Feature article

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

 Brochures courtesy Jo Kenney

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.

Jack and Peg Kenney's children—from left to right, Jo, Billy, Davey, Bub and Mike— grew up on the Tamarack property. Mike raced on the U.S. Pro Tour and today is Bode's mentor and primary coach. Photo courtesy Jo Kenny.

“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.”

Jack Kenney (far left) on the snow-covered tennis courts at nearby Mittersill in 1951, during a fundraiser for the 1952 Winter Olympics ski team. He played with (left to right) U.S. tennis champion Pancho Segura, Chilean tennis player Ricardo Belbieres, and New York society columnist Cholly Knickerbocker. By 1952, his Tamarack ski lodge was struggling and Kenney has started to plan a tennis camp on the property. Photo courtesy of New England Ski Museum

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.”

Photo above: Bode Miller, shown here during the 1996 U.S. national championships, learned to ski at age 2 on the trails at Tamarack. Courtesy New England Ski Museum.

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

Until the 1920s, alpine skiing was a niche sport practiced by a few European guides and their wealthy clients. Here's how it grew to be a mass-participation sport with a spectacular competition component.

Click here for the full article.

A century-and-a-half after a Norwegian woman soared 20 feet in the world’s first recorded ski-jumping event, female flyers were still fighting for international recognition.

At the first recorded event in history dedicated solely to ski jumping, one of the jumpers wore a skirt. Ingrid Olavsdottir Vestby probably left the ground for around six meters, or almost 20 feet—“past the point where many a brave lad had lost his balance earlier in the competition.” Spectators shouted bravos because “they had never seen a girl jump on skis and they had been more than a little anxious as she flew over their heads.” She jumped in Trysil, Norway. She jumped in 1862. She landed in obscurity.

Today the history of women’s ski jumping has just begun to be written. Only in the 1990s were women first allowed to fully participate in international jumping competitions. For more than a century after Vestby’s historic jump, the spectacle of woman soaring on skis was widely regarded as dangerous, unhealthy, immoral, unladylike and unattractive. Of course, there’s a good explanation for the latter: the horror of mussed-up hair. Austrian Paula Lamberg, the “Floating Baroness” who set a world record in women’s ski jumping at 22 meters, was given grudging admiration in her country’s Illustrierte Zeitung magazine in 1910. But the quote provides a glimpse into the on-again, off-again history of women’s ski jumping—and the stubborn prejudice with which the sport has long been forced to contend.

“Jumps of this length are very good, even for men. It is understandable that ski jumping is performed very rarely by women, and taking a close look, not really a recommendable sport. One prefers to see women with nicely mellifluous movements, which show elegance and grace, like in ice skating or lawn tennis…and it is not enjoyable or aesthetic to see how a representative of the fair sex falls when jumping from a hill, flips over and with mussed-up hair glides down towards the valley in a snow cloud.”

How embarrassing was that?

Women’s jumping were not on the schedule at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, but they will be in 2014 at Sochi, Russia.

In November of 2006, in response to a proposal from the Fédération International de Ski (FIS), the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ruled that there was not enough technical merit among women ski jumpers to allow them on the jumps, and then immediately stated that the decision had nothing to do with gender. “There is no discrimination whatsoever,” IOC President Jacques Rogge said.

With a quick look at history, it becomes obvious that women’s exclusion has everything to do with gender. The reason too few women have been able to develop enough technical merit for the IOC’s standards is because they have been actively discouraged from ski jumping, from 1862 until today.

Under today’s helmets, nobody’s hair gets mussed, so that can’t be the problem. Could there be another reason why women have been kept from this last fortress of manliness?

Ladies Can’t Jump

At the beginning of the last century, the infant sport of skiing was introduced to North America by immigrant Norwegian miners and lumberjacks. They had a name for their sport: Ski-Idraet, meaning the sport of skiing that showcased high ethics, courage, discipline and physical fitness. By contrast, they preferred their women sweet, pleasant and soothing—and safely tucked away at home.

“To keep women away from sports and primarily men’s sports, medical arguments were quite often used,” says Annette Hofmann in her paper, “Female Eagles of the Air: Developments in Women’s Ski Jumping,” published in New Aspects of Sport History in 2007. “Vital energy theory,” for instance, said that women were born with a limited amount of energy; as child-bearers their bodies were reduced to “a morbid state” and thus were at risk when performing jumps, said Norwegian Christian Døderlein in 1896.

By the 1920s, doctors and female physical educators began to understand the importance of physical activity for women. They encouraged them to get out in winter, and enjoy themselves with skating, snowshoeing and skiing. But jumping was still out of the question. The latest medical concerns focused on the jolt of landing or a possible fall; at the time, uterine stress was believed to cause sterility. “Ski-jumping is not good for the female organism,” declared Gustave Klein-Doppler in the 1926 Wintersports Yearbook.

“This might be physiologically explained by the different construction of this sex. At this time there is no need or reason to organize jumping competitions for the ladies. Because of this unanswered medical question as to whether ski jumping agrees with the female organism, this would be a very daring experiment and should be strongly advised against.”

Those that spoke out against women in ski jumping even included sports women, like Germany’s Alpine World Champion skier Christl Cranz: “Cross-country skiing and ski jumping are athletic performances…for which a lot of strength and endurance is necessary, more than women can give without harming themselves…Certainly no reasonably sporting girl would think about participating in a marathon or boxing, and that is how it is with us women skiers; there is no interest in running or jumping competitions.”

Spooked mothers kept their daughters off ski jumps for more than half a century. Those fears and excuses seem positively Jurassic more than eighty years later. Imagine someone today saying, for instance: “Ski-jumping is like jumping down from, let’s say, about two meters off the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.”

Yet that’s what FIS and IOC official Gian Carlo Kasper said—in February of 2006. Meanwhile, women are participating in much more dangerous Olympic ski events, such as the downhill, in which racers are occasionally killed, and in the brand new skicross and snowboard cross, where four racers hurtle down a twisting, bumpy track at the same time.

At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Alissa Johnson sat on the sidelines and watched her brother slide down the inrun instead. “So far, we’ve been told every excuse in the book. That it’s too ‘dangerous’ for girls. That there aren’t enough of us. That we’re not good enough. That it would damage our ovaries and uterus and we won’t be able to have children, even though that’s not true. It’s so outdated; it’s kind of funny in a way. And then it’s not.”

To Make a Long History Short

Ingrid Vestby may have made a daring venture into ski jumping in 1862, but she certainly didn’t jump into any history books. She must have influenced a few of her fellow Norwegian women, however, because by 1896 there were enough of them to organize the first (unofficial) national ski-jumping competition for women.

The self-proclaimed Mecca of ski jumping, the mighty Holmenkollen, was built in 1892 to host the Norwegian national cross-country and jumping competitions, and Scandinavians held tight to their tradition. Even as they immigrated to North America, particularly the American Midwest, they set up their rickety scaffolding and continued to dominate the sport. Early men’s competitions literally put Norwegians in their own class to give newcomers a fighting chance at winning a prize of their own. Women didn’t have any class at all, on either side of the Atlantic. No woman would “diminish the allure of the sport” by being allowed to jump at Holmenkollen in Norway until 1978.

Official recognition didn’t stop them from jumping. In 1904, a Norwegian Miss Strang jumped 14.5 meters; Tim Ashburner’s History of Ski Jumping (Quiller Press, 2003) noted that the English Miss Hockin jumped “very gallantly” at the first British Ski Championship in 1911, landing seven meters without falling.

Probably the best-known woman jumper of the era—even of the century—was “the Floating Baroness” Paula Lamberg, from Kitzbühl, Austria. She set a record of 24 meters in the 1920s. By 1926, the Norwegian Olga Balsted Eggen had jumped 4.5 meters further.

The extent of the Baroness’ fame was obvious even in Canada in 1921. That year at an Ottawa jumping championship, the Montreal Star reported, spectators were shocked to see that the world title for ski jumping was going to be challenged by a woman. The flamboyant “Countess Alma Stang” soared off the platform, looking to set a new record—until her wig fell off and revealed her as a man in drag. It was a backhanded compliment to the Baroness.

Queens of the Skies

Before the 1990s, ski jumping for women probably enjoyed its biggest surge of popularity in the Roaring Twenties. When a new jump was built in 1922 in Brattleboro, Vermont, the first person to fly off it was the man who got it built, Fred Harris, founder of the Dartmouth Outing Club; the second person was his sister Evelyn. All over town, the local papers reported, “youthful interest manifested itself by the innumerable ski jumps built all over town by the boys and girls.”

It may have sounded like equal opportunity, but during the 1920s and 1930s women were kept off the official jumping programs. Norwegian stars like 14-year-old Hilda Braskerud and 17-year-old Johanne Kolstad matched the boys in their distances, but were regulated to jumping “outside” as “trail jumpers” during the breaks. After a decade of constant scolding by the Norwegian Ski Federation that “women’s cross-country skiing and ski jumping are not desirable,” Kolstad left for the USA. Re-christened the “Queen of the Skies,” she proved it by jumping a world record of 72 meters in 1938.

When women did go off the same jumps as men, they often went as “glider girls,” taking off while holding hands with a male partner—a trick that seems more dangerous than going solo.

One woman who didn’t want her hand held was Isabel Coursier. Born in Revelstoke, British Columbia, Isabel watched the boys leaping off the new jump there, but nobody thought to ask her to join them. Instead, at a winter carnival she entered the “ski-joring” competition, a race in which the skier is pulled behind a galloping horse. “She beat all the boys,” says Wendy Bryden in her book Canada at the Olympic Winter Games. That finally got her the invitation to jump on the “Boy’s Hill” on Mount Revelstoke.

By 1923 Coursier got on the big jump, and promptly bested the Baroness’ world record by jumping 25.5 meters (84 feet). She was the only woman on the jump that year to compete unassisted, and went on to soar from numerous jumps across North America. Her fame led to a jumping exhibition with men’s world-record holder Nels Nelson for then U.S. President Warren G. Harding.

Like Coursier, many other women were able to jump throughout North America, for the most part in winter carnivals. At Colorado’s Steamboat Springs, for example, “ladies and girls” had their own jumping events. One of the most notable jumpers was Beatrice (Bea) Kirby. Since 1993, a trophy in her name as been awarded to the best jumper.

Another exceptional (in every sense of the word) American jumper of the period was Dorothy Graves of Berlin, New Hampshire. After jumping with the Queen of the Skies at an indoor international meet at Madison Square Garden in 1938, she went on to a career competing with men in both Class A and B during the 1940s.

In 1924 at the first Winter Olympics (which weren’t given that title until a year later) in Chamonix, France, ski jumping was one of the original six sports. But despite all the proof of women’s skill and bravery in making world record jumps—despite the Floating Baroness, despite the Queen of the Skies, despite Isabel Coursier’s Presidential jumps—women’s ski jumping was banned from those first Games.

It would take the IOC until 1991 to rule that each event must have a female equivalent. They made an exception, of course, if the sport was “grandfathered” in without a women’s component…like jumping.

With such a lack of respect for their abilities, and without encouragement for future generations, women’s jumping soon faded into the background. Over the next decades even men’s ski jumping (with its high insurance premiums) lost popularity to slalom, downhill racing and ever more extreme sports. It took until 1972 for a woman to beat the 72-meter jump record of Johanne Kolstad. Anita Wold of Norway, who had started during men’s competitions and was the first woman to jump at Holmenkollen, jumped over 80 meters that year. Four years later, while trying to bust the 100-meter mark, she reached a world record of 97.7 meters in Sapporo, Japan. In 1981 Finnish jumper Tiina Lethola soared 110 meters. Then things got quiet again, until a girl who had begun ski jumping at six years old entered the scene and began to forever change the complexion of women’s ski jumping.

The First Competitions

A modern ski jumper slides onto a horizontal start bar. Beneath the skis drops a narrow strip of snow and ice 90 meters (300 feet) long, with two perfect tracks and only one way to go. As the light turns from red to green, the jumper shifts forward and commits to sliding down the track at 60 miles an hour. When the tracks end and the slope flattens at the take-off, the jumper springs forward, arms pinned to the sides, head just above the ski tips, splayed skis slicing the air.

And then, a few seconds later, they land back in reality.

In 1991, Austrian Eva Ganster and her friend Michaela Schmidt, who had both headed down those slick slopes since they were young girls, began ski jumping at competitions. Only there weren’t any competitions for women. They jumped at men’s events as pre-jumpers, or jumped against men, or if they were lucky, like Karla Keck in the United States, they jumped in junior competitions. At every turn, like most women before them, they fought against officials who did not want the girls to jump, no matter how successful they were.

But by the mid-1990s, both Ganster and Schmidt had secret weapons: their fathers. Dr. Edgar Ganster and Hans-Georg Schmidt saw no reason why their daughters were not allowed to compete.

FIS officials trotted out that century-old scare of the female uterus bursting upon landing, but Dr. Ganster was having none of it. He and Schmidt began to push towards getting women their own jumping competitions so their daughters would have a place to show their stuff.

It soon paid off. Eva Ganster made a pre-jumper appearance at the famed Viersschanzentournee (Four Hills Tournament) in Europe, and then in 1994 made a breakthrough by starting as a pre-jumper at the Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. She was 16 years old, and set a women’s world record of 113.5 meters at that event.

The FIS cautiously began to notice the girls, and in 1994 set up a group to study the possibility of accepting women. Meanwhile, in 1995 women were allowed demonstration jumps at the FIS Nordic World Cup in Thunder Bay, Canada, and again in 1997 in Trondheim, Norway.

By that time Ganster had set another record by being the first woman to jump on a ski-flying hill, designed for long jumps; she set a new women’s world record of 167 meters. Six years later fellow Austrian Daniela Iraschko would break the record with a 200-meter jump.

That summer of 1997, the first international meet for young female jumpers was held in Voukatti, Finland. It was a slow start; the competition was unofficial, the girls jumped in the men’s pre-program, and they were given no score. Not content with that, Dr. Ganster and Mr. Schmidt then organized a girls-only competition at the Junior World Championships in St. Moritz in 1998, hosting 17 jumpers from seven countries on a 90-meter jump. It was not sanctioned by the FIS.

With that minor success, the fathers put together a Ladies’ Grand Prix as a counterpart to the Four Hills Tournament for 1999. The 13-day tourney hosted 29 women from nine countries, with five different competitions. That year too, the US Ski Association included for the first time a women’s class in the US Ski Jumping Championships.

By the 2002-2003 season, the Ladies’ Grand Prix became the FIS Ladies’ Tour Ski Jumping; that summer a Summer-Tournee Ski-Jumping was established as well, and in the United States, FIS-sanctioned ski jumping competitions were held with five competing nations. But the USSA still refused women the opportunity to win prize money at the national level, even though they did so in all other skiing disciplines.

At the Nordic National Jumping Championships in Steamboat Springs, Colorado that season, coaches and parents pressured the USSA to get a prize together for the girls. The organization yielded, and a big deal was made of presenting a check so large three people had to hold it up. The amount first place winner Jessica Jerome received was $150. The men’s winner took home $1,200.

Thanks to Eva Ganster’s record-making jumps and her father’s history-making stubbornness, the Austrian Ski Federation became the first country to form a national female ski-jumping team in 2000, with its first members Ganster and Iraschko (Ganster retired in 2005). The next year, both Norway and Japan had national teams too, followed by Canada in 2004 and Germany in 2005. Although the United States had a team by 2004 (and a regular sponsor in VISA), the USSA accepted the American team in 2006. Since then, the Germans have ranked first in the world in women’s ski jumping, followed closely by the United States.

Another event in 2004 triggered more attention for the women jumpers. One of the best female jumpers of all time who had already won the Holmenkollen women’s title in 2004 and 2005, Norwegian Anette Sagen, was not allowed to jump K185, the Ski Flying platform in Vikersund. Torbjørn Yggeseth, FIS chairman of the ski jump committee, opposed Sagen, saying the jumping ability of women was not good enough to jump at international venues like this one. Media coverage was ferocious, and the debate led to an open battle over women’s rights in sports.

That same year, the FIS allowed the women the “B” category. The points won during the Grand Prix count for the Grand Prix and the total score of the Continental Cup, now the closest thing to a World Cup and “A” status for women jumpers. In 2006, women had their own category at the Junior World Championships in Slovenia.

All that was missing was their own World Cup, and inclusion in the Olympics.

The Real Fear Factor

By the mid-1990s, men’s ski jumping was in a deep crisis. Fabled Norway had more ski jumps than jumpers in the Norwegian Federation. Sexy and more dangerous sports like inverted aerials, skicross and snowboard cross were all over the place—and women were doing them. Those factors may have contributed to the FIS finally recognizing the first women’s ski jumping event on the eve of the new millennium. What took them so long?

There are a few theories, but it’s the way officials act towards the athletes themselves that gives the broadest clues. When FIS ski-jump chairman Yggeseth denied the “little girls” the right to ski fly, he said most jumpers were “doing something similar to sledding. They should stay on the small hills,” he counseled.

This kind of belittling of women jumpers happens, says Annette Hofmann, because “There is a hidden fear that women will be as good as men, and thus threaten men’s dominance.” A study published in the Journal of Biomechanics (commissioned by the FIS and IOC) proved that women jumpers could become “a real competitive threat,” thanks to their lower body weight. Both organizations introduced strict rules in 2004 to take away any weight advantage—men were already “dieting to the point of illness,” said an official in SKI magazine. Anorexia in men, traditionally a female disorder, has contributed to the fear that the sport (judged not only on distance but by mellifluous style as well) will be taken over by women. More concretely, there’s a real fear that women asking for a piece of the pie would cut into resources like contracts, prize money and positions.

Not in My Olympics

Nothing helped get women into the Olympics in 2010, including the fact that women’s ski jumping was a demonstration sport at the 2006 Olympics. Not even the historic decision on May 26, 2006, when the FIS accepted that women jumpers would have their own World Cup at the 2009 Nordic World Ski Championships in Liberec, Czech Republic. Or the FIS decision to let women have a team event at the 2011 World Championships.

The IOC’s decision to ban women from ski jumping in the Games (they had done it in 1998, 2002 and 2006 as well) were:

• Women’s jumping was still developing in its early stages

• It lacked a sufficient number of countries participating

• It didn’t meet the technical standards required

Also cited was the problem that two world championships had not been held. That rule seemed flexible—women’s cross-country skiing had its first world championship two years after it was accepted in the Olympics in 1952. Then one year after the IOC’s decision to disallow women, the rules were changed to a sport only needing one world championship.

“There are 80 women” ski jumping, IOC President Jacques Rogge said. “In any other sport you are speaking about hundreds of thousands, if not tens of millions of athletes, at a very high level, competing for one single medal. We do not want the medals to be diluted and watered down.”

Those in the sport come up with different numbers than the IOC. Jumpers claimed there were 135 elite female ski jumpers registered internationally, in 16 countries. To put that in perspective, snowboard cross had 34 female competitors in ten countries; bobsled had 26 women in 13 countries; and the new skicross had 30 women in 11 countries.

In 2006 Women’s Ski Jumping USA said that “there are more women jumpers worldwide, and competing on a higher scale, now than there were women competing in bobsled or skeleton at the time those sports were added to the Olympic program for women.”

A Legal Right?

American downhill and World Cup overall champion Lindsey Van is a fighter, and she’s hungry. She’s been jumping internationally since she was 13 in a sport that itself is fighting for recognition. She parties hard, she works hard at her sport, and she works hard at keeping her weight in line. “I’ve been hungry for twelve years,” she says.

In May of 2008, a who’s who of international women’s jumping stars filed lawsuit in the British Columbia Supreme Court against the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), the host of the 2010 Olympics. Canadian taxpayers footed a $580 million bill, they claim, for facilities with a men’s only sign; lawyer Ross Clark said that the absence of a women's competition is a violation of Canada's equal rights law, which is guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights.

The plaintiffs included Lindsey Van, along with Americans Jessica Jerome and Karla Keck, Annette Sagen of Norway, Daniela Iraschko of Austria, Jenna Mohr and Ulrike Grassler of Germany, Monika Planinc of Slovenia, and retired Canadian Marie-Pierre Morin (who had earlier moved to the U.S. after facing discrimination in Canada). Seventeen-year old Canadian Zoya Lynch joined the lawsuit later, but has since resigned from the Canadian team “out of frustration.”

“We're not asking for a new sport,” said Jessica Jerome's father, Peter, the vice president of Women's Ski Jumping USA. “We're not asking for a new discipline. We're just asking that an existing Olympic event allow women to compete.”

Yet the protests of women ski jumpers  did not fly. “It’s not a human rights case,” says Dick Pound, the Montreal lawyer and chancellor of McGill University—and member of the IOC since 1978. “It’s a decision on the part of the IOC. And it’s not going to stand them in good stead to sue a bunch of grumpy old men.”

Pound is no stranger to controversy and protests, and may even include himself in the Grumpy Old Men category. He was a mediator on the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the Chair of the Anti-Doping Agency, and as the ethics watchdog for the IOC, the investigator of the Salt Lake City Olympic scandal.

“They’ve missed the mark,” he said of the plaintiffs’ suing VANOC for not letting women use a Canadian facility, “because women will use the jump before and after the Olympics.” (The Continental Cup for women took place at Whistler in the middle of December 2008.) Conversely, “The International Committee is using that facility for just one event.”

Instead, Pound says women jumpers should look to the real source of their problem: the FIS. “We looked at the proposal from the FIS [in 2006]. It was made without much enthusiasm. It was made with them knowing the IOC would refuse it. The FIS have not done their job in promoting women’s jumping.”

Do the Right Thing

The long struggle of women jumpers for recognition is not the first time the FIS has dug in its heels against new sports. There was that incident in the last century where an upstart and extreme version of skiing tried for recognition too, and came up hard against a “Scandinavian ski aristocracy.” The new-fangled thing—out of Britain, mind you—was slalom and downhill skiing, first raced in 1921. The FIS banned slalom and downhill from the first “international world ski championship” (only later called the Winter Olympics) in 1924 at Chamonix, as founding editor Morten Lund has written in these pages. Those new sports missed two more Olympics, those in 1928 at St. Moritz and in 19832 at Lake Placid, and Alpine ski racing’s acceptance into official world competition came only in 1936 at the Garmisch Olympics after having been “delayed at least ten years past the time when it was ripe.” There was, however, a plus side: At Garmisch, for the first time, women had their own slalom and downhill competitions.

Cold comfort for women ski jumpers, perhaps, but what else do they have to hold on to? Well, for one thing, perhaps the International Olympic Committee’s own mission statement and charter?

First there was the new equality rule of 1991 that called for each sport to have male and female components. That didn’t work. Then there was the announcement in 1996 that “The IOC strongly encourages by appropriate means, the promotion of women in sport at all levels and in all structures, particularly in the executive bodies of national and international sports organizations with a view to the strict application of the principle of equality of men and women.” That from the IOC, an executive body consisting of 15 men and one woman.

And then there’s the part of the Official Mission and Role of the IOC that says the Olympics will:

6. Act against any form of discrimination affecting the Olympic Movement;

7. Encourage and support the promotion of women in sport at all levels and in all structures with a view to implementing the principle of equality of men and women.

Caption: North end of Gotthard Tunnel; train to Andermatt climbs away to the right.

Skiers have been following rails into the snowy mountains for 140 years now. 1868 was the year the Mt. Washington cog railway first hauled passengers to the summit. The cog railway didn’t run during the snowy months, because New Hampshire’s vicious weather made it dangerous to keep the tracks clear of snow. But that same spring, the first passenger train ran the route from Sacramento across Donner Pass into Truckee and on to Reno. The nine-hour trip cut 41 hours off Snowshoe Thompson’s best time. During the following winter, the train ran through snowy trenches dug out by hundreds of navvies and coolies. This was the heyday of long-board racing in the Sierra mining camps, and while we have no record of it, it would have been odd indeed if a Norwegian miner didn’t depart the train at Soda Springs or Donner Tunnel to ride his snowhoes down to Truckee. Thompson himself was probably one of them: during construction of the railroad, he’s known to have skied mail from the station at Cisco south to Meadow Lake, now a ghost town south of Kirkwood.

In 1920, Switzerland had enough hydroelectric dams to electrify all these routes (can you imagine riding behind a steam locomotive through a nine-mile tunnel?). One side-benefit of a high-alpine dam is that its construction – and the maintenance of the head-pipe running down to the generating station – usually required a funicular (cable-drawn) railway. Ernest Hemingway’s 1924 short story Cross Country Snow – perhaps the first evocative description of the ski bum life – begins with a couple of American skiers jumping from the baggage car of a Swiss funicular train for a powder run back to the valley.

The Canadian Pacific Railroad pushed across Rogers Pass in 1885, and Glacier National Park opened the following year. The railroad encouraged tourism, putting up alpine hotels and, in 1899, hiring the first of a team of Swiss guides who would help to pioneer alpine skiing throughout the region. Over a 35 year period, avalanches across the tracks killed 200 railway workers. In 1913 construction started on the five-mile Connaught Tunnel, and the surface tracks were abandoned.

The 20th century brought true wintersport tourism to snowbound towns served by railways. In 1909, Charles McGlashan of Truckee founded the town’s annual Winter Carnival, designed to lure tourists from San Francisco. At Hilltop, a knob overlooking the train station on the southeast edge of town, organizers built a toboggan slide. In 1910 some local genius rigged a steam donkey (a steam-driven winch) to haul the sleds up the hill. Skiers rode the rope, too, and thus was born North America's first mechanical ski lift (The first mechanical ski tow, powered by a water mill, was built in 1908 by Rober Winkelhalder at his hotel in Germany's Schwarzwald region). 

During the 1920s, as ski clubs grew, they rode trains into the Alps, the Laurentians, the Adirondacks, the Rockies, the Sierra. And when the Depression cut into railroad revenues, creative marketing men in New England and elsewhere hit upon the idea of special weekend excursion trains. According to John Allen (From Skisport to Skiing), the Boston & Maine ran its first ski train out of Boston to Warner, New Hampshire on Jan. 11, 1931, carrying 197 members of the AMC, Dartmouth Outing Club and Harvard Mountaineering Club. Over the course of the winter, the railroad ran 12 trains northward, carrying over 8,000 skier, experts and newcomers alike. Clerks and secretaries climbed aboard – many came not to ski but to party. Local innkeepers reopened for the winter weekends. In January, 1932, the Rio Grande Railway ran special trains from Salt Lake to Park City.

After Alex Foster set up his first rope tow early in 1933, the ski train business boomed. The Boston & Maine hired ski instructors and put in a stock of rental skis, racked in the baggage car. In 1935 the New York, New Haven & Hartford sent trains north from Grand Central Station. Averell Harriman, president of the Union Pacific, took note and began dreaming up Sun Valley. By 1936, John Allen writes, 70,000 skiers rode trains out of New York in January, February and March alone.

(Right: Canadian Pacific crosses Rogers Pass. Painting by Max Jacquiard)

The Colorado Ski Train

When the Colorado Ski Train glides out of Union Station at 7:15 a.m., its 14 heavy cars and 750 passengers are drawn by three 3,000 horsepower General Electric F40PH locomotives. Over the next two hours, the 16-cylinder diesel engines will turn at a constant 900 rpm as the train climbs 3,960 feet in 56 miles, to the Moffat Tunnel and Winter Park Station.

That’s the basic numbers. Here’s another one: It’s been 97 years since Carl Howelsen and his buddy Angell Schmidt turned the Denver, Northwestern & Pacific Railway into a ski lift – and started a revolution in Rocky Mountain skiing.

In 1902, Denver banker and railroad executive David Halliday Moffat, Jr. developed a plan for a six-mile tunnel under Rollins Pass. He pushed a temporary line over the pass, at 11,660 feet on Colorado’s Continental Divide. The Moffat Road would require a sizeable crew to shovel the tracks – in fact, 41% of the railroad’s expenses eventually went to snow-clearing – and so the company built a dormitory at the summit, dubbed the Corona Station. The DN&P business plan was to haul coal eastward from the Yampa Valley, and eventually to run the line out to Salt Lake City. In the meantime, Moffat’s main revenue stream came from tourism: He marketed the spectacular ride up Boulder Creek to the Top of the World, and expanded the Corona dormitory into a hotel.

(Left: Corona Station, located in a snow shed at the top of Rollins Pass, Colorado)

Within a year, Moffat was able to run his tourist traffic all the way to Hot Sulphur Springs, a spa town at 7,600 feet on the western slope. Hot Sulphur Springs had been developing as a mineral-baths resort since 1864. The railroad was a big deal for this town – it meant steady business right through the winter. To celebrate the opening of the line in September, 1905, a special excursion train carried 900 passengers over the top.

In the fall of 1911, Swiss-born hotelier John Peyer decided to promote his winter business in Hot Sulphur Springs by organizing a Winter Carnival, complete with skating and sledding. He scheduled it for final weekend of the year.

At 8 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 30, 1911, a DN&P train pulled out of the North Denver station for the long climb to Corona. It carried a load of New Year’s Eve celebrants bound for the Peyer’s Winter Carnival. Among them was a Norwegian mason who happened to have been Holmenkollen combined champion in 1903 (and the 50k cross-country champ in 1902 and 1903). After helping to found the Norge Ski Club in Chicago, Carl Howelsen (originally Karl Hovelsen) had moved to Denver in search of some real snow. He found it.

At noon, the train pulled into Corona Station. Howelsen and his friend Angell Schmidt climbed down, put on the their skis and began the long exhilarating run down the west slope of the Rockies. They descended 3,100 feet to Fraser, about 16 miles, following close to the railbed because of all the fallen timber in the woods. They then ran another 18 miles to Hot Sulphur Springs, the last four miles all downhill. They langlaufed into town at about 9 p.m., at the height of the party.

The crowd was happy to see them. In the morning, they shoveled snow into a small ski jump on the hill behind Peyer’s house. Before the day was out, Peyer and his winter sports club were planning another carnival for February, and the Norwegian pros were invited back. Thereafter, the Hot Sulphur Springs Winter Sports Carnival was an annual event. Hundreds of Denverites rode special trains to the event. The following winter, Howelsen settled in Steamboat Springs and began teaching the local kids to ski and jump, and in 1914 Steamboat launched its own Winter Sports Carnival. Howelsen and his Norwegian friends were busy teaching skiing – and building jumps — from Denver north and westward to the end of the line in Craig. Top Norwegian jumpers like Ragnar Omtvedt and Anders Haugen traveled from the Upper Midwest to visit little Colorado towns and set records on their big jumps. The Winter Carnivals formed a circuit of ski racing and ski jumping events that could support a crew of athletes through most of the winter. As in the Midwest, a jumping meet was the occasion for most of a town’s population to climb on a train and follow their champions across a couple of counties.

The train schedule was not dependable. Despite the huge budget thrown at snow removal, despite the adoption of steam-driven rotary plows, sometimes the weather simply shut the pass down for weeks at a time. Weather forced the railroad into bankruptcy in 1913, and again in 1917. The route was taken over by the Denver & Salt Lake Railroad, the D&SL.

North American ski trains took a break for World War I, when Moffat Road locomotives were busy moving coal and oil for the war effort. Work began on the Moffat Tunnel, under the pass, in July, 1923, and the first freight train hauled 12 cars of lumber eastward on Feb. 24, 1928. The following morning, passenger train service began.

During the intervening years, trains had usually been able to get over the top to Hot Sulphur Springs and Steamboat Springs for their Winter Carnivals. With the tunnel open, access was guaranteed, even as the Depression deepened.

In February of 1936, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News sponsored an excursion train to the 25th Annual U.S. Western Ski Tournament and Winter Sports Carnival at Hot Sulphur Springs. The D&SL charged $1.75 for round-trip fare and admission to the carnival. The response was huge, and the railroad ended up sending three trains with over 2,200 passengers. Another train with 500 passengers ran down from Steamboat Springs. Among the Steamboat crowd were 50 local jumpers and the 42-piece high school marching band. Some 7,000 visitors found their way to Hot Sulphur Springs for the carnival. According to Patterson and Forrest, writing in their book The Ski Train:

The winter carnival kicked off at 8:30 a.m. with a snow shoe race, followed by a three-legged race, then a novelty race – one ski and one snow shoe. Ski races, sled races and toboggan raced preceded a hockey game, figure skating and barrel jumping. There was even a skijoring jump with automobiles. The afternoon had an impressive line-up of nine ski jumping events on that part of Bungalow, Dean or Maggie Hill dubbed “Howelsen Hill,” concluding with with slalom and what was then called “down-mountain” races by Arlberg Club members.

A week later the News ran a Pullman sleeper train overnight to the 23rd Annual Winter Sports Carnival at Steamboat. Before long, other businesses – the Denver Post, Montgomery Ward, Safeway Stores — ran trains to Aspen or Gunnison. And the News Snow Train became an annual event.

Meanwhile, skiers could ride regularly-scheduled trains up to snow country on any winter day. The easiest trip, of course, was to the West Portal of the Moffat Tunnel – just two hours out of Denver. This was the site of the prosperous Fleming Bros. sawmill, which had produced all the railroad ties and shoring lumber for construction of the tunnel and approach track. The logging trails offered good skiing upward to timberline and the open bowls above. Members of Denver’s Arlberg Club had built a few private cabins and in 1933 cut the first dedicated downhill ski trail near the old Mary Jane mining claim. In 1937 George Cranmer, a club member and Denver’s manager of parks, talked the city into spending $30,000 on a rope tow. Winter Park opened as a municipal enterprise with a three-day carnival at the end of January, 1940, and of course a series of special trains hauled the celebrants. Meanwhile, in 1939 local skier Frank Bulkley had founded his Eskimo Ski Club and loaded up to 300 kids on the regular D&SL train to West Portal each weekend morning in winter.

After World War II, skiing and ski trains resumed. Winter Park acquired four Army-surplus rope tows from Camp Hale, and built three Constam T-bars. The Denver & Salt Lake merged into the Denver & Rio Grande. In 1947, the new railroad entered into a 40-year partnership with the Eskimo Ski Club and Winter Park. Bulkley, along with Gordy Wren, launched the Winter Park Ski School. Bulkley showed the D&RG management how to set up special trains to handle hundreds of skiers, equipping baggage cars with ski racks, and providing one car with a snack bar.

In the early days, kids paid $3 for the round trip. At its height in the mid-‘60s the train ran with 22 ancient cars, most of them built in 1915. This was the practical limit, because the cars were heated with steam lines from the locomotives, and that was about as far back as heat would carry. In theory the cars seated 80 each – that’s almost 1800 kids – but there wasn’t always room for everyone to sit. In a big winter, trains hauled as many as 30,000 passengers, most of them under 16.

More or less unsupervised for the two-hour ride, some of the passengers grew obstreperous. Water-pistol fights were common, occasionally aided by the discharge of a fire extinguisher. A favorite stunt was to vandalize the lights so the car would go dark for the trip through the tunnel. Teenagers began smuggling booze aboard. The railroad resorted to putting three sheriff’s deputies aboard, but they couldn’t patrol 22 cars at once. A couple of generations of Denver kids learned to ski in the rowdy culture of the D&RG train, which may explain some of the doings at Colorado’s ski resorts (and in the ski industry) in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

By the late ‘60s, like most railways around the country, the D&RG wanted out of the passenger business. Concerned about passenger safety and the vandalism of its cars, the railroad began scaling back the service. First they dropped the snack car, spurring dozens of young entrepreneurs to haul suitcases full of candy bars aboard for sale to their peers. Then the railroad terminated Sunday service, and finally reduced the string to just eight 70-year-old cars, limited to 30 mph because of their ancient trucks. Frank Bulkley fought for a few years to keep the ski train running. The gasoline shortage of the mid-70s gave the train a new lease on life, and the much-reduced ski train chugged on through another decade. But the Eskimo Ski Club relied on a fleet of buses to haul kids over Berthoud Pass.

In 1983, what remained of the D&RG passenger service was absorbed into Amtrak. In November, 1984, the railroad was purchased by Philip Anschutz, a Denver-based billionaire who had made his money in oil, railroads, telecommunications and entertainment conglomerates. Anschutz had an instinctive love of trains and railroading. He saw in the ski train a chance to recreate an earlier era and culture. He sold the creaky old coaches to an outfit that ran wine trains in Napa Valley, and bought 17 lightweight, high-speed cars from Canada, where they’d served the Montreal-Toronto run.

Anschutz had the Tempo cars fully refurbished and painted in the Rio Grande colors, gold and silver with black trim. Today the ski train, operated by Ansco vice president Craig Meis and general manager Jim Bain, is a luxurious experience, with three classes of service and elaborate dining facilities. For the 69th season of the Denver Ski Train, beginning Dec. 27, passengers will pay $59 in coach and $85 in the club car, with plush lounge seating. Corporate groups can reserve a deluxe observation car, parlor car or sleeper/dome car. It’s a long way from sharing your brown-bag lunch with 80 screaming 13-year-olds.

Ski Trains Around the World

Today, the D&RG Ski Train is unique in North America, the only dedicated train that delivers skiers directly to a ski hill. Out in California, a skier can still ride from Oakland to Truckee via Amtrak’s California Zephyr, and catch a cab up to Northstar, Squaw Valley or Alpine Meadows. For that matter, you could catch the Zephyr from Chicago and change at Denver’s Union Station for a regular Amtrak train that follows an hour behind the D&RG Ski Train. There’s still a ski train out of Boston to Wachusett (but the last few miles are by van).

Japan still runs regular trains from Tokyo north to ski country, and the Glacier Express runs across most of the high country in Switzerland. The slickest modern ski train, for my money, is the 8-hour overnight Eurostar run from London’s Waterloo Station to Bourg St. Maurice, via the Channel Tunnel. From the Bourg station, passengers stroll directly onto the aerial tram for a 7-minute ride to Arc 1600 and the high-alpine skiing of the Tarentaise.

This story is based largely on accounts by Steve Patterson and Kenton Forrest (The Ski Train), Leif Howelsen (The Flying Norseman), and John Allen (From Skisport to Skiing). 

From pine pitch to perfluorocarbons, ski waxing has come a long way since the days of Scandinavian ski-sport and Sierra longboard racing.

During the Vancouver Olympics in February, skiers contended alternately with slush and bumpy ice—basically, refrozen slush. The shifting weather was especially brutal during the men’s 20 kilometer biathlon on February 18, when skiers starting midfield, during a snow squall, had no chance to ski fast or shoot accurately, and during the first run of the women’s giant slalom on February 24, when late starters got soft, wet snow and limited visibility.

Rapidly changing snow conditions have always been the bane of ski waxers. Very warm and very cold weather provokes a kind of silent panic among the ski-tech reps, the people who wax the skis. When the weather can’t be predicted, reps go nuts. They pore over old notebooks, looking for a similar combination of humidity, temperature and elevation, hoping to find a combination of wax and base structure that works. For downhill and Super G, they need a solution that can accelerate out of the start and slide quickly across a flat section 2,000 vertical feet down. For a long cross-country race, they need a combination of kick and glide that will work over a two-hour weather change and resist picking up dirt along the course. At Vancouver, even the freestyle events required a specific wax solution: the snow at Cypress was so soggy that puddles formed in the troughs before the kicker ramps, and skiers needed to splash through the wet spots without slowing down, which could throw off their timing in the air.

Photo above: Coach Bob Beattie waxes Buddy Werner's Kastles at the starting gate of the 1964 Innsbruck Olympic slalom. Note that Buddy hasn't even stepped out of his long-thong bindings. It was a simpler time. Joern Gerdts photo for Sports Illustrated.

I saw this wax panic up close during the 1989 World Championships in Vail. In the week before the downhill, temperatures dropped to minus 40 overnight. No one had ever seen a ski race run in that kind of cold, which gripped the 11,000-foot elevation of Beaver Creek’s summit. No one knew how to wax for it. Alpine waxers resorted to superhard “polar” nordic waxes, and some even used hardwood floor wax. In the end, the weather moderated for the race and the medalists – Hans-Georg Tauscher, Peter Muller and Karl Alpiger – apparently used “conventional” waxes.

We’ll never know, really, because at the World Cup level, wax gurus don’t give away their secrets. Outside the locked waxing rooms, where snooping reporters are decidedly unwelcome, we had no way of knowing that the tuners were already experimenting with fluorinated waxes, which would hit the market a year later. Waxing had become a sophisticated pseudo-science, practiced with the secrecy of classified weapons development.

Waxing: It Goes Way Back

Ski waxing long predates the development of alpine skiing. It arose naturally, in the early days of Scandinavian ski-sport, from the happy coincidence that waterproofing wood also helps it to glide on snow.

Wood is designed by nature to soak up water. Trees transport water from soil to leaves, through the cellular structure visible to us as wood grain. Any wooden structure exposed to water needs to be protected from drenching. Whether you’re building a ship, a roof or a ski, you need to apply a preservative to wood to keep it from absorbing water. The earliest known preservative was pine tar, often called pitch. There’s no way to tell when the practice began, but God Himself told Noah to use it in Genesis 6:14: So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. The Phoenicians certainly used it for sealing amphorae, among other things. The stuff was produced by distilling scraps from the lumber trade—often the roots—in a pit covered with peat, or in a funnel-shaped kiln. A ton of wood, burned slowly in a nearly oxygen-free container, produced about 250 pounds of charcoal and about 50 gallons of mixed turpentine, pitch and rosin. The pitch was pine tar.

The earliest literary reference to ski preparation found by the Norwegian historian Jakob Vaage was a history of Lapland written in Latin by Johannes Scheffer and published in English translation in 1674. Scheffer reported that Sami skiers used pine pitch and rosin.

That recipe is pretty good for running on the flat. For good glide, the important issue is that the wood repel water. The technical term for water repellency is “hydrophobic” (the opposite is hydrophilic, or perhaps wettable). Pine tar glides on snow because it’s insoluble in water. Water beads on it nicely, forming droplets instead of sheets. This means that at a microscopic level, the ski glides not on a sheet of water, nor on hard-point snow crystals, but on the equivalent of tiny liquid ball bearings, mixed with a lot of air. That’s good because air is about 99 percent less viscous, and therefore a lot faster, than water.

At the same time, pine tar on wood isn’t perfectly smooth, so when you kick back the surface links up mechanically with the snow surface to provide traction.

It’s this combination of qualities—durable wood preservative, with good kick and decent glide—that made pine tar the standard choice as a permanent base treatment for several centuries. One of the first skills you learned as a new skier was to boil pine tar without burning it, and to paint it onto a hickory base. As a running surface, pine tar was supplanted only in the late 1940s, with the development of celluloid surfaces, and then in the mid-1950s by polyethylene. As late as the 1960s, when I started skiing, a good ski shop still reeked pleasantly with the sharp resinous scent of boiled pine tar, because we were still using it on the wood cross-country skis of the era.

If all you were interested in was glide, pine tar could be improved with a temporary coat of some waxy substance. California’s longboard racers, who invented a form of straight-line downhill racing during the 1850s to pass the time during long snowbound winters in Sierra gold camps, didn’t need kick. They sought faster glide, and that meant improving the water-repellency of their pine-tar bases. By 1868, they were trying anything they could find that seemed slick: glycerin, whale oil, kerosene, candle wax and, famously, spermaceti, the waxy goop harvested from the heads of sperm whales. They mixed these into fragrant combinations called “dope.” Each ski club had its own continually-evolving formula, and some were packaged and sold under brands like Greased Lightning, Skedaddle and Breakneck.

Meanwhile, in Europe…

Until around 1890, ski meets held in Norway and elsewhere in Europe required a competitor to jump on the same skis that he used for cross-country. Then, as jumps became longer and cross country skiing faster, skimakers began building narrower, lighter running skis, while jumping skis grew straighter, wider and heavier. Looking for higher take-off speeds, jumpers began painting their bases with a variety of hard water-repellent shellacs, and in wet conditions might paint on a thin layer of paraffin.

Peter Østbye, born near Lillehammer in 1888, was a pretty good cross country racer. In 1913 he patented Østbyes Klister. The word is of German origin and means glue or adhesive; it was a mix of paraffin, pine resin, venetian turpentine and shellac, packaged in tubes and meant specifically to improve kick in wet snow. With his klister, Østbye beat favorite Lauritz Bergendahl to win the 18-kilometer race at Holmenkollen in 1914.

Klister was a sensation. Østbye sold it for 2 kroner per tube, roughly 30 cents at the contemporary exchange rate, but it looked like a fortune in those hard times. Gunnar Kagge, writing in Aftenposten in 2003, recalls that during the Depression he and his friends cooked up their own klisters using beeswax, resin, melted phonograph records and bicycle innertubes, and occasionally blew up a kitchen.

On the alpine side, in 1922 a new wax factory in Stuttgart introduced candles and shoe polish products under the brand Loba. At the same time it introduced a durable ski-base coating labeled Holmenkol-Mix—it was a season-long varnish rather than what we would recognize as a daily wax. In 1933, a competing leather-wax company in Attsätten, Switzerland, launched its own Ski-Gliss base varnish, followed in 1940 by a rub-on alpine wax called 1-3-5. The brand name was Toko. By World War II, North American firms had begun packaging rub-on ski waxes, usually put up in metallic tubes. The 10th Mountain Division was issued waxes for three or four temperature ranges, each imprinted with the warning that they should not be applied with heat. The waxes were clearly the byproducts of industrial processes: One of the manufacturers had, as its main business, the production of torpedo fuses.

A breakthrough in ski wax technology came in 1943, when the Swedish chemical firm Astra AB hired Martin Matsbo, 1937 winner of the Holmenkollen 18-kilometer race and bronze medalist in the 1936 Winter Olympic Games and 1935 and 1938 World Ski Championships 4×10 relay, to develop a commercial ski wax based entirely on controlled, synthetic waxes. By that time synthetic waxes were predictable, stable, plentiful and cheap byproducts of petroleum refining. Paraffin sold for pennies the pound, and was widely used in hundreds of consumer products, including cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and even baked goods (it was used in place of pricey butter to make baking pans slippery). By mixing paraffin with microcrystalline waxes to make harder and more flexible formulas, Matsbo produced a series of three hard waxes and two klisters designed to provide a good combination of kick and glide across the entire range of cross-country snow conditions. A new company was founded in 1946 by Börje Gabrielsen and began producing waxes in Skåne county in Sweden and at Fjellhamar, near Oslo, under the brand name Swix, a blend of the words ski and wax.

Because synthetic waxes were colorless, tasteless and odorless, Swix added pigments, with warm reddish colors for warm wet snow and cool blue-green colors for cold dry snow. The principle was simple enough: soft waxes, with low melting temperature around 110°C, were very hydrophobic and worked well for wet snow, especially when the snow crystals had gone soft and round; hard waxes, with melting temperatures around 140°C, were less hydrophobic but resisted penetration by the hard sharp corners of cold snow crystals. You could blend the soft and hard waxes to cover intermediate conditions. The brand quickly grew popular and inspired competition; in time for the Helsinki winter games in 1952, a group of young Finnish chemists established the Rex brand and gained wide acceptance.

The concept caught on quickly amongst alpine skiers, too. Both Holmenkol and Toko produced their own color-coded synthetic alpine waxes beginning in 1948. Because the materials were cheap and available worldwide, the new color-coded waxes inspired worldwide competition. In North America, dozens of skiers who had taken high school chemistry were able to brew their own wax lines. Naturally, every major distributor wanted its own brand of wax, too. Thus were brightly-colored boxes of paraffin, and even spray bottles, marketed under the labels A&T Blue Streak, Austro, Fall Line, Faski, Fastex, Hoffer, International, Jack Rabbit, Poly-Fin, Merix, Northland, Quick, Scia, Skee, Ski Spree, Ski-Z, Sohm’s, Speed Ski, St. Lawrence and Tip-Top.

Beginning in 1955, alpine skis were sold with polyethylene bases branded as Kofix, P-tex or something similar. By one scientific measure (droplet surface angle), high-density polyethylene (PE) was roughly 40 percent more hydrophobic than pine-tarred wood, and in fact a good-quality paraffin based wax couldn’t improve its repellency very much. Racers continued to wax because even a two or three percent improvement could be the margin of victory—one percent on a two-minute course means 1.2 seconds.

In 1964 Swix moved its entire production to Norway, and in 1978 it was fully acquired by Ferd AS, a Norwegian company.

Waxing Goes Downhill

Waxing for alpine glide speed was still a black art. As late as 1964, despite the advent of polyethylene bases, slalom racers often applied melted wax with a paintbrush, the better to fill up the screw holes on their segmented edges. Over the next couple of decades, the European ski factories and alpine ski teams embarked on expensive research projects to improve glide speed. For instance, it was theorized, and possibly proven, that at downhill racing speeds the heat of friction under the base created more water. A downhill racer might therefore need a slightly softer wax than, say, a GS racer in the same snow conditions.

Waxroom progress wasn’t a strictly scientific, peer-reviewed process, because even small improvements were kept secret. It cost millions of schillings, francs and kroner to send vanloads of waxing technicians scurrying about the World Cup venues every winter, on top of the pool fees required by the national teams—an alpine supplier of skis, boots, poles, goggles, helmets, clothing or waxes typically paid more than $50,000 per national team per winter just to have access to the racers. This level of investment made incremental knowledge very valuable. It could produce victory, which produced sales not only of skis and boots but of wax, too. Despite the universal adoption of “no-wax” polyethylene bases, ski wax remained a viable consumer product. Figures from Snowsports Industries America show that in recent years, retail sales of ski wax in the U.S. alone averaged about $5 million annually. A rule-of-thumb projection suggests that the worldwide market is about $25 million.

In search of improved glide speed, World Cup waxing technicians experimented with additives derived from more modern chemistry: graphite powder, silicon liquid, various metal powders for lubricity, and “plasticizer” additives like ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) to produce “polar” waxes useful in temperatures down to minus 20°F. These materials provided small but important performance improvements, especially as track-setting by increasingly heavy machines hardened the surfaces of cross-country racecourses. There were many experiments with miracle ingredients like Teflon (a solid fluoride plastic called polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE), but the stuff has such a high melting temperature —more than 200° C—that ironing it in often destroyed the ski base. Graphite additives seemed to work, but no one knew why: They didn’t really improve hydrophobic performance, and scientists scoffed at the idea that carbon’s electric conductivity could have any effect on glide speed.

By 1974 fiberglass construction and plastic bases had arrived at the top of cross country racing, thanks largely to Kneissl and Fischer. The Austrian factories successfully promoted fiberglass race skis to top competitors, among them Thomas Magnusson, who won the 30k race at the Falun World Championships that year. The design engineers in Austria had learned their craft in alpine racing, and they naturally tested their skis with alpine glider waxes at the tip and tail, resorting to a softer kick wax —even a klister —in the camber “pocket.”

Because World Cup technicians don’t share their secrets to success, much waxing lore has the apocryphal character of folktale. I got a glimpse of the secrecy-shrouded world of alpine ski waxing during the lead-up to the Olympic downhill in 1984. American Billy Johnson had an astonishing run of victories on soft-snow and “glider” courses that season, thanks in large part to a few pairs of blazing-fast Atomic skis prepared by tuner Blake Lewis. Lewis protected those skis from tampering and even inspection by stashing them under his bed when he slept. Like his competitor tuners, he refused to discuss what might be in his wax mixtures. He once showed me his collection of waxes: a tray of small pots, each filled with a plain white wax and each labeled with a numerical code. “There you go,” he said. “Know any more now than you did five minutes ago?”

However, two big advances in ski wax chemistry—surfactants and fluorocarbons—took place more or less out in the open, and well away from the alpine World Cup circus.

Terry Hertel was a recreational skier from the San Francisco area. He had made some money during Silicon Valley’s computer boom and in 1972 introduced a cute little electric waxing drum for home use. To go with it he created a line of waxes. As a Lake Tahoe skier, Hertel was fascinated with the problem of glide in very wet snow. In 1974, on the advice of UC Davis chemistry professor Tim Donnelly, he added a surfactant to his paraffin wax to produce a universal wax he called Hot Sauce. A surfactant is a wetting agent, the exact opposite of a hydrophobic agent. It shouldn’t have worked. But the stuff Hertel used, sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), is an odd columnar molecule with a hydrophobic end. It's commonly used in toothpaste, shampoo and shaving cream as a foaming agent. Suspended in wax, SDS molecules clump into spheres, called micelles, with the hydrophobic end out, each sphere acting as a water-repellent ball bearing. Hertel said his surfactant ingredient was “encapsulated.” Super Hot Sauce earned an insiders’ reputation for great glide in heavy snow. Town racers liked it. Hertel could never afford the fees to join the U.S. Ski Team supplier pool, let along send a technician to Europe, but he says he sent some surfactant wax to Europe with the team and is convinced it was an ingredient in the Diann Roffe and Eva Twardokens medals in GS at the Bormio World Championships in 1985.

At around that time, Hertel started looking for a “Spring Solution,” something that would work in very wet snow but repel the pine pollen, diesel exhaust particles and other dirt that darkened the ski slope snow in April and May. He tried polypropylene glycol, a food-grade antifreeze used to keep ice cream from melting, and it worked. But he also talked to Rob Hunter, a chemist at 3M, who mentioned that the company sold a liquid fluorocarbon to the cosmetics and paint industries—it dried to a smooth, glossy surface. Hunter thought the liquid fluorocarbon would work well in a ski wax, but warned that at $1,000 per pound, it was far too expensive.

Hertel wound up buying the 3M perfluorocarbon (PFC) liquid in five-gallon drums, mixed it into a high-strength candle wax called Paraflint, and in 1986 introduced a hard block wax he called Racing 739. It was very hydrophobic, and very fast. (Perfluoro means that all the lateral links in the polymer chain, not just some of them, are capped with fluorine atoms.)

Meanwhile, at Swix, chief chemist Leif Torgersen was also looking for something to repel dirt. A hard glide wax was essential to last throughout a 50 km race or a ski marathon, but the softer kick wax picked up pine pollen and other dirt, slowing the ski progressively through the course of the race. So he sought a form of PFC that could be ironed into the base. In Italy, he found it: Enrico Traverso at Enichem SpA, a state-owned industrial giant, had a PFC powder with a melting temperature of about 155°C. High-density polyethylene typically melts at about 130°C, but if you had a really good sintered base and kept the iron moving, you could apply the powder without destroying the ski base. Enichem had no other commercial customers for the material, but were willing to produce small, expensive lots for use in ski waxes. Swix began experimenting with the stuff on both cross country and alpine race courses and found that it improved glide by about 2 percent over the best non-PFC waxes. In 1990 the company introduced a commercial version called Cera F (cera is Italian for wax). The price: $100 for 30 grams. The parents of young racers screamed in agony: Apparently you couldn’t win without it. Fortunately, a little went a long way. Speed skier C.J. Mueller remembers waxing his skis with the scrapings from another competitor’s skis.

In the meantime, in 1988, Swix had been contacted by engineers at Salomon. The French company was developing its first alpine ski, and had spent a great deal of money to improve the quality of the base and edge grind. It wanted a broad-temperature wax that could be applied without heat in the factory or on the hill. Swix proposed a liquid form of PFC diluted into a thin paste. It could be applied with a paintbrush or with a sponge applicator. Named F4 for the Salomon ski, it was introduced to the market by Salomon and grew widely popular.

Belatedly, it occurred to the various parties in this technology race to patent their products. On March 2, 1990, Enichem applied for an Italian patent on a “ski lubricant comprising paraffinic wax and hydrocarbon compounds containing a perfluorocarbon segment.” On the same day, Hertel filed for a U.S. patent on a “ski wax for use with sintered-base snow skis,” containing paraffin, a hardener wax, roughly 1% perfluoroether diol, and 2% SDS surfactant. “That’s not the full formula,” Hertel cautioned me. “I’ll never tell anyone what else is in there.”

These were the two earliest patents for PFC ski waxes. Later patents were granted to Dupont and to a New York chemist named Athanasios Karydas.

Hertel claims his perfluorocarbon Racing 739 product quickly found its way into the waxing kits of World Cup technicians, and was used in a number of medal-winning performances. However, because he never joined the national team pools, he has never been able to publicize or even document the use of his products in FIS racing. Swix, Toko, Holmenkol, Briko, Maplus and Dominator, the large European wax companies who comprise the supplier pools for ski wax, don’t talk about the advanced technology they may be using on World Cup skis.

The end of fluorinated waxes

PFC molecules don't break down in nature, and when they get into groundwater can accumulate in plant and animal tissue. That reality led large industrial users of PFCs (manufacturers of Teflon, for instance), to scale back their use beginning in 2006. Ski waxes used tiny doses of PFCs, and much of it is scraped off in the ski-tuning process, so it was long assumed that the amount of PFC going into the snowpack was insignificant. However, fluorinated hydrocarbons, when heated above 250 degrees Celsius, are unsafe to breathe. The wax companies that used PFCs long warned waxing technicians against burning the wax and most waxing irons are set at a maximum of 140 degrees C.  Nonetheless, in 2011 researchers in Norway and Sweden found elevated levels of  PFC derivatives in the blood of cross-country ski coaches and waxers. Then, in 2016, the U.S. Congress amended the Toxic Substances Control Act, requiring the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to control chemicals deemed harmful to human health. As one result, starting in early 2018 the EPA notified all companies using fluorocarbons in their products to document the specific chemicals and amounts used. For ski wax manufacturers and importers this meant reporting all chemicals – dyes, scents, waxes, hardeners and fluorines, retroactively. Most  wax companies couldn’t afford the testing and reporting procedures and quickly withdrew PFC waxes from the market. During the following two winters, ski tuners relied on stocks of PFC waxes already in hand. The European Uniorn planned to ban he most common industrial PFCs starting in July 2020. In this context, in 2019 the International Ski Federation (FIS) announced in October, 2019 a ban on all PFC waxes in all forms of ski competition, beginning with the 2020-21 season.

But now there are rumors of a “nano wax.” Maybe it’s marketing horse-hockey. It’s fun to think it might contain those submicroscopic carbon spheres called buckyballs. I have my own concept for a quantum wax: its antimatter particles would repel both ice crystals and air molecules. The ski would therefore levitate into its own micron-thin and entirely frictionless vacuum. Investors should write to me directly.

Thanks to Mike Brady, David Lampert, C.J. Mueller and Terry Hertel for help with this article. Some technical data was derived from an academic thesis by Leonid Kuzmin.

Pine tar: Skis, ships and sailors
Viking shipwrights and house builders used oakum soaked in pine tar to seal the joints between planks. They mixed pine tar, linseed oil and turpentine to make a preservative. Shipwrights applied the stuff liberally on the inside of a new hull and watched to see how it infused through to the outside. That told them where the planks needed better sealing. Then the outside could be stained. Scandinavian stave churches built of wood last for centuries because they’re stained black with pine tar.

In different parts of the world, different species of pine produced pine tar of varying qualities. The shipbuilders of Northern Europe considered that the world’s best pine tar came from the forests of Scandinavia, and specifically from northern Sweden. Beginning in 1648, the Wood Tar Company of Northern Sweden had a royal monopoly to export pitch, and its biggest customer was the British Royal Navy. When a Russian invasion of Sweden cut off the source of supply around 1705, the Admiralty turned to the American Colonies, and by 1730 pine forests in Georgia and the Carolinas provided about 80 percent of the pitch used to waterproof His Majesty’s warships. Hence the term Tarheel for North Carolinians, not to mention the reference to any British sailor as a Tar.

This article first appeared in Skiing Heritage magazine, June 2010 (page 42). It has been updated several times.