Top exec will step down after five decades at the sport’s governing body.
Gian Franco Kasper, the president of the International Ski Federation (FIS), recently announced that he will step down this spring after 22 years at the helm of the sport’s governing organization. Both an effective and controversial executive, Kasper has held different roles at FIS for nearly 50 years.
Photo at top of page: An effective and controversial leader, Kasper’s reign has been spiked with controversy, often fueled by his off-hand remarks. DPA Picture Alliance / Alamy Stock Photo
Kasper, 75, was named secretary general of the federation in 1975 and took over as president in 1998. He succeeded the late Marc Hodler, who at 80 had headed FIS for nearly 50 years, the longest reign at any international sports organization. Under Hodler, the season-long World Cup competitions and freestyle were introduced, snowboarding competition came under FIS governance, and he exposed the bid-rigging scandal of the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Under Kasper’s reign, the number of ski and snowboarding medaling sports at the Winter Olympic Games has multiplied to more than 50, with many new freestyle events successfully geared to attracting a younger audience.
The FIS began in 1924 as a Scandinavia-based and operated organization. The first two presidents were a Swede and a Norwegian. With Hodler’s election in 1951, the FIS moved its headquarters to Switzerland, where they have remained for almost 70 years. The current headquarters are in Oberhofen, where the influential Marc Hodler Foundation is also located.
Regarding Kasper’s succession, the FIS says that it supports “a timely process for the national ski associations to prepare any applications for candidacies.” The less-than-transparent Hodler-Kasper succession process in 1998 was harshly criticized by former FIS vice-president Bjorn Kjellstrom. The betting now is on another Swiss, Urs Lehmann, 1993 world championships downhill gold medalist, President of the Swiss Ski Federation, a successful business consultant, President of the Laureus Foundation, and husband of Swiss acrobatic ski champion Conny Kissling.
Kasper’s long tenure also has been spiked with ongoing controversy, occasionally fueled by his off-hand remarks. Last year he caused worldwide headlines and brief outrage when in an interview with a Swiss journalist he sarcastically remarked that with authoritarian governments it was easier to overcome environmental obstacles to Olympic site selection. He previously found himself under the spotlight in 2005 after commenting about women ski jumpers that the physical force upon landing “seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.” The FIS did eventually sanction women’s ski jumping, which made its Olympic debut at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.
This season, Kasper scrapped with athletes and coaches who criticized the expanded 2019-20 alpine schedule for not providing enough time for travel and proper recuperation. Kasper conceded that the alpine World Cup circuit contains “too many races,” and then offered not much more than sympathy.
“I know it’s not easy for the athletes and also for some organizers. We are now at a certain limit, there is no question,” Kasper said at a press event in October. “But FIS is not here to prevent races but to organize races.” He did say that the FIS would look into improving its scheduling process. Without Olympic Games or World Championships this season, the current alpine World Cup schedule runs nonstop from October through March, with 44 men’s events and 41 women’s events at nearly two dozen venues.
Kasper, a former journalist, also has held leadership roles with the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency, among others. He was elected to another four-year term as FIS President in 2018, but will only make it halfway through. He will officially resign his post at the next FIS Congress in Thailand in May. --Greg Ditrinco
Wear Your Passion on Your Sleeve
Sun Valley resident Karl Johan has been collecting Demetre sweaters for years, picking them up at garage sales, thrift stores and online.
Karl Johan grew up with an immutable ski uniform: a Demetre sweater. It made sense. He lived in Seattle, near Demetre’s Ballard-based factory. And his family all wore the sweaters whenever they skied. As did most Seattle-based skiers.
The factory and the brand have since shut down (Roffe purchased Demetre in 1987, and itself closed a decade later), but the sweaters still live on in Johan’s memories and closet in Sun Valley.
Karl Johan. Photos: Karen Bossick / Eye On Sun Valley
Marketing director for Sun Valley Culinary Institute, Johan has long collected the sweaters at garage sales, thrift stores, retro clothing stores, online—wherever he can find them. When he nabs one, he cleans it, steams it, and stashes it away. His collection can number more than 50 sweaters at a time. That number decreases whenever he holds a pop-up vintage sweater sale in Sun Valley.
Johan notes that the old-school sweaters hold up remarkably. “The designs and colors are amazing,” he says. And “they look brand new” whenever he still sees them on the slopes. He also enjoys the local angle to his soft-goods obsession, as John and Sally Demetre have long had a home in Sun Valley.
Demetre was founded in 1921 by John’s father as the Standard Knitting Company, which manufactured uniform sweaters out of its factory in Ballard, Washington, which is now a hip waterfront neighborhood of Seattle. During the time Demetre sweaters were being manufactured, Seattle was one of the largest apparel centers in the country and considered a pioneer in outerwear.
In the early 1960s, Demetre saw a business opportunity in the explosive growth of skiing, and expanded into ski sweaters. The company landed early sponsorships with the U.S. and Canadian Olympic ski teams. The U.S. Ski Team wore Demetre sweaters at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan. During its heyday, Demetre was tagged “America’s first name in fine ski sweaters,” with an ad from a 1972 issue of Skiing magazine pledging: “One look and you know it’s Demetre.”
As any skier of a certain age can confirm, Demetre sweaters were colorful, comfortable, and tightly woven to provide superior warmth. The construction resulted in a heavy-weight sweater that was virtually indestructible. Not surprisingly, many of the sweaters have survived, now 50 or so years later. And many Demetre fans have kept their favorite sweaters.
Pinterest, Ebay and other websites are full of Demetre sweaters—and memories from skiing’s golden era. One fan blissfully noted of her Demetre sweaters, “I wore them when I was skinny.” —Greg Ditrinco
Sailer in his early days as head of the Buck Hill racing program
Buck Hill Marks 50 With Sailer
In December 2019, Buck Hill—a small Minnesota ski area with a big racing reputation—celebrated 50 years with its legendary coach, Erich Sailer. Since founding the racing team back in 1969, Sailer has churned out an impressive roster of Olympic and World Cup athletes, including Kristina Koznick, David Chodounsky, Tasha Nelson and Lindsey Vonn. Vonn retired in 2019 with four World Cup overall titles, 11 Olympic and FIS World Championship medals, and 82 World Cup victories—a record for women, and just shy of Ingemar Stenmark’s record-setting 86 wins.
Celebrating five decades at the Minnesota ski area in December 2019 with Jacob Olsen and Jessica Stone, daughter of founders Nancy and Chuck Stone.
Thanks to Sailer, Buck Hill is home to one of the country’s most active recreational racing programs, drawing youth and adults from the Twin City suburbs for training, leagues and competitions. An honored member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, the Austrian-born coach pioneered summer ski racing in the United States in 1956 with a camp at Timberline on Oregon’s Mount Hood. By 1967, his camp near Red Lodge, Montana had become the biggest in the country.
Buck Hill was founded in 1954 by Charles “Chuck” Stone Jr. and his future wife, Nancy Campbell. In late 2019, Nancy published Buck Hill: A History. To purchase a copy, email ncstone@aol.com. —Kathleen James
Snapshots in Time
1866 SONDRE NORHEIM’S HEEL
In 1733, a Norwegian military officer, Col. Jens Henrik, wrote the first ski instructions for the military. Those rules contain the first mention of heel bindings, but illustrations of military skiers throughout the 18th century show only toe straps. Despite the increased pressure of jumping and racing competition, begun in 1765 and 1767 respectively, the heel binding didn’t really catch on until Sondre Norheim’s dramatic exhibition at Mordegal a century later. “With legs drawn up, he flew like a bird.” Thus 41-year-old Norheim impressed the crowd at an 1866 jump at Hoydalsmo, near Mordegal in Telemark. Within two years, the Telemark skis—cambered at the waist, broadened at the tip—and Norheim’s new heel bindings astonished the crowd at Christiana. Sport skiing was on its way. —Ted Bays (Nine Thousand Years of Skis: Norwegian Wood to French Plastic)
1936 SISSIES, SPOILSPORTS AND MOTHER-FRIGHTENERS
The first death on the slopes shook up the small skiing fraternity of the day. An emergency meeting was called by the New York Amateur Ski Club, whose founder, Roland Palmedo, appointed Minot “Minnie” Dole chair of a committee to inquire into the causes and handling of ski accidents. The results of their questionnaires was disappointing. Only a hundred replies dribbled in. Of these, roughly half accused the committee of being “sissies, spoilsports, and frighteners of mothers.” —Gretchen Rous Besser, “Samaritans of the Snow” (Collected Papers of the International Ski History Congress, 2002
1959 LISTEN AND LEARN
Have you reached a plateau in your skiing where nothing seems to help you improve? Then “Skiing by Ear Method” may be just what you need! Relax and learn with these 33-1/3 rpm records. $8.95 each. Money-back guarantee! —Advertisement in SKI “Holiday Gift Guide” (December 1959)
1967 WORLD CUP ACCOLADES
The winter of 1967 marked the beginning of a new era in international ski racing. For the first time in the history of the sport, the world’s best racers were rated not on the basis of one or two headline races, but on a systematic accumulation of results over the whole season. The new system proved a smashing success. So much so that the World Cup of Alpine Skiing is to become a permanent annual fixture of the sport, rivaling the Olympics and the FIS World Championships. Initially ignored by international ski officialdom, the World Cup won instant and enthusiastic acceptance by the two groups most important to the success of ski racing: the racers themselves and the press, who report the results to an eager public. —John Fry (SKI, September 1967)
1978 THE BUCK STOPS HERE
Your three-miles-a-day skier is starting to see the wisdom of the East. For the first time, Stratton (Vermont) is drawing vacationing skiers from Washington DC, Texas, Georgia and Puerto Rico. And these are not weekend skiers. “Vail, founded the same year we were, programmed itself as a vacation resort from the beginning,” says Stratton marketing manager Jeff Dickson. “It worked closely with airlines and travel agents and ski clubs to get people to come for a week. The Eastern resorts are waking up. The only way we can support the lifts we’re building is by becoming a vacation destination.” —Morten Lund (SKI, September 1978)
1989 CLAMORING FOR THE BEST
A great perplexity hits me every time I hear skiers talking about lift ticket prices. Late last season, I skied Butternut Basin in the Berkshires. The change from eight years earlier was dramatic: lifts, lodges, trails, parking and food were greatly expanded. And instead of narrow ribbons of icy snow or rock-hard moguls, the trails were white velvet from edge to edge. As good as Colorado. What happened? Butternut has been transformed into the New Skiing, with trail systems that disperse skiers around the hill, massive snowmaking, and squads of grooming machines that work every trail by sunrise into a soft-but-firm surface that spells, “Have a ball.” Yet skiers are having a fit—those lousy lift ticket prices keep rising. —Morten Lund (Snow Country, January 1989)
2000 HIGHER POWER OF POWDER
In the 2000–2001 season, I didn’t finish 13 of the 24 races I entered. I’ve seen people lose their hair or get religion over less. But I knew I was getting better; I knew I had far more control than ever before. It just wasn’t always obvious to everyone else. And explaining myself all the time got old fast. Better to be laconic—the shrug, the smirk. People hear what they want to, anyway. … When fans or young racers ask me the Big Question, I tell them: “Go fast.” It’s the whole deal, the only tip worth taking. —Two-time overall World Cup champion and 11-time Olympic and FIS World Championship medalist Bode Miller (Bode: Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun)
SKI LIFE
from SNOW COUNTRY / DECEMBER 1988
That’s not what I said; I said “We have six inches of powder under an ice crust.”
Why's It Called That? Mont Tremblant
The Algonquin believed that Quebec’s Mont Tremblant trembled when violated by human exploitation.
The mountain lay in the heart of Weskarini Algonquin territory, and was the home of the Great God, or Manitou. They called it Manitou Ewitchi Saga, the mountain of the great god, or Manitonga Soutana, mountain home of the spirits. In 1652, Weskarini were massacred here by invading Iroquois. Many sought refuge with French Jesuits, and were forced to convert to Catholicism.
The Weskarini believed the mountain trembled when violated by human exploitation. And so the French settlers adopted the name Mont Tremblant (“Trembling” in English). What the Weskarini meant by “trembling” is unclear; one folk-tale recounts violent storms destroying swathes of forest. Seismic activity is common. Several faults run within 50 miles of the mountain and the region has recorded at least one magnitude 6.9 earthquake in the past 250 years, and a couple of 4.5 quakes right in Ste-Agathe during the past 25 years. It’s possible that the Weskarini actually felt the mountain shake. —Seth Masia
Ski Art: Gunnar Hallström (1875–1943)
On the one hand Gunnar Hallström, Swedish painter of national-romantic scenes, was everything a modern environmentalist might honor. He settled on the island of Björko in Lake Malar, about an hour by boat out of Stockholm, and became involved in the preservation of Birka, Sweden’s oldest town, and in the maintenance of the island’s traditional farms. He persuaded the government to buy up the land and put it under protection. Today it is managed by the Riksantikvarieämbetet, the National Heritage Board.
But there is another side to Hallström’s art, first coming to notice in the early years of the 20th century. The frontispiece of Henry Hoek and E. C. Richardson’s 1907 Der Skilauf und seine sportliche Benutzung (Skiing and its Sporting Use) is a reproduction of Hallström’s skier. The original is believed to have been owned by a Munich publishing firm that later had connections with the Nazis. When the Germans were in deep financial trouble following World War I, communities printed their own money, called Notgeld. The town of Furtwangen put Hallström’s Schneeschuhläufer (Ski Runner) on its 10-mark note. That gained him a great deal of attention. In 1921, for example, the German Ski Association’s journal Der Winter called Hallström “well known.”
In the political turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, Hallström moved to the right in Sweden and became involved in decorating with swastikas one of the lodges to which Hermann Göring fled after the failed 1923 Hitler putsch. He signed his initials in the spaces created by the squared swastika symbol, and he appears to have been involved with the pro-Nazi Swedish Carlberg circle.
Politics aside, the painting illustrated here, used both as the frontispiece to Hoek’s and Richardson’s book and as the formidable image on Furtwangen’s 10-mark note of December 1, 1918 proves his knowledge of skiing as well as his expertise in landscape depiction. —E. John B. Allen
After World War I, a German town used Hallström’s image of a skier on its 10-mark note. He was likely involved with pro-Nazi circles in Sweden. --E. John B. Allen
This article first ran in the January-February issue of Skiing History.
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...
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.
Mikaela Shiffrin on Sunday celebrated her first Overall World Cup Championship, at the culmination of the 50th World Cup Finals in Aspen. She is the fifth American to win the overall globe, following Tamara McKinney, Phil Mahre, Bode Miller and Lindsey Vonn.
At age 22, Shiffrin is already the three-time world champion in slalom and four-time World Cup champion in slalom.
Joining Shiffrin at the awards ceremony was Canada's Nancy Greene Raine, winner of the first two overall World Cup championships in 1967 and 1968.
Last March, in celebration of Winter Park’s 75th 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.
The mountain lay in the heart of Weskarini Algonquin territory, and was the home of the Great God, or Manitou. They called it Manitou Ewitchi Saga, the mountain of the great god, or Manitonga Soutana, mountain home of the spirits. In 1652, Weskarini were massacred here by invading Iroquois. Many sought refuge with French Jesuits, and were forced to convert to Catholicism.
On the one hand Gunnar Hallström, Swedish painter of national-romantic scenes, was everything a modern environmentalist might honor. He settled on the island of Björko in Lake Malar, about an hour by boat out of Stockholm, and became involved in the preservation of Birka, Sweden’s oldest town, and in the maintenance of the island’s traditional farms. He persuaded the government to buy up the land and put it under protection. Today it is managed by the Riksantikvarieämbetet, the National Heritage Board.
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:
Flag Colors, Team Races
