Short Turns

Can you name these five skiers?

1. Won both the Olympic downhill and the Olympic ski jump.
2. First to win all the alpine events in a single Olympics.
3. Won three Olympic golds and the overall World Cup in the same year.
4. Set the world record for ski jumping distance five times.
5. Won 26 World Championship and Olympic gold medals and 114 World Cup races.

The answers:

1. Birger Ruud
2. Toni Sailer
3. Jean Claude Killy
4. Matti Nykanen
5. Marit Bjorgen

(photo by Ilan Adler)

Heavy snowfalls this winter across the Northern Hemisphere led to record avalanches. For the 2018–19 season, the Colorado Avalanche Information Center reported 2,557 observed slides, up 96 percent over the five-year average. The Swiss Avalanche Institute reported that, across Europe, 147 people died in avalanches up to May 13, a 47 percent rise over the 20-year average.

According to etymological dictionaries, “avalanche” first appeared in print in French in the 17th century. It comes from the old French word avaler, meaning “descend” or “go down.” It became the modern verb for “to swallow.” Aval today means “downstream” and derives from the phrase à val, “toward the valley.”
The second half of the word, -anche, is a variation of the common French suffix -ance, from the Latin -antia. The suffix turns a verb into a noun. An English example would be turning deliver into deliverance.

Other Latin-based dialects have similar words: in Savoyard lavantse, in Provençal lavanca and in Romanche avalantze. The related word avalement, meaning “swallowing,” was adopted by Georges Joubert to describe a form of down-unweighting, or upward retraction of the legs—a turn that functions to absorb a roll in the terrain. —Seth Masia

Who needs powder? A Minnesota resort goes to the mat for its future.  By Greg DiTrinco

There is an annoyingly capricious component of the sport of skiing. It’s called snow. Both skiers and resort operators alike have to deal with the seasonal limits of their passion—and their business model. So what if you removed the unpredictability of snow from the sport?

Buck Hill, Minnesota, aims to find out. This mighty mite of a ski area, tucked in a few miles south of the Twin Cities, is perhaps the biggest supporter of a small, but growing segment of the industry: four-season skiing. The resort has installed an all-year skiing surface to create—in theory—an endless winter. Now a few seasons into the radical experiment, “It took a while, but I’m pleased with where we are,” says Dave Solner, Buck Hill’s CEO and co-owner...

The sleek modern skiwear look, it’s typically thought, originated suddenly in 1952 with the Bavarian designer Maria Bogner’s use of Helanca-modified nylon and wool blend to create the first durable stretch pant. (See “50th Anniversary of Stretch Pants,” September 2002, Skiing Heritage.) But the body-hugging ski look was arguably more of an evolution than a revolution, as the pictures accompanying this article show. Bogner’s revolution had as much to do with wildly varied colors replacing blacks and greys. 

Even before World War II—a period associated in North American minds with skiers wearing wool sweaters and cloth jackets, and baggy trousers with socks pulled over the bottoms—a slim aerodynamic look was underway... 

From the FIS website:

The International Ski Federation - Fédération Internationale de Ski, Internationaler Ski Verband - is abbreviated in all languages as FIS.

FIS was founded on the 18th of February in 1910 when 22 delegates from 10 countries joined together to form in the International Skiing Commission in Christiania (NOR) and served from 1910 to 1924. The group became formally known as the International Ski Federation on 2nd February 1924 during the first Olympic Winter Games in Chamonix, France with 14 member nations. Today, 123 National Ski Associations comprise the membership of FIS.

Whilst the existence of skiing as means of transport is very ancient, its practice as a sport is relatively recent. It was not developed in Norway until after 1850, when the first races were held around the town of Christiania, which later became the city of Oslo. From 1870 onwards, the Alpine countries were in turn affected by the rapid expansion of skiing as a sport: the first competitions in Germany in 1879, the foundation of the first Swiss Club in 1893 at Glaris initiated by Christoph Iselin. National Ski Associations appeared in turn in Russia (1896), Czechoslovakia (1903), the United States (1904), Austria and Germany (1905) and Norway, Finland and Sweden (1908). From 1910 to 1924, the International Skiing Commission strove to monitor the development of competitive skiing throughout the world. In 1924, at the time of the first Olympic Winter Games, this Commission gave birth to the Federation International de Ski.

For more information on the past International Ski Congresses, see here.

Special report: A six-year effort, led by FIS Alpine Rules chief Michael Huber, has yielded the first comprehensive digital collection of the changing rules that have governed ski racing over 80 years.

Alpine ski racing has a precise birth date. On February 26, 1930, in Oslo, Norway, the Congress of the International Ski Federation (FIS) officially accepted alpine ski racing—downhill and slalom—as a separate discipline. The FIS had previously recognized only the disciplines of competitive nordic skiing—cross-country and jumping. 

Delegates to the 1930 Congress also adopted the first official rules for alpine racing. But what precisely were they? And where could they be found? Had no one kept a copy? 

For Michael Huber of Kitzbühel, Austria, chairman of the FIS Subcommittee on Alpine Rules and president of the famous Kitzbühel Ski Club (K.S.C.), the challenge was irresistible: to find the book. Huber would spend six years searching for it. And not only seeking the alpine competitions rules book of 1930, but also all official published FIS alpine rules of the past. Huber’s goals were:

• To make the alpine racing rules as they existed over an 85-year span available digitally for people around the world. 
• To gain insight into the very early history of competitive alpine skiing. 
• To understand why specific rules were written as they were, when and how they were changed, and to better identify what was the core of the sport that remained unchanged. 

Huber asked officials, experts, organizations and museums for help. First, the International Skiing History Association (ISHA), through its magazine Skiing History and its Website skiinghistory.org, under the lead of John Fry, sent out an international call, asking people to submit copies of old Alpine Rules books. Well-known ski historian E. John B. Allen of New Hampshire soon reported that the New England Ski Museum in Franconia had a number of books from the 1930s into the 1980s, most in English, some in German. The New England Museum’s staff copied countless pages and sent them to Europe for processing. 

“The Book is Found!”
Still, the most sought-after book, the original rules book of 1930, was missing. 

Then it happened: Last year, Ivan Wagner, the editor of the Schneehase, the official publication of the Swiss Academic Ski Club (SAS), sent a note to Huber. “I think we’ve got it. It’s found!” After much searching, Schneehase’s former editor, Raoul Imseng, had discovered, in Issue No. 4 printed in 1931, the full and official German wording of the International Competition Rules for Slalom and Downhill Races, established at the XI International Ski Congress in Oslo and Finse (Norway), 1930. 

Next step was to translate the German version into English. The long-serving member of the Subcommittee on Alpine Rules, the British native Martin John Leach, who has lived for many years in Switzerland, was ready to do the job. 

Flag Colors, Team Races

What is the content of the Alpine Rules of 1930? The 14 pages are divided into ten chapters. The first chapter deals with the organization and officials needed to run an alpine competition, like “the Setter” and the “Flag-keepers.” The second chapter deals with “Flags” for Downhill—originally red, blue and yellow. 

Another section deals with the different types of start, like simultaneous start, individual start, team and slalom start. Surprisingly, the alpine combined is not of primary interest. (Surprising because the combined was the primary focus of the pre-existing famous Arlberg Kandahar of Hannes Schneider and Arnold Lunn.) Rather the rules focus on “Team Races in Downhill and Slalom.”

It didn’t take long for the original rules to undergo change. Only two years later, the alpine FIS Rules of 1932 defined the flag colors for slalom as two; penalized a competitor five seconds for making a false start; required racers to be more than 18 years of age; and prohibited a competitor from making more than one start unless handicapped by the presence on the course of a spectator or a dog.

The results go live online

The former chairman of the Subcommittee on Alpine Rules and predecessor president of the K.S.C., Christian Poley, added missing books of past years. So the digital archive now includes about 60 different Alpine Rules books from 1930–2016 in English, German and French. 

To create digital access to all of the rules, the copied material had to be scanned and laid out—work done by the staff of the Kitzbühel Ski Club under Barbara Thaler. In a final step, Sarah Lewis, FIS Secretary General, provided a special place on the FIS website for digital storage, so the public worldwide can access more than eight decades of alpine ski racing rules. “Thanks to all who made this project a success,” says Huber.

To access the FIS Alpine Rules book digital archive, go to: http://www.fis-ski.com/inside-fis/document-library/alpine-skiing/#deepli....

Last March, in celebration of Winter Park’s 75^th anniversary, the resort revived the Denver ski train as a one-weekend experiment with Amtrak (see the March-April 2015 issue of Skiing History, page 7). Tickets sold out quickly, so for the coming season, Amtrak has scheduled regular weekend service, from January 7, 2017 to March 26.

The train will leave Denver’s Union Station at 7 a.m. each Saturday and Sunday (plus Martin Luther King Day and President’s Day), arriving at Winter Park at 9 a.m. The return run will leave Winter Park at 4:30 p.m., arriving Denver at 6:40 p.m.  Adult fare begins at $39, with half-price tickets for two kids kids 12 and under riding with an adult. One-way tickets are available to skiers planning a multi-day Winter Park vacation.

The train ran between Denver and Winter Park every ski season from 1940 to 2009 (see “Rails to Trails” in the December 2008 issue of Skiing History, or skiinghistory.org/history/ski-trains-history).

The Colorado Transportation Commission has provided a $1.5 million grant to help build an ADA-compliant boarding platform and rail improvements at Winter Park.

For more information, and to book tickets, see amtrak.com/winterparkexpress.

Hundreds gathered in February at Deer Valley to honor the memory of the late Stein Eriksen.
STORY AND PHOTOS BY JOHN FRY

He was our hero. In his beautiful style of skiing and his charismatic persona, he combined the utmost grace we would ever see in the sport. 

Stein Eriksen, 88, died just after Christmas in 2015. On February 4, 2016, more than a thousand skiers showed up to honor his memory at an outdoor ceremony at Deer Valley in Utah, where Stein was director of skiing for 35 years. 

The ceremony was staged at the venue of the 2016 World Cup of freestyle skiing, a sport first popularized six decades ago by Stein with his famous, widely filmed and photographed inverted aerial. A simulation of that famous flip was performed by Dylan Ferguson, longtime U.S. Ski Team aerialist, to the roaring appreciation of the crowd. 

Speakers included Stein’s widow, Françoise Eriksen; U.S. Ski Team vice-president and spokesman Tom Kelly; Deer Valley Resort president Bob Wheaton; Stephen Kircher of Boyne, Michigan, Stein’s first U.S. resort employer; and Stein’s longtime fishing and hunting pal, Jim McConkey. 

Friends of Stein also memorialized him with speeches and Norwegian songs at a reception in the Stein Eriksen Lodge, and a party at the Eriksen home in Park City. RIP.  

For a full tribute to Stein Eriksen, "The One and Only Stein" by Morten Lund, see the January-February 2016 issue of Skiing History.

By John Allen

Of 2,856 athletes competing from 88 countries at the Sochi Winter Games, seven came from six first timers: Malta, Paraguay, East Timor, Togo, Tonga, and Zimbabwe.  Outside of the luger from Tonga, all except Togo’s Mathilde Petitjean—who represented France as a junior cross-country racer—compete in alpine disciplines.  All have, in one way or another, dual citizenship.  Luke Steyne, was born in Zimbabwe and moved to Switzerland when he was two and where he has been ever since.  Malta’s Elise Pellegrin was born in France where she now studies.   East Timor’s John Goutt was also born in France (French father, East Timor mother), took to skiing at two at Val d’Isère, trains in Australia during the summer and France in the winter.  Julia Marino was adopted from Paraguay when she was eight months old and came through the US ‘academy’ ranks and is now at the University of Boulder.  Perhaps the most curious case is that of Alessia Afi Dipol whose parents instructed at Cortina and where she started skiing at three.  Her father owns a clothing factory in Togo and although she was born, lives, and trains in Italy, “now I will always stay with Togo.”

 Is this what globalization of Olympism is all about?