s early efforts to promote the sport. “One knew that Norwegians took to skiing as part of their regeneration, one understood its patriotic and military reach. One wanted to make strong men and strong soldiers.”

The French Alpine Club undertook to organize annual international ski meets, beginning with the one in 1907 at Mont Genèvre near Briançon. From the first, these ski meets ranked as major national sporting events covered by a large number of French papers. There were reporters from L’Illustration, L’Auto, Armée et Marine, Le Petit Parisien, Les Alpes Pittoresques—to name five of twelve newspapers represented at Mont Genèvre. Visiting foreigners brought the excitement of international competition with the Italian Alpini providing a special dash. At Genèvre there was an ice Arc de Triomphe. On one side was CAF’s motto, Pour la Patrie par la Montagne (For the Fatherland by way of the Mountains), on the other was L’Amour de la Montagne abaisse les Frontières (Love of Mountains does away with Frontiers).  Patently, skiing was part of the Franco-Italian détente. CAF held its second meet in 1908 at Chamonix. The third in 1909 was at Morez in the Jura. CAF’s letter soliciting prizes for the Morez meet was clear in its meaning: “Our context is the most powerful means of spreading in our country, a sport which regenerated the Norwegian race.” And Norwegians were always present, adding their supreme authority to the competitions.

The theme of regeneration runs through club discussions and reports. Henry Cuënot, the spokesman for regeneration, wrote many of CAF’s notices. The military fully supported the annual meets by providing a band, teams of soldiers, and the patronage of any number of high-ranking officers. These patrons, if they did not attend themselves, sent deputies to speak the right words at the award banquets. At the 1908 meet, General Soyer, filling in for General Gallieni (who had been at the meet the previous year), affirmed that “all mountain sports are incomparable in making men valiant and vigorous.” 

The fourth CAF meet was held in 1910 at Eaux Bonnes and Cauterets and the fifth, the following year, at Lloran. It was CAF’s policy to hold the meets all over snow-covered France. By the time the seventh annual meet rolled around, correspondents from 17 papers covered the event held in the Vosges  at Gérardmer in 1914, and was the occasion of the awarding of the first military Brévet for skiers. Successful candidates won the right to choose which ski regiment they would join when called to the colors, which happened all too soon; August 1914 the tocsin sounded for World War I.

But Chamonix was coming into its own during those years. It was not the mountains that had first attracted men to the Chamonix valley, but its glaciers. In the enlightened 18^th century had come the Englishmen Windham and Pocock, the first of a long line of gentlemanly amateurs. Mt. Blanc was climbed in 1786. In the Romantic age, the high lakes were the attraction, and only from about the mid-19^th century did alpinism take hold. There was much foreign business prior to skiing in the valley. In 1860 Chamonix welcomed 9,020 visitors, in 1865 the number was up to 11,789, with the English supplying about one third. Chamonix became “a little London of the High Alps” in the summer season. In 1860 there were 7 hotels, 10 in 1865 including the 300-bed Grand Imperial. An English church was built in 1860, the telegraph arrived two years later, the first of the mountain huts, the Cabane des Grands-Mulets was ready in 1864, and Whymper climbed the first ‘needle’ in June 1865. Skiing came in 1898. Arnold Lunn remembered the guide “who regarded his skis with obvious distaste and terror. He slid down a gentle slope leaning on his stick, and breathing heavily, while we gasped our admiration for his courage.” Chamonix skiing prospered thanks to the local GP, Dr. Payot, who took to visiting his patients on skis. By the beginning of the 1907-08 season there were about 500 pairs of skis in town. CAF was mightily pleased with its propaganda, for skiing was “social and patriotic at the same time.” Chamonix was CAF’s choice for its Second International Week in January 1908. Two hotels had remained open for the winter of 1902, four in 1906, and the number tripled by 1908. The hoteliers had been skeptical at first of CAF’s enthusiasm, but had joined in as the day grew closer. They ended up “surprised by the affluence of their visitors” whose choice was for hotels with central heat. Heating was a major concern for villages and towns as they started to attract winter visitors.

The meet was a resounding success. The reception for the alpine troops, the gentry in their sledge carriages made a fine show, baby carriages on runners provided a charm and calm to the physical presence of all the skiers, the lugers, and bobsled teams. The sober colors of the skiers’ clothes mingled with the elegant costumes of the ladies. Officers from Norway, troops from Switzerland and of course, France’s own Chasseurs Alpins were the cynosure of all. The throng included amateurs from home and abroad, and guides and porters busied themselves throughout the town: all under a radiantly blue sky with the Mt. Blanc chain creating a magnificent backdrop, “a picture rarely seen and suggestive to a high degree.” Chamonix had become Chamonix-Mt. Blanc, a “new winter station…equal to the big Swiss centers,” enthused one commentator in the Revue Alpine.

A new winter station? Maybe. Certainly one not to equal those in Switzerland, nor, indeed, could it compare with its status as a summer destination. In the summer of 1907, Chamonix welcomed approximately 2,000 visitors a day, for a total of c. 170,000. A little more than 2,000 had been in town for its winter week. It was a start to Chamonix’ becoming France’s premier ski and winter sports station, even if it could not compete with St. Moritz and Davos.

Although the numbers of visitors did not greatly increase during the winter seasons—11,725 in 1911-12 to l2,975 in 1912-13—Chamonix’ standing as premier in the places to ski was enhanced by CAF’s sixth international competition in 1912. Of course there was commentary in the French papers, but it also received notice in Oslo’s Aftenposten  and in the Italian paper, Lettura Sportiva. Excelsior, a French paper, put it exactly right, just what CAF wanted to hear: “Chamonix shows, this year, as in others, that it knows how to organize sporting events.”

Chamonix capitalized on its renown and started major advertising abroad. “Sunshine is Life” read an advertisement cued to the fogged in English in 1913. Cheap 15-day excursion return tickets from London cost just £4.0.3 in 1913.The following year the town’s tourism committee decided to spend some of its advertising budget on Algerian and Tunisian newspapers. As the war loomed, Chamonix was thinking internationally.

During this pre-war period, skiing also spread throughout the local community. Much of the early enthusiasm was generated by Dr. Payot. He made the Col de Balme on February 12, 1912 and followed it by crossing the Col du Géant to Courmeyeur in 14 hours two weeks later. The following season he did the traverse Chamonix to Zermatt. He not only was an ardent apostle for skiing, but also for its physical benefits. Skiing was seen as liberating Chamonix folk from the servitude of the snow, bringing health and renewal. As Payot wrote in 1907 in La Montagne, Chamonix residents of all ages were taking to the sport enthusiastically. It was life in the open air. It was impossible, wrote Payot, “when one has got the blood going and the lungs full of pure air to endure the nauseous atmosphere of double-windowed houses.”  It was the end of anemia by confinement. Living was being aerated and sun-drenched, and this, better than thirty ministerial changes in the government, would bring both moral and physical benefits.

It was to youngsters, though, that the French government leadership looked, “impetuous and fecund youth which is little by little declining; they all come to ask of the sun and the pure air power for the days to come or the courage to replace what the days past have extinguished.” There was a strain of romantic desperation sounded as the ominous possibilities of armed conflict between France and Germany turned to probabilities on the eve of World War I. Pour la Patrie per la Montagne took on new significance in the years leading up to the declaration of war in 1914. The French Alpine Club organized L’Oeuvre de la Planche de Salut to provide free skis for mountain children. Few would miss the double meaning of Planche de Salut—these skis were not merely healthy boards but they were also boards of last resort, as one might throw out to a drowning swimmer.  In a few years the children “will make a marvelous army of skiers perfectly trained and ready to defend the soil of the fatherland if needed.”

 “Today,” wrote one of the very few critics of the idea of mingling the ideals of sport and war, “it is not only correct but elegant to be patriotic. The wealthy…add snobbism to their personal pleasure in the aid of national defense, even of the regeneration of the race.”

But a patriotic attitude rather than irony held sway generally. The enthusiasm for fitness manifest in the French Alps, was echoed equally in the Jura, where the earliest sports organization was the “Vélo-Club,” founded in 1892, followed by the “Union Athlétique Morézienne” whose manifesto referred to skiing as “an excellent means of social hygiene.” The sick and the tourists came to the little towns of the Jura “to find repose and health in the mountains and the forests of fir.”

As proclaimed in Savoy, the French needed regenerating because of the squalid conditions of the cities. “Alcoholism, venereal disease and tuberculosis continue death’s work,” was one Savoy doctor’s summation in 1906.

The “air cure,” especially for weak children, was promoted in Chamonix. There puny mites were being turned into robust little fellows by sport and sun well prior to the onset of the Great War. Chamonix’ Dr. Servettaz claimed he required only two months to make children “stronger, with larger chests and lungs, muscles more solid and dense, blood more rich.” Chamonix’s high altitude was widely credited with increasing appetite as well as being good for sleeping.

A Mirroir article in 1914 carried a photo of tracks leading straight to a snowy peak with the skier victorious on top. The caption praised the true alpinist who forgoes the easy pleasures of luge and skeleton and who “with will power, courage, endurance, a strong heart, and fighting white vertigo, specializes in great ascents.” These physical and mental attributes, it was widely believed, would carry Frenchmen to victory in the oncoming battles of World War I. In the midst of the war, the French Alpine Club publicly speculated that one possible positive aspect of the war was that it would exercise a happy influence on general health. Whether it did is immeasurable.

Still, the Ministry of War in 1920, two years after the Armistice had been signed, recognized the French Alpine Club as the organization promoting “physical instruction and preparation for military service” by giving CAF a ten-thousand franc subsidy. Tourism and national health, however, had  by then become of more immediate concern than military preparedness. France was urged “to win the peace.” The National Tourist Office, the Ministry of War, the French railroad companies, and syndicats d’initiative all involved themselves deeply in the “future of tourism in France and the development of the race by the cult of sport.”

After the war as well, France’s mountain communities turned the number one national health problem to advantage. In the generation before the advent of antibiotics, tuberculosis killed off French citizens by the tens of thousands. In 1926, it was responsible for some 20% of all French deaths—almost 150,000. Since the only known effective cure was to dwell for considerable length of time in cold, clear mountain air, mountain villages began to bloom with “cure hotels” for tuberculosis patients. The extensive services required by the sanitariums busied villagers profitably in supplying the services required.

The tuberculosis bonanza, paradoxically, could have driven off healthy tourists. The French government, to meet this threat, distributed subsidies to the mountain villages agreeing to stringent conditions for hoteliers in order to separate patients and tourists. In Mégève, for example, all visitors in 1932 had to present a doctor’s certificate, attesting that they were free of the contagion.

The village of Passy went at the problem by dividing itself into two zones: between 1,000 and 1,400 meters, “cure hotels” and pensions catering to the tubercular received guests under medical supervision. The sick were barred from the second zone, within the village itself. As a result of the quarantine approach,  tourists continued to come. In the twenty-five years between 1914 and 1939, Mégève grew from a village with three hotels to a town with 66 hotels—from 140 beds to 2,400.

 Enter the Olympic presence: Winter Olympics had been contemplated since 1899 but had always run up against Sweden’s Colonel Balck, the promoter of the Nordiska Spelen.  His friend, Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games and president of the International Olympic Committee, was not especially noted for his keen interest in skiing. He had been impressed with Balck’s Games (particularly the military skijoring races) run every four years, and did not give much thought to trying to incorporate skiing into the Olympic program, in spite of what he said at Chamonix in 1924. He believed, in 1908, that skiing had a “hygienic value of the highest order” and called it “the best medicine for tuberculosis and neurasthenia.”  However, he was often invited to join the Honorary Committee of CAF’s meets.

 

After the war, Chamonix was also growing apace in the twin categories of health center and ski station, particularly the latter. It developed the best lifts and the most expert terrain and was, in that sense, the country’s most prestigious ski village. Chamonix in particular and the French in general had acquired an infrastructure and the experience needed to host ever larger winter competitions—both accumulated beginning in the prewar governmental programs concerned with health, war and tourism. The climax of all this effort came in 1924 when Chamonix was chosen as the site of what became in retrospect authorized as the First Winter Olympic Games. It had not been easy. The Scandinavians had opposed joining the Olympics for years. Coubertin was never an advocate and in 1920 believed that “les sports d’hiver sont douteux,” (winter sports are doubtful) as he penciled in on one protocol. The IOC felt increasing pressure to award the 1924 Games to France, “victor and martyr” of World War I. CAF threw its weighty support behind the proposals for winter games. Meanwhile the Scandinavians sent a warning to the IOC that if skiing were included, they would not attend. At its meeting in Lausanne in 1922, the IOC decided that there would be Games under its patronage but they were not to be thought of as “Olympic” and “champions had no right to medals.” The Games, then, were to be considered as merely an extension of CAF’s International Sporting Weeks that had begun at Mont Genèvre in 1907. The Scandinavians did not approve of this but went along with the contract signed with Chamonix (Gérardmer and Superbagnières were mildly considered) on February 20, 1923 since they were assured that they would not be Olympic Games. “It is absolutely essential,” wrote Siegfrid Edström, the Swedish President of the IOC to the French representative Baron W. de Clary, “that the Winter Games do not take on the character of the Olympic Games,” but to characterize them as “international” would ensure Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish participation.” All parties involved kept this international, as opposed to Olympic, front while the Games were in preparation. The Winter Sports Week was “not an integral part of the Olympic Games,” confirmed Fratz-Reichel, the Secretary of the Committee overseeing the plans and installations at Chamonix. As the opening of the Games drew closer, the difference between an international sports week and a Winter Olympic Games became increasingly blurred, even in the Executive Committee of the IOC. In effect, France’s immense turn-of-the-20^th century concern with the deteriorating health of its mountain villagers, its efforts to create a healthy population for military preparedness in the first instance, and a desire for profitable mountain tourism as a second priority led to a much grander concept. The mounting of ever more grand ski tournaments readied France in general and Chamonix in particular to produce what amounted to the First Winter Olympics, retrospectively granted that status by the IOC in 1925.

The uneasy beginnings of Winter Olympics at Chamonix continued to plague the Games in 1928. The Norwegian Ski Association voted 29 for participation, 27 against—hardly a vote of confidence for the Winter Olympics. Not one European had faith that the United States could pull off a successful ski meeting at Lake Placid in 1932. At the end of those ill-attended games, the Technical Committee of the FIS sent a stinging rebuke to Godfrey Dewey. In many ways it was remarkable—considering the politics of the 1930s—that the Winter Games survived the Nazi extravaganza at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936. And then the Second World War put Olympic competition on hold for the duration.

Following the war, the Winter Games increasingly took on a powerful life of its own, particularly after it became fueled by television funding. It is now that huge international undertaking quadrennially riveting the attention of the world’s sports-minded.

The focus has changed drastically. Modern Winter Olympic commentators never hazard the thought that the Winter Olympics are put as a marvelous engine for producing a healthier world population or that these Games constitute fine physical conditioning for potential infantrymen. The theme of the Winter Games (and of the Summer Games as well) has become something altogether different, standing in as a benign substitute for war between nations, a sublimation of future Hiroshimas one hopes will never happen.

Today’s Winter Olympics is an exponentially-growing entity producing ever-larger spectacles for the world’s entertainment, achieving ever-greater complexity within its competitions and attracting ever-larger portions of the world’s attention during those weeks every four years when it is being held on the television screens of the world. In retrospect, it exhibits a wondrously paradoxical contrast to that long-ago series of modest French Alpine Club ski competitions from which those first Winter Games were born three generations ago.

A veteran journalist on the world alpine racing circuit recalls moments of high drama—and humor—from the Winter Games.

STORY BY PATRICK LANG

 

INNSBRUCK 1976

FRANZ KLAMMER’S RECKLESS
GOLD-MEDAL RUN

Franz Klammer produced one of the most thrilling moments in alpine racing history with his reckless gold-medal run on the treacherous Patscherkofel downhill course at Innsbruck, Austria in February 1976. It was a huge achievement, as there was so much pressure on him prior to that Olympic race. The Austrian had become a hero in his country after having won a dozen downhill races in previous seasons. His fans adored his down-to-earth personality and his aggressive style.

Klammer felt he “had” to win the Olympic downhill for the honor of his ski-crazy country and the estimated 60,000 spectators who gathered along the race course to watch the competition. The streets across the nation were empty and factory workers received a special break, so they could watch the event on TV with millions of their compatriots.

Everyone got nervous after defending Olympic champion Bernhard Russi from Switzerland set the best time after a nearly flawless run. The course was rougher when a nervous Klammer pushed himself out of the starting hut. The screams of thousands of spectators must have been heard for miles. The blow-by-blow delivered over the PA system didn’t help their nerves—Klammer was behind the leaders at the intermediate times. Even his coaches were tense. “He is out, he can’t make it…” shouted triple Olympic champion Toni Sailer, alpine director of the Austrian team, after seeing Franz fly high into the air off the Ochsenschlag jump in the upper part of the run.

Yet Franz fought hard to stay on line, his arms wheeling in the air while approaching the last turns. He was two-tenths of a second behind Russi. He nearly crashed again on one of the last jumps yet recovered to cross the finish line with the winning time, only a few tenths of a second ahead of his Swiss rival and friend. The crowd went nuts as the announcers in ABC’s commentator booth—Frank Gifford, Bob Beattie and their special host Jackie Stewart, the former Formula One world car-racing champion—told the world the results. “I can’t believe it, he has been amazing!” Stewart said. 

Only a few months later, Franz told me how he managed to clinch that title after his fantastic run. “When I started, the course was basically ruined and I knew I had only a small chance to win,” he said. “So I decided to take even more risks than I had planned, especially in the Ochsenschlag section.

“I had seen in training that a few skiers, including Ken Read of Canada, had tested a straighter yet very risky line there. As I approached it, I made a last-second decision to go for it instead of following my usual rounder line. I made a huge jump and thought I would crash, yet I managed to survive and land on my skis. I was not sure how much time I gained or lost, yet it gave me so much determination that I kept risking everything until the last meter. 

“I was amused later to discover that I was the only skier who dared to take that line. The other favorites were not as gutsy or crazy. That’s how I won that day.”

Photo caption: The race course was rough and the pressure was on when Klammer pushed out of the starting hut in the downhill. “I knew I only had a small chance to win,” he told the author. “So I decided to take even more risks.”

LAKE PLACID 1980

MOSER-PROELL WINS THE RACE… AND WINS REDEMPTION

Annemarie Moser-Proell dominated her time as no other skier before and after her. The Austrian set an impressive record of 62 victories and 115 podium finishes on the World Cup tour in only 175 competitions. Her last victory—in the Olympic downhill at Lake Placid in 1980—was particularly emotional and a great story, too.

To fully understand Annemarie’s crowning achievement, it’s important to look back at the 1972 Olympics at Sapporo, Japan. She was the skier to beat after her great season start, marked by five victories and four podiums finishes in all three classic specialties: downhill, slalom and giant slalom.

Yet the 18-year-old turned out to be the victim of the political storm that eliminated her teammate Karl Schranz, unfairly disqualified by the IOC at the beginning of the Games for having apparently earned endorsement money as a ski racer. 

Schranz didn’t want to leave Japan alone and he put pressure on the entire team to fly back home with him. There were some hot meetings within the Austrian squad, but the other racers didn’t want to miss their chance for an Olympic medal just a few hours before the start of the show. 

One of his strongest opponents was the very determined Annemarie Proell. She fought for her rights, yet lost focus and energy during the intense political battle.

After Schranz flew back to Vienna, where he was welcomed by a huge crowd on the main square, “La Proell” did her best to recoup, yet could not achieve her potential on race days. She finished second in downhill and giant slalom behind the unknown Swiss teenager Marie-Therese Nadig, who had never reached any major podium before the 1972 Olympics.

As a consolation prize, Proell won the FIS gold medal for her success in the three-event combined, yet she apparently threw the medal away after receiving it. 

Four years later, she missed the 1976 Games at Innsbruck; she had retired from racing the previous year to get married and take care of her dad, who was seriously ill. After his death, she staged a successful comeback. After clinching her sixth crystal globe for the overall World Cup title in 1979, Annemarie was aiming for the elusive Olympic gold medal in 1980 that she had missed eight years before. 

Yet this time, she was the hunter: Nadig had dominated the previous downhill races, winning six out of seven, as well as a giant slalom.  Moser-Proell had won three events, including a downhill, yet she had not been charging as hard as usual. But she still appeared confident heading into the Games. “I’m fully ready for Lake Placid; I have enough confidence for the big day,” she told me in January after her win at Pfronten in western Bavaria.

At Lake Placid she managed to stay quiet, resolute and ready for the last assault. On race day, she stayed laser-focused as she made her way down the course, despite strong gusts of wind that disturbed some of her main rivals, including Nadig. The Swiss favorite came in third this time, behind Moser-Proell and silver medalist Hanni Wenzel, who took gold in slalom and GS. Eight years after Sapporo, “La Proell” had enjoyed a superb revenge.

“I’m extremely happy. This success means a lot to me after all those years,” she told reporters at the post-race press conference that I was running in the modest base lodge of the resort. “Even though I had nothing to prove here, it’s a special victory after that nightmare in Japan.” The Austrian was obviously relieved to have blown away the dark clouds of Sapporo that had haunted her.

Having followed her career since her first victory in 1970, it was electrifying to hug her after the press conference—a record-setting athlete who had become a good friend.

CALGARY 1988

ALBERTO TOMBA, WINNING AND WATCHING WITT

The 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary were particularly intense, with ten alpine competitions held over two weeks. The preceding ski season had been terrific, too, as big crowds closely followed Italy’s unpredictable phenomenon Alberto Tomba, who was dominating the World Cup that season with six victories and a second place standing in the technical events.

In an interview before the Games, La Bomba told the press that his dad, Franco, might buy him a Ferrari if he clinched two gold medals in Canada—a mission he accomplished by winning the slalom and the GS. After his victories, Alberto told me he’d be pleased to watch East Germany’s attractive superstar Katarina Witt competing at the ice arena in Calgary. I spoke about it with ABC studio producer Draggan Mihailovich, a Tomba fan, who organized the journey.

An ABC van brought us from the medal plaza to the Saddledome arena. The Italian skier, closely followed by a crew from a U.S. network, was proudly wearing his two Olympic gold medals around his neck. Thanks to special accreditations, we were standing right at the rink when Witt started to perform. 

We had briefly seen Witt during our walk under the crowded stands, as she was exercising with her trainer, Jutta Mueller. As we approached her, Mueller, who recognized Tomba and might have read about his wish to meet her protégé, pushed Katarina into another room, so she wouldn’t be distracted by the handsome Italian playboy.

We enjoyed watching Katarina claim her second Olympic title after a brilliant show. But the skating star didn’t meet Alberto afterwards. They met later that year in Italy during an exhibition—and then again four years later at Les Menuires, the site of the slalom race for the 1992 Albertville Games.

Once more, it was Draggan, working then for CBS, who set up the encounter in a nice restaurant in the French resort. During the evening, Witt expressed her desire to ski once with Alberto, who had just collected his third Olympic title in giant slalom at Val d’Isère. “No problem, let’s meet tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

The next day, Katarina showed up on time with her gear, which Alberto’s personal bodyguard carried up to the hill. Nearly two hours later, they came back smiling. Witt was exhausted but happy about her exclusive ski lesson. “He was adorable. He showed me plenty of tricks and we had so much fun,” she told me afterwards as we sat down to enjoy hot chocolate and cakes.

The next day, Tomba finished a strong second in a slalom dominated by Norway’s Finn Jagge. Two years later, both Tomba and Witt competed again at Lillehammer. This time, Alberto could not attend her performance, but Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf was sitting next to me.

Photo caption: Italian superstar Alberto Tomba won gold in slalom and GS at Calgary, then cheered from the side of the rink as Katarina Witt of East Germany claimed her second Olympic figure-skating title. Four years later, they met for dinner and a private ski lesson. “He was adorable,” said Witt of her time with La Bomba.

ALBERTVILLE 1992

LITTLE-KNOWN PATRICK ORTLIEB SHOCKS THE SKI WORLD

The steep and sinuous La Face course at Val d’Isère, France, which was built in the late 1980s by Switzerland’s Bernhard Russi, the 1972 men’s downhill Olympic champion, launched an unexpected revolution in the sport.

Russi was selected to design the course by Jean-Claude Killy, co-president of the 1992 Olympic organizing committee, who used to ski on that part of the Bellevarde slope as a kid. Russi traced a new type of downhill that required great technical skills from athletes and a high level of performance from their skis. In fact, the course contributed to new technology in ski construction, ultimately leading to the parabolic “shaped” skis now used by most recreational skiers.

The older generation of established alpine speed specialists from that time—led by Swiss racers Daniel Mahrer, William Besse and 1991 downhill FIS world champion Franz Heinzer—had great difficulties in negotiating La Face with their traditional style, which was to enter the turns at full speed and throw the skis sideways to change direction.

The new downhill skis produced ad hoc for the Albertville course were shorter and narrower at the middle. They also required more feeling from the racers, who needed to steer them continuously from the entrance to the exit of each turn. It turned out that powerful skiers could exit the turns with amazing acceleration, a situation that caused some spectacular crashes.

Interestingly, none of the well-known “technicians” on the tour, like multiple overall World Cup champion Marc Girardelli or local favorite Franck Piccard, the 1988 Super G Olympic champion, clocked the fastest downhill time on race day. That honor went to a little-known Austrian from Lech, Patrick Ortlieb, who had never won a major event.

Wearing bib 1 and with nothing to lose, as he didn’t belong to the circle of favorites, he achieved an aggressive yet controlled run and set a time that nobody could beat. Many of the top guns failed to control their line in the tricky parts of the course.

Patrick Ortlieb’s win was the first surprise of the men’s Olympics events at Val d’Isère, yet he confirmed his success in the following seasons with significant triumphs on the World Cup tour, including winning the legendary Hahnenkamm race at Kitzbühel.

Another surprise was revealed later when my father, World Cup founder Serge Lang, intrigued by Patrick’s last name, discovered that he was a double national: Austrian, as he was born in that country from an Austrian mother, but also French through his dad, a cook from Alsace, who had emigrated to Lech to work, raise a family and run the Montana Hotel there.

“Ortlieb is a well-known name in Alsace; I think I know some of his relatives,” explained Lang, who was also born in Alsace in 1920. Patrick Ortlieb admitted afterwards that he had a French passport lying around somewhere at home, yet he was happy to race for Austria.

Ortlieb’s daughter, a tall racer and 17-year-old beauty named Nina, is now a member of the Austrian C squad after achieving some promising international results. She may soon compete on the World Cup tour. “Is she also French?” I asked him at the 2013 World Cup season start at Soelden. “Possibly yes,” he answered with a grin. 

Photo caption: Ortlieb takes flight over the men’s downhill course on his way to winning gold at Albertville. He was able to hold his line on a difficult course, while established speed specialists struggled.

 

NAGANO 1998

AFTER A SPECTACULAR CRASH,
HERMINATOR MEETS TERMINATOR

Some of ski racing’s greatest characters have attracted even more attention from the media and the crowds, thanks to nicknames invented by fans, friends or reporters. The best example is Austria’s Hermann Maier, one of the greatest personalities in alpine ski racing. He became famous in 1998 after clinching two Olympic gold medals—in Super G and GS—at Nagano despite a horrific crash in downhill. After that, he was known as The Herminator.

His formidable appearance, his determination on the slopes, and his numerous victories in the weeks prior to his trip to Japan had led reporters to use rougher nicknames, like The Beast, which Maier didn’t like at all. One of them had also briefly mentioned The Herminator, a combination of his first name and the invincible ‘Terminator” movie character, played by another Austrian legend, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The nickname became particularly apt after he survived his spectacular flight, several meters above the slope, and the post-landing cartwheels in soft snow. Two days after that frightening accident, he was facing the press to confirm his intention to race the following day in Super G. “It was quite a flight—for sure not as comfortable as our journey over here with Lufthansa,” he said with a grin. In a quick one-camera interview I made with him later on, he added, “I’ll be back!”

During one of our early morning production meetings at the CBS office at Hakuba, I discussed Hermann’s chance to excel in the Super G with play-by-play announcer Tim Ryan. “If anybody could do it, it’s for sure Hermann,” I explained with great optimism. I also told Ryan about that funny nickname and Maier’s comment. “That’s a fun story. We should do a feature on it with Arnold,” he said. “I think he is skiing right now at Sun Valley and I know his ski instructor. I’ll call him.”

Ryan didn’t need much time to get hold of Schwarzenegger’s Austrian-born ski instructor, Adi  Erber, and to organize a crew to do an interview with the movie star. Tim also talked directly to “Arnie,” who asked him for Maier’s phone number. 

I gave him the local phone number of Austria’s media coordinator, who did receive a call from Idaho after Hermann’s amazing comeback in Super G. Schwarzenegger was so impressed by Hermann’s triumph and his funny nickname that he wanted to speak to him. During the call, he also invited Maier to visit him next spring in Los Angeles.

They also had a great time in California, so it was no surprise when Arnold came the following year to Beaver Creek to encourage his friend, who clinched two more gold medals at the 1999 Ski World Championships. Apparently they also threw quite a party at Arnie’s suite at the Hyatt Hotel to celebrate the wins. 

Photo caption: Hermann Maier’s nickname, the Herminator, was inspired at the 1998 Games by the movie character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The two became friends. Above: Maier on the GS course in Nagano. Right: Schwarzenegger and Maier at the FIS Alpine World Championships in Schladming in February 2013. Austria in February 2013.

 

Patrick Lang, the son of World Cup founder Serge Lang, has covered 11 Winter Olympics since 1972 and has written about ski racing for dozens of media outlets. His company BioramaSports.com produces the Ski World Cup Guide and provides TV stations with reports from the World Cup circuit. He is a member of the Skiing History magazine editorial board.

History magazine editorial board.

This article first appeared in the January/February 2014 issue of Skiing History magazine.

How the Olympics came to a sleepy Adirondack village