Ski Racing

In a poll of Skiing History readers, 59 percent put Stenmark first.

Lindsey Vonn’s decision at the beginning of February 2019 to retire, four victories short of Ingemar Stenmark’s 86 World Cup wins, gives rise to a debate: Which racer’s record is superior? It may be an artificial question created by the press, but Vonn herself said, “Retiring isn’t what upsets me. Retiring without reaching my goal is what will stay with me forever.”

The World Cup was originally created to honor all-round excellence in technical and speed competition. Vonn won in all disciplines, Stenmark in only two.

Starting in February, Skiing History ran a poll on its website (www.skiinghistory.org) and Facebook page (www.facebook.com/skiinghistory), asking our readers to choose between Vonn and Stenmark. Of 962 votes cast, Stenmark received 568 (59 percent) and Von 394 (41 percent). Here are some of the comments from voters... 

Translated from the French by D. Wright Pryce

Published posthumously, with the kind permission of Patrick Lang

Editor’s Note: Today’s World Cup of Alpine Skiing is so firmly in the grasp of the International Ski Federation (FIS) administration and of the national ski federations that it has almost been forgotten that the world-wide, season-long competition was not an FIS initiative, but one spearheaded by the press. The actual individual initiator was the dean of Europe’s ski writers, the late Serge Lang, a Swiss who lived partly in France, and wrote for the Paris-based sports daily, L’Equipe, as well as for German and Italian newspapers. Shortly before his death in 1999, Lang wrote a history of how the World Cup was launched more than 40 years ago.  

The World Cup was to be brought into being by a near-perfect conjunction of events and by the support of a handful of important people.

The very name chosen to designate it was of the utmost importance. World Cup, Coupe du Monde, Weltcup, Coppa del Mondo, echoed like a fanfare in all the languages of the world.  Other than in soccer, there were no other World Cups at the time. And soccer's international trophy had only been dubbed the World Cup by the British that same year. Today, of course, there are a hundred-odd world cups, in everything from sailing to cycling, fencing to volleyball, rugby to bob-sledding. In skiing alone—including jumping, cross-country, freestyle - there are half dozen World Cups, all inspired by the name and, sometimes, by the spirit and the formula of the alpine skiing World Cup, which my colleagues and I created.

The World Cup was not only a journalistic creation, a fact that I can confirm, having been a journalist since 1940. It was an event devised with the media in mind—not just the mass-circulation newspapers and the sporting press, but also radio and especially television. Audiences, viewers, readers and sponsors have proven this to be right. The World Cup has become a massive world-wide attraction.

In the early days, however, only three journalists were prepared to put their professional weight behind the project. Those three were: Michel Clare of L'Equipe, the famous French sports paper ; John Fry, then editor-in-chief of Ski Magazine in New York; and Austria's Kurt Bernegger, a reporter for Salzburger Nachrichten, later with Austrian television and to my mind the most far-sighted commentator of that era.

And what of all the other sportswriters and broadcasters? While they were not really against the World Cup, neither were they ready to support it. Later I was to read with great interest that a good many of them had, for a long time, imagined a similar ranking system. Well, such a system was not unique. Other sports had adopted a point-based ranking system for some time. The Desgrange-Colombo Challenge and the Prestige Pernod in cycling, and the Golden Ski of L'Equipe, awarded ten years earlier, all used similar systems.

The original World Cup of alpine skiing, in fact, borrowed its format from sailing. It followed a system of counting at the beginning of the season a limited number (best three) of finishes from each discipline towards the overall ranking.

"That way, our skiers won't feel obliged to participate in every race," said French team coach Honore Bonnet. He was wrong, as we were all to realize very soon, having ignored the racers' strategic sense of what was needed to win. Even after having accumulated their maximum number of points in any given event, they still entered races in order to deny rivals the chance to score more and get closer to them.

It Began at the Hahnenkamm

The story of the World Cup began late one January morning in 1966, less than a hundred meters from the "Hinterseer Farm," halfway down Kitzbühel's Hahnenkamm famous downhill course. Struck by sudden inspiration, I turned to French Team Director Honoré Bonnet and US coach Bob Beattie, who, like me, were there to watch the practice runs.

"What we are going to do," I said, "Is...to hold a World Cup." I was speaking in English for the benefit of Bob Beattie, so "World Cup" was the actual phrase I used. At that point Beattie was defending the idea of holding the FIS World Championships annually. (Ed. Note: The FIS World Championships were, and still are, held every second year.)

In a way, of course, I can take no great credit for coining the name World Cup. For several weeks the British had been using the term to describe soccer's world championship being played in England that summer of 1966. In Portillo, Chile, at the 1966 World Alpine Ski Championships, I remember standing on the edge of the downhill course at 10 a.m. listening to the soccer final between England and West-Germany at Wembley.

It was at Portillo that skiing’s World Cup was effectively born, thanks to Bonnet, Beattie and Dr Sepp Sulzberger, a lawyer who was in overall charge of the Austrian Alpine ski team. But it was Marc Hodler, President of the International Ski Federation (FIS) since 1951 who had the courage to shoulder the heavy responsibility and declare that the first World Cup would be raced under FIS patronage in the winter of 1967.

MARC HODLER SEALS THE DEAL

I once read that history knows how to choose the men and the women it needs to carry out its destiny. Perhaps it is true. After all, I held no mandate in any ski federation. The only official title I had was president of the International Association of Ski Journalists. But this was enough to enable me to have official-and usually friendly - relationships with the executives of the various ski federations, the FIS and, more importantly, its president.

Even though Hodler had long been enthusiastic about such a project, nothing was certain in Portillo. Even after long days and nights of negotiations with my three partners and with the project finally ready, Bob Beattie doubted that we would get FIS approval. For a week, Beattie listed the possible objections, even though he was one of the greatest supporters of the World Cup idea. One evening he got up from the table, pointed to a piece of paper on which we had noted the various points of our agreement—the dates of the first schedule, the rules and the points system and so on—and said : " Marc Hodler will never accept this proposal. "

Fortunately this was a gross misreading of Marc Hodler, of his sportsmanship, enthusiasm, goodwill and his long range vision. The next day, around noon, and in the same bar where, with the aid of much "Pisco" and coffee , we'd just spent a good part of our Chilean nights, Marc Hodler studied the proposal for a few minutes then asked simply : "What time do you want me in the Press Room to announce the creation of this World Cup?"

A NEW ERA BEGINS

And so, in the heart of the Andes, thousands of miles from the Alps, the old calendar of ski racing died on August 11, 1966. A new era, whose outlines we could not yet make out, was about to begin.

At the time, international ski racing was in the doldrums - except for its natural peaks, the Olympic Games and the World Championships. Meanwhile, a new medium had arisen. The growth of television highlighted the need for a change in the ski racing’s format.

TV had already begun to make its presence felt in the skiing world, making stars out of what had formerly been ski racing champions on paper. Racers likes Jean Claude Killy, Karl Schranz and Leo Lacroix clamored for TV attention. International skiing was desperately in need of a new showcase.

Bonnet and Beattie had come up with the idea of an Alpine Countries Cup. The concept played down individual victories and elevated nation-by-nation racing. It was an excellent idea in itself, but unlikely to generate mass popular interest. Ski racing is a sport of individuals, not a team game. And TV wanted to concentrate on stars. Nevertheless, the national team competition idea persisted. The mid-March 1965 “World Series of Skiing” at Vail was restricted to nations – France, Austria and the U.S. -- whose athletes had won medals at the Innsbruck Olympic Games the year before.  Excluded were the Canadians and the Swiss. They were snubbed. And, in the view of some people, unfairly.

Meanwhile, something else happened in 1965. During the summer, in the heart of Roubaix, France, a dense crowd had gathered to witness the morning start of one of the stages of bicycling’s Tour de France. In the confusion, Jacques Goddet—chief editor of l'Equipe (the French daily sports newspaper) and head of the Tour de France itself - strode towards me in pressed khaki pants, like a central-casting British officer.

"Hello Serge" he said. "Listen, dear friend, no-one can make head nor tail of this ski racing business anymore. One day Killy is winning, the next it's Schranz, Marielle or Billy, Dick or Harry. Come on, get me something together. A challenge to decide the winner, a gimmick or an event like the Super Prestige Pernod in cycling. Fix it with Albert de Wetter and get me an outline before the end of the Tour de France" At that time, De Wetter, a noted journalist, was one of L'Equipe's two representatives in the Publicis group, the main advertising agency of this important sports paper.

Over an awful cacophony of car horns, De Wetter shouted at me: "I've found a client who wants to spend a quarter of a million to link his logo with skiing and snow—it's Evian mineral water. You get the picture—drink Evian and feel like you're in the French Alps. Set up a challenge with a ranking over a number of races...See you at Bordeaux."

On the eve of our next meeting, I drafted my project. There was to be a point system: in each race—25 points for the winner, 20 for the second, 15 for the third and so on, down to one point for a tenth place finish. There would be a dozen races. Everything was to begin at Hindelang in the western part of the Bavarian Alps and to end, at the beginning of March, in Muerren with the Arlberg Kandahar where all the points would be added up. It was a simple idea and, including the schedule, it fitted on two-double spaced pages.

I gave my outline to De Wetter the night of the Bordeaux stage of the Tour de France. It did not seem to interest him as much as it had a few days earlier in Roubaix. The first races were won by Karl Schranz and Marielle Goitschel,  yet the season-long competition was being named "Challenge de l'Equipe," and not "Challenge Evian." Because of a banal misunderstanding, the original sponsorship agreement had never been completed.

The "Challenge de L'Equipe" survived one year. A wasted year? Hardly. That season was a great prelude to the World Cup. After Billy Kidd, who led the Challenge after his slalom victory at Hindelang, injured himself during the Hahnenkamm slalom at Kitzbühel, no-one talked anything but the World Cup,  the name that had struck a chord a stone's throw from Hinterseer's farm.

Once Evian learned that what was at stake was no longer a challenge but an authentic World Cup under the aegis of the FIS, the mineral water company wanted to share it. So it happened that the first World Cup was graced by the  famous crystal globes introduced by Evian in 1968.

WITHOUT PORTILLO, IT MIGHT NOT HAVE HAPPENED

I have good reasons to believe that had the 1966 World Championships—then held every four years—taken place anywhere else but Portillo, Chile, in the Southern hemisphere far away from the Alps, the World Cup would never seen the light of the day. The Southern Cross was our lucky stars. If the World Championships had been awarded to a more traditional European venue - Davos, Garmisch or Kitzbühel for instance - our proposal for a World Cup - which would run throughout the season from country to country - would not have overcome the opposition of the conservative voices in skiing. But in Portillo, they were of no consequence. The potential political opponents did not come.

The move to Portillo was itself revolutionary. Think of it...what kind of idea was it, to go and hold world skiing championships in midsummer,  in a distant part of the globe, let alone to discuss a new idea for a World Cup? Anyway, at the crucial moment, the stick-in-the-muds were not there to bray that a World Cup would serve no purpose and would only cause additional problems. Of course, they made their positions known, but much later - too late, once everything had begun.

The whole set-up in Portillo was of vital importance too. The small resort was situated a few kilometers from the Chilean-Argentine border, perched at nearly 9,000 feet. All the skiers and officials had to live together in a single hotel offering only 100-odd beds. This excluded battalions of unwelcome visitors. Everything had to happen either in the hotel or on the slopes. While the Andes offered an admirable diversity of skiing, in the hotel everything was confined to dining room bar and the basement nightclub. It was in that bar, which was deserted after dinner, that Bonnet, Beattie, Sulzberger and I sat day in, day out discussing the new season-long, annual competition.

While the racers' attention was naturally fixed on the events of the World Championships, most of them, including Jean Claude Killy, greeted the idea of the World Cup with enthusiasm.

Yet a few months later, as the opening date of the first World Cup season of 1967 approached, I wondered. How would it be greeted by the countries with long skiing traditions, whose races were already classic events long before the World Cup? I need not have worried. The World Cup not only strengthened all the classic races, but it proved to be crucial in the development of more races and resorts.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS by John Fry

The first World Cup season of 1967 comprised seven slaloms, five giant slaloms and five downhills. A racer’s points were derived from his or her three best results in each discipline. It was a little bit like draw poker, where you discard an inferior card and hope to replace it with a better one. If you placed well in a race, the points replaced a previous lesser result. You could earn a maximum of 75 points for the season in each of the three disciplines, but as you got closer to attaining 75 points in giant slalom, for example, point gains diminished. You needed to turn to downhill and slalom to keep up in the overall standings.

In retrospect, the original World Cup formula—discarded after only a few seasons—was a good system. It truly rewarded all-round competitors. It involved only 17 races, compared with the bloated total of 30 or more created in later years—not by the press, but by ski politicians seeking to appease resorts and national federations.

Beginning in the 1970s, FIS officials fought against specialization in alpine skiing, by frequently changing the World Cup point formula. The battle to prevent technical specialists from winning the overall title was understandable, but  juggling the point formula removed any chance of comparing the performances of racers from year to year. In my judgment, it impoverished the sport’s history. Fans and journalists today cannot rate, for example, Hermann Maier’s 1998 World Cup points against Jean-Claude Killy’s or Ingemar Stenmark’s winning records.

As for the first World Cup season, it culminated in March,1967 when a huge entourage of racers, coaches, officials, press and their mountain of luggage and skis arrived in the United States for the first North American World Cup races at Cannon Mountain. Before the racers came to Cannon, we published a profile of Killy by Lang in SKI Magazine.  I created a program for the event, with an explanation of how the new winter-long circuit worked. It appeared as an insert in SKI Magazine, reaching 100,000 readers. As many as 15,000 spectators showed up. Killy won all three races. Sports Illustrated featured him on its cover. At the season-ending final ceremony at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, FIS President Marc Hodler presented Killy and Nancy Greene with Evian’s trophies.

The World Cup had proved a huge success! Serge Lang’s dream came true.

HOW THE NATIONS CUP STARTED

By John Fry

Serge Lang, en route from the FIS World Championships at Portillo to his home in Switzerland, visited me in my office in Manhattan on a hot August day in 1966.

“SKI Magazine should be involved in the new World Cup,” said Lang.

I gave Lang the usual answer to all proposals brought to the magazine at the time. “We don’t have any money.”

“That’s okay,” he responded. “Evian (the bottled water company) pays for everything. But we want American press exposure. Why don’t you present a trophy?”

“For what?”

“Come up with an idea,” said Lang.

“Right now, I don’t have an idea.”

“Fine, let’s go to lunch. I know a very good Italian restaurant on Madeeson Avenue.”

Extended, multi-course meals, laced with several bottles of vin rouge, were Lang’s way of finding solutions, as I came to learn. The Madeeson Avenue lunch produced no ideas, but waking the next morning, I came up with one. Why not group the points accumulated by each nation’s racers and create a team competition—albeit a statistical one? The team whose racers aggregated the most points by the end of the season would win a trophy, called The Nations Cup. Year by year, the standings would compare how the world’s alpine skiing nations rank in strength.

That morning, before Lang flew back to Europe, he dropped by my office, where I explained my concept to him. “And SKI Magazine will present the trophy,” I added, “not to an athlete, but to the head national coach, as a means of recognizing the role played by the trainers.”

“It’s good,” he said quietly. . .so quietly that I couldn’t tell if he was unenthusiastic, or sorry The Nations Cup wasn’t his own idea. “It’s good,” he repeated. We shook hands.

 
Although it was an American idea, the Nations Cup has never been won by the U.S. Ski Team. The Team did, however, win the women’s category in 1982; its best overall showing, second-place, was in 2006. In 42 winters so far, only Austria, Switzerland and France have won the Nations Cup.

NASTAR, the world's largest recreational racing program, began 50 years ago when this editor wanted to introduce the equivalent of golf's par to the sport of skiing.

The environment for people learning to ski has varied little over the years. Ungainly tip-crossing neophytes are herded into classes of eight to a dozen students. After a day, or perhaps five days, they emerge skilled enough to achieve what they want: to descend the mountain on pleasant trails, while enjoying the scenery and the company of friends. 

Most recreational skiers are like golfers who play a round without keeping score, or tennis players happily lobbing the ball back and forth across the net.

Beginning as editor-in-chief of SKI Magazine in the spring of 1964, I worked across the hall from the editorial office of GOLF Magazine, whose editorial director I would become five years later. GOLF's editors relied heavily on supplying readers with tips to lower their handicaps. Golfers could relate their scores to a PGA player's sub-par round, or their own putting to Arnold Palmer's challenge of sinking a 10-footer. How great it would be, I thought, if I could ratchet up SKI's newsstand sales using the same appeal! How great it would be if it were to become a goal of ski instruction!

To read the rest of this story, see the January-February 2018 issue of Skiing History magazine. To read the digital edition online, you must be a member of ISHA. Not a member? Join today!

NASTAR’s mid-1970s national coordinator fondly remembers the low-tech camaraderie of the racing program’s early days. 

By 1973, under the direction of former U.S. Ski Team coach and director Bob Beattie, NASTAR had expanded from the original eight to 80 ski areas, attracting recreational skiers to make 80,000 runs. With such rapid growth, Beattie—who was also running the World Pro Ski Tour—needed to expand his staff.

In the mid-winter of 1973, Bob Beattie decided to hire a public relations director for NASTAR, a job that had been held by Aspenite Greg Lewis. When Beattie tapped Lewis to announce his World Pro Ski Tour races, the NASTAR job opened, and I took it. By that spring, I’d been promoted to NASTAR national coordinator. 

It was a swift change of gears for me, a totally new world of big money, credit cards, expense accounts, fancy restaurants and lodges. “Nothing like going to restaurants where no entrée is under $7!,” I remember thinking at the time. But it wasn’t hard to get used to.

Back then, NASTAR operated in a low-tech world. To process results, we used a futuristic computer something akin to “Hal” of the then-popular film 2001 Space Odyssey. Hal sat in a cool, dark facility in Boulder. At our headquarters near the Aspen airport, we sorted hand-written weekly race results that we then shipped via courier to Boulder for punch-card processing, ultimately determining national finalists and other awards. Our office ran on Selectric typewriters, land lines, snail mail and hand labor.

SETTING THE PACE

The NASTAR season got underway each year with the December pacesetting trials to determine the national zero handicapper against whom all NASTAR scores were compared.

We traveled the country to run these events. Some memorable moments: torrential rain and impenetrable fog at Crystal Mountain, Washington; Indianhead, Michigan, where the local drink was cheap brandy and soda; too much snow and broken timing equipment at Sugarbush, Vermont; perfect venues and perfect hosts at Waterville Valley (New Hampshire), Alpine Meadows (California) and Vail (Colorado); and the Eastern Slopes Inn at Mt. Cranmore, where the pacesetters flocked to the indoor gym and pool after midnight.   

Austrian triple Olympic medalist Pepi Stiegler, director of skiing at Jackson Hole, was the perennial zero handicapper during my NASTAR stint, 1973 through 1977. He wasn’t unseated in my era. I recall watching Pepi slip effortlessly through the gates on Vail’s Golden Peak, with World Pro champion Spider Sabich waiting at the bottom, holding the lead. Pepi won again. “He doesn’t even look fast,” said Spider. “How the hell does he do it?” 

Spider and other stars of the World Pro Ski Tour—Olympians Hank Kashiwa, Otto Tschudi and Moose Barrows among them—brought PR glitz and personality to NASTAR. Touring pacesetter Barrows stood inside the day lodge atop the Indianhead slopes one year, skis and goggles on, fully suited and booted up. It was 30 below zero. He ventured outside only long enough to make his runs. Another time, we arrived in the dark of night at the massive Telemark Lodge in Cable, Wisconsin, with Alpine Meadows pacesetter Jorge Dutschke in tow. When we headed outside the next morning, he said, “I can’t see the ski hill; the lodge is in the way.” Hill vertical: about 300 feet.

Early on my twin sister Lisa was the only female pacesetter running with the men pacesetters, at the Vail trials, before Bonne Bell initiated its women’s pacesetter program. Keystone founder Max Dercum was perennially our oldest pacesetter, in his 50s at the time. Max personified NASTAR’s raison d’etre: pacesetters and racers alike all earned their handicaps when scored against Pepi’s time, adjusted by age.

SPONSORS COME AND GO

My first big NASTAR road trip was to Vail in mid-season 1973 to jumpstart the new Johnnie Walker Red Cross-Country NASTAR, with its own pacesetting trials. With my NASTAR colleagues, we welcomed a stalwart group of cross-country pros, including the hard-charging Ned Gillette, out of the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, who would go on to become one of the most successful big-mountain climbers and skiers of his generation.  

That sport was still in its infancy in the U.S. and this sponsorship was a mismatch lasting but one season. Granola-crunching Nordic skiers and ski bums were not scotch drinkers. As the corporate bigwigs feted us, we quietly poured their sponsored beverages into nearby potted plants. 

Doral cigarettes came on board the alpine NASTAR early on with a special windshirt prize. There was no such thing as an anti-smoking movement back then. Their execs in Winston-Salem had rarely seen snow and none of them skied. Small wonder they soon left NASTAR for bowling and stock car sponsorships.  

Bonne Bell was the first successful promoter of colorless sunblock lotion. No more zinc-covered clown noses. Their all-female Ski Team supplied glamour along with cases of product. 

Pepsi got what it wanted from its sponsorship of Junior NASTAR: NASTAR resorts had to agree to pour Pepsi, not the other big brand. With NASTAR’s growing popularity, it was a profitable deal for their regional distributors.  

We enjoyed a great relationship with Schlitz beer. Their white-haired, mild-mannered PR pro Don Dooley was an avid skier and a real workhorse who helped us through many a mad scramble posting Finals press releases, working alongside us well past midnight every year. We snail-mailed at least one release per competitor, with photograph, to each finalist’s hometown newspaper—more than 100 pieces, all handled manually.

SNAFUS IN THE OFFICE

The shared headquarters of NASTAR and the World Wide Ski Corporation was always chaotic and never dull. The office was ably managed by the colorful Jenni Seidel, who kept things rolling through storm and calm. She was infamous for kicking the copier to “fix” it; when that failed, she dumped wine into the toner. It worked!  

Imagine what it cost NASTAR for a marketing director’s blunder in ordering thousands of promotional posters he’d commissioned—a cartoon facsimile of Superman donning ski clothing in a phone booth—“From skier to racer in a single bound.” We were issued a cease-and-desist order by Marvel Comics and the whole truckload had to be dumped.  

One season a large batch of enameled NASTAR medals incurred serious chipping. There were a lot of unhappy customers. We got the problem fixed in a hurry, sent nice letters out with new medals and put that issue behind us. But I’ll never forget the charming hand-written note from one seven-year-old Squaw Valley girl thanking us for sending her a new medal. “Your letter is funny. The metal [sic] is pretty,” scribbled little Edie Thys [Morgan]. I always like to think NASTAR was Edie’s jumping-off point to the U.S. Ski Team and the 1988 and ’92 Olympics and her subsequent career as a ski writer.

THE SCHLITZ NASTAR FINALS 

The Schlitz NASTAR Finals were a big deal. How we managed it all without computers, email and fax machines is amazing to contemplate in today’s high-tech world.

Hal the computer spit out the results by mid-March, tapping the top regional recreational racers with the lowest handicaps, male and female, in adult age classes. The biggest miracle was how we got all of them to the same airport, at around the same time, from all points of the compass. We had to telephone each of 80 winners and arrange for their travel, coordinated by the doggedly efficient Aspen Travel agency.  

The NASTAR Finals of that era were an expense-paid trip for the finalists—free air, lodging, and bus to the venue from the airport. Nothing was more gratifying than calling up a winner and announcing, “You’ve won a free trip to the NASTAR Finals.” The responses were hilarious, some thinking we were a crank call, others screaming to family members in the background, but all buckling down to help us get them to the big event. Their excitement was contagious, even though we were exhausted by then.  

They came from all over the country, from all walks of life, of all ages, body shapes and sizes. There were no racing suits, no helmets, no special racing skis. It was competing for the pure fun of it. Out of hundreds of finalists in my NASTAR days, two come to mind who may jog the memories of Skiing History readers.

Goldie Slutzky, wife of Izzy, founder of Hunter Mountain with brother Orville, made the cut in 1974. The Finals were at Sun Valley, where four different weather patterns assaulted us—rain, hail, snow, fierce winds. There was no sun in Sun Valley. But our finalists were undaunted, least of all Goldie, whose bubbly personality buoyed all of us. When she completed her first run, she collapsed in a heap past the finish line. We rushed to her aid, only to hear her giggling. When we got her on her feet, she whispered, “I’ve split my stretch pants.” Quickly remedied with a draped wind jacket, Goldie carried on.

Then there was 10^th Mountain Division veteran J. Arthur Doucette from the Mt. Washington Valley of New Hampshire. He qualified for the Snowmass finals in 1976, at age 68 the oldest competitor I remember. He was on his sixth pacemaker and, at altitude, required an occasional nip from an oxygen tank. After completing his race runs, Arthur donned his full 10^th Mountain rucksack and white-camouflage uniform and skied the course again to wild cheers. 

The NASTAR finalists loved to ski and loved NASTAR. Though they came to compete, winning was not foremost in most of their minds. It was the spirit of NASTAR that bonded us all. Such memories last a lifetime.

Who’s the greatest? For skiers able to win under pressure, look to their single-Olympics record. By John Fry

Mention the greatest alpine ski racers of all time, and you usually hear a recitation of racers with career-long stats—for example, Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark, winner over 16 winters of a record 86 World Cup races; and Lindsey Vonn, who has broken Annemarie Moser-Proell’s 62 victories, with 78 by the end of 2017. Neither of them won more than one gold medal in a single Winter Games. And how about Marc Girardelli, with five World Cup titles? And Marcel Hirscher, with a record six? And Karl Schranz, at the top of his game from 1957 to 1972? None of the three is an Olympic gold medalist.    

Skiing’s superstars are athletes who don’t appear on lists counting most races won. They won races that most counted. At clutch time, in the Olympics, they showed up.  

“The greatest racers win gold at the Olympics and World Championships,” insists 1970 FIS Alpine World Champion Billy Kidd. “The events, compressed into a couple of weeks, demand something that doesn’t come into play in career-long performances and season-long accumulations of points…the ability to win when the chips are down.”

The most outstanding single Winter Olympics alpine skiing performance arguably belongs to Croatia’s Janica Kostelic. At Salt Lake in 2002, she won gold medals in the slalom and giant slalom, won silver in the Super G, and competed in two more races—a downhill and a slalom—to win the combined. She went on to triple-gold at the FIS World Alpine Ski Championships three years later. Not a few experts regard her as the greatest woman ski racer of all time.

Arguably the best male Olympian was 1956 champion Toni Sailer. The margins by which the Austrian superstar won his gold medals were staggering: 3.5 seconds in the downhill, a mind-boggling 6.4 seconds in the one-run giant slalom, and 4 seconds in the slalom. At the 1958 World Championships, Sailer almost repeated his Olympic hat trick, placing first in downhill and giant slalom, and second in the slalom. With jet-black hair and a movie star’s face, the handsome poster boy Sailer went on to act in films and TV mini-series. Later, he served as head coach of the Austrian national team, and chaired the FIS Alpine Committee.

Sailer and Jean-Claude Killy are the only racers to have captured all of the alpine gold medals available to be won in a single Olympics…in their eras,  there were just three. (Super G and actively raced combineds didn’t exist at the time.) Killy, 24, was already an internationally acclaimed champion before his 1968 Olympic triumph in the French Alps above Grenoble. The previous winter the Frenchman had won 71 percent of the races on the World Cup calendar, a feat never since repeated. (See “Killy’s Winter, Never Equaled,” Skiing History, January-February and March-April 2017) The pressure on Killy before the Grenoble Games was unimaginably intense. For days on end he was pursued by photographers, autograph seekers and worshipful fans. To escape, Killy went into seclusion a week before the lighting of the Olympic flame. When he showed up in the starting gate, he was psyched and ready. He pulled off the gold medal hat trick, albeit winning by narrower margins than Sailer had.

In an almost superhuman performance at the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics, Norway’s Kjetil Andre Aamodt competed in all five alpine events, gold-medaling in the Super G and the combined, placing 4^th in the downhill, 6^th in the slalom, and 7^th in GS. Remarkably, in four separate Winter Games, Aamodt won an unrivaled total of seven Olympic alpine medals.

Bavaria’s Rosi Mittermaier in 1976, and Liechenstein’s Hanni Wenzel in 1980, both narrowly missed performing the Sailer-Killy hat tricks. At the Innsbruck ’76 Olympics, after gold-medaling in the downhill and slalom, Mittermaier came within one-eighth of a second of winning the giant slalom. As a result she won the paper combined title, not an Olympic medal. Married to former German champion Christian Neureuther, Mittermaier is the mother of World Cup racer Felix Neureuther.

At the Lake Placid 1980 Winter Olympics, Liechenstein’s Hanni Wenzel won gold medals in the slalom and giant slalom, narrowly missing the hat trick with a silver in the downhill on Whiteface Mountain. She easily won the World Championship gold medal in the combined, its final appearance on paper as a statistical combination of slalom and downhill. That winter she won the 1980 overall World Cup season title as did her brother Andy, a family triumph. Hanni was banned from the 1984 Winter Olympics by the International Ski Federation (FIS) for accepting promotional payments directly, rather than through her national ski federation, removing her chance of winning another Olympic medal. Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark was similarly affected. Like Wenzel, he was a double gold medalist at Lake Placid. The only other Olympic medal Stenmark ever won was a bronze at Innsbruck in 1976. His record total of 86 World Cup wins has yet to be surpassed.    

In 1952 at Oslo, fiercely determined Andrea Mead Lawrence won two Olympic gold medals at the age of only 19, an unprecedented youthful achievement. She crashed in the downhill trying to win a third gold. She’s the only American to win twice in a single Olympics, a record that Mikaela Shiffrin may break in Korea. 

For an Olympic performance under pressure it’s hard to equal what Austria’s Hermann “the Herminator” Maier did at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Japan. After a spectacular airborne, body-crunching crash in the downhill, he rose like a man from the dead, and went on to win both the Super G and the giant slalom gold medals. Following a nearly fatal motorcycle crash in 2001 that left him with a mangled leg, Maier rose to become overall World Cup champion again. 

Switzerland’s Vreni Schneider was a 1988 double gold medalist in slalom and giant slalom at Calgary. Additionally, she won another three Olympic medals, including a gold, at Lillehammer in 1994, plus six FIS World Championship medals. She is one of the great women ski racers of all time, winning 55 World Cup races, a total exceeded only by Lindsey Vonn and Annemarie Moser Proell.  

Arguably the most electric personality who ever appeared in the starting gate of a ski race, Alberto Tomba was a double gold medalist at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. Over a dozen winters from 1986 to 1998, Tomba won 13 world championship and Olympic medals, plus no fewer than 50 World Cup slaloms and giant slaloms. Powerfully built, with curly black hair and a volcanically engaging Italian charisma, La Bomba at Calgary famously presented ice skater Katarina Witt with a huge bouquet of flowers as she glided off the ice from her gold-medal-winning performance.

Olympic medals can’t deliberately be won, once observed Bode Miller, who’s on camera as a technical analyst for NBC in Korea. “In ski racing,” he said, “you have on-days and off-days, and sometimes the Olympics fall on an off-day. It’s the law of averages.”

Maybe, but the great Olympic champions weren’t racers who succumbed to the inevitability of averages. They went out and conquered off-days and the law of averages by winning multiple medals. I bow in reverence to the golden men and women of our sport.  

John Fry covered the ski races at four Olympic Winter Games. “How Skiing Changed the Olympics” is the subject of a chapter in his award-winning book The Story of Modern Skiing, published in 2006.

Cross-country racers and jumpers who have dominated the Winter Games. By Bob Woodward

To be a dominant cross-country skier come the Olympics is to be a sprinter, a middle-distance ace and a marathoner. It’s tough. Ask Finland’s Juha Mieto, who took silver in both the men’s 15- and 50-kilometer events at the 1980 Lake Placid Games. In the 15K, Mieto went full bore from the start. In the 50K, he set a steady, workmanlike pace until the fast final ten kilometers. Unfortunately, Mieto doesn’t make the “dominant” list, as Soviet skier Nikolay Zimyatov won three gold medals (in the 30K, the 50K and the 4x10 relay) to rule the Lake Placid Olympics.

On the women’s side, Soviet great Alevtina Kolchina paved the way for those who came to rule the Games—among them, Galina Kulakova and Raisa Smetanina. It’s interesting to speculate how those two would do today in the skate/freestyle events. After all, they were easily the two most gifted and dominant athletes in the sport for years.

Men

1924 Thorleif Haug

1957 Sixten Jernberg

1964 Sixten Jernberg

1980 Nikolay Zimyatov

1992 Bjørn Daehlie and Vegard Ulvang

*Special mention to Gunde Svan for multiple medals in 1984 and 1988, and Thomas Alsgaard for medalling in 1994,1998 and 2002 

Women

1968 Toini Gustafsson

1972 Galina Kulakova

1976 Raisa Smetanina

1984 Marja-Liisa Hamalainen

2010 Marit Bjørgen

2014 Charlotte Kalla

*Special mention to Stefania Belmondo for medals in 1992,1994,1998 and 2002

Jumping

Historically, the jumping medals have been broadly distributed among athletes and nations. It’s hard to be dominant, as newer and younger talents enter the sport yearly. But there have been exceptions, and they are:

1932, 1936, 1948 Birger Ruud

1984 Jens Weisflogg

1988 Matti Nykänen 

*Special mention goes to Simon Ammann with medals in 2002 and 2010

Who’s the greatest men’s giant slalom racer of all time? With each passing generation, racing fans renew the ongoing debate. By Peter Oliver

It’s a pot that sports fans of all stripes love to stir. Call it GOAT stew—who is or was the Greatest Of All Time? Football’s Tom Brady or Joe Montana or Johnny Unitas? Tennis’s Roger Federer or Rod Laver or Bill Tilden? The hagiology of sporting greats is reassessed with each passing generation.

So when Steve Porino, the thoughtful ski-racing TV commentator, suggested on air that in today’s World Cup men’s giant-slalom field Austria’s Marcel Hirscher, the U.S.’s Ted Ligety, and France’s Alexis Pinturault were the GS GOATs from their respective countries, the stewpot stirred on the hot stove of Porino’s Facebook page. All sorts of World Cup history buffs chimed in.

Hirscher? Yes, though with a strong challenge from Hermann Maier. Ligety? Certainly, though the Mahre brothers could arc pretty decent medium-radius turns, too. But Alexis Pinturault? A great GS racer to be sure, but had Porino forgotten a Frenchman named Jean-Claude Killy? 

Pitting athletes of different eras against one another is always nettled with complication in the search for common comparative ground. And for the record, there’s little argument that the greatest GSer from any country was and is the inimitable Swede, Ingemar Stenmark, who won 46 World Cup GS races in a 16-year career. 

But back to the Pinturault-Killy debate. Porino based his call, fairly enough, on total wins, and indeed, Pinturault passed Killy’s nine World Cup GS wins in December. But how about winning percentage instead? Pinturault wins about 17 percent of the World Cup GS races he enters—pretty darned good, until stacked against Killy’s brilliant GS winning rate of 82 percent.

To be fair, Killy’s World Cup career lasted just two seasons and 11 GS races (he was second and third in the two he didn’t win). So a very small sample. Still, Pinturault didn’t get his Killy-topping tenth World Cup GS win until his 59^st start. Checkmark in the Killy column.

But not so fast. . .The shortness of Killy’s career gave him the unfair advantage of being in his prime for every World Cup race he entered. He was 23 years old when the World Cup was launched in 1967, and he retired at just 25. His World Cup record doesn’t include years of pre-prime apprenticeship, as Pinturault’s record does, nor late-career decline. Also, when Pinturault began as a 17-year-old in 2009, Ligety and Hirscher were already dominant World Cup forces. 

Raising another point: GS fields in Killy’s day weren’t as strong or deep. Switzerland’s Edmund Bruggmann and Austria’s Herbert Huber, second and third to Killy in the 1968 GS standings, were competent, but they were hardly Hirscher and Ligety.

Killy was unquestionably the better all-rounder. He raced and won in three disciplines—slalom, GS, and downhill—and won 67 percent of all the World Cup races he entered. In today’s age of specialization, Pinturault has raced just four World Cup downhills, without distinction. 

In 2018, however, Killy would probably be a specialist, too. The grueling 2017–18 World Cup schedule comprises 42 races, including Olympic events, discouraging all-event participation. The 1968 World Cup schedule, including three Olympic events, consisted of just 22 races. Last year, as a tech-event specialist, Pinturault still entered 26 World Cup races, 11 more than Killy did as an all-eventer in 1968.

Almost no one attempts the Herculean effort of all-event racing today, especially when current World Cup scoring rules—very different than in Killy’s day—have allowed a specialist like Hirscher to win six straight overall titles without scoring points in a single downhill. As an all-eventer in winning his first World Cup overall title in 2005, Bode Miller entered a punishing 36 World Cup races (plus another five world championship races).

Pinturault’s career is obviously a long way from over. So, too, is the ongoing GOAT debate. 

What if you thought that you’d straddled a slalom gate pole, and the gatekeeper missed seeing it? And you earned a good result for you and your team?

            It happened this past February during the New York State Slalom Championships at Bristol Mountain in the Adirondacks. John Emerson, 15, a sophomore at John Jay High School in Westchester County, 30 miles north of Manhattan, was among the youngest in a 64-boy field. Starting 53rd in the first run, he blistered the course, registering the ninth fastest time.

            Against racers with single-digit bib numbers in the second run, he wound up in sixth place, enough for a medal in the NY State Championships.

            Yet something about the run didn’t seem right to Emerson. After the race, he watched the video his father had taken. In super-slow motion, on a large computer monitor, he clearly saw that he’d straddled one of the gates.

            “In real-time it was only a fraction of a second and impossible to see, but in slow motion the video was clear,” wrote Ken Kostick in the Bedford Record Review.

            And so, less than a half hour before the medal ceremonies for the top finishers in the slalom events, Emerson made a startling announcement. He would not accept the fifth-place result, nor the honor that went with it.

            New York State Public High School Athletics Association chief Robert Zayas said at the awards ceremony that he’d never witnessed an act of sportsmanship as great as Emerson’s. Athletes, coaches and parents gave the young man a standing ovation.

            “In a sport with more than 1,300 active high school racers,” said John Jay ski coach Chris Reinke, “John demonstrated the highest level of sportsmanship.”

            “There is no podium for what this individual did,” said John Jay coach Tom Adamec. “It was an act that was selfless, honest, compelled by integrity and, most of all, loyalty to oneself.”

            Chris’ older brother is also a promising racer. Says their father Tony Emerson, “Ski racing involves hard work, danger, speed, brutal weather, how to deal with losing, and more. There’s no better sport to teach kids lessons in adversity.”  --Seth Masia

INTERVIEW by Yves Perret

In an exclusive interview, Jean-Claude Killy recalls the first season of the World Cup, 50 years ago, when he won 12 of the 17 races, all of the downhills, and finished on the podium in 86% of the races he entered, a record never surpassed.

The winter of 1967 remains one of the most memorable in alpine ski competition history. Not only did it introduce the new World Cup—skiing’s first use of a season-long series of competitions to determine the world’s best—it also resulted in an astonishing, never-to-be-repeated record. Jean-Claude Killy won 12 out of the 17 slalom, giant slalom and downhill races on the calendar. He finished on the podium in 86 percent of the 29 races he entered. 

In an exclusive interview with sports editor Yves Perret in the last issue of Skiing History (January-February 2017), Killy told about the origins of the World Cup, his motivations, and his early victories in the historic first season of the World Cup, which this year is celebrating its 5oth anniversary. Part Two is the conclusion. 

Killy had just won both the downhill and slalom at Wengen, Switzerland. Now came a high point of the season—the classic Hahnenkamm competition at Kitzbühel, Austria. . .

Kitzbühel was a special moment. What was it like for you?

Competing at Kitzbühel is the most exciting thing imaginable for a ski racer. You’re in Austria, where skiing is the national sport. We were challenging the guys who embody skiing itself, cheered on by an immense crowd of spectators. I was respected, but my relationship with the Austrian public could be complicated. To relieve myself from the pressure of fans surrounding our living quarters, I sometimes would even send Jean-Pierre Augert, who looked a lot like me, to go into the crowd and sign autographs. 

Winning in Kitzbühel is every skier’s dream. That year I won the downhill, the slalom, and the combined, and I became the first—and still the only—skier to achieve the double-double win in Wengen and Kitzbühel, or triple win including the combined. Nowadays we don’t realize what that represented, but winning the combined was important even if it didn’t count for World Cup points and was a mathematical point combination.

In the Hahnenkamm downhill, the world’s most difficult and dangerous, I came in ahead of the German Franz Vogler by 1.37 seconds, and I beat the course record held by Austria’s Karl Schranz. 

The Kitzbühel slalom is magnificent—staggeringly varied, with sidehills and rhythm changes. The atmosphere can be hostile for rivals of the Austrian team. You have to stay in a bubble, keep concentrated, be removed from the noise and the pressure, focusing on your own run. I was the fastest in both runs of the slalom. I beat by more than two seconds the Swede Bengt-Erik Grahn, who was one of the best slalom specialists of the era. 

I’ll never forget the atmosphere that weekend. The local ski instructors carried me across on their shoulders to the podium to receive my awards. This would have been unthinkable a couple of years earlier. “Superman on Skis!” headlined the Austrian daily Kronen Zeitung the next day.

After that victorious weekend, Austria’s greatest racer, Toni Sailer wrote, “Killy is practicing a different kind of skiing, a kind of skiing that is a step above that of the best skiers. His wins are those of an all-around athlete who has reached maturity.” By then I had scored 151 out of the maximum of 175 achievable points at that stage in the season. Austria’s Heini Messner, who was in second, had 75 points.

The winning streak continued with the downhill in Megève…

The Emile Allais course was very demanding, with the Bornet face being the most difficult and dangerous section of all of the international downhill races I’d competed in. I beat the Swiss Hans Peter Rohr by two seconds. . . my best downhill ever. I was amazed by the lead. It was my eighth consecutive win. We were in the last days of January, and the 1967 World Cup downhill title was already mine.

Périllat came out ahead in the slalom. He apologized for having beaten me. He had especially wanted to beat Austria’s Karl Schranz, our perpetual rival. I was sick and I fell in the first run, but I finished second anyway, and I won the combined.

I didn’t compete in the World Cup slalom at Madonna di Campiglio, Italy. I took two weeks off. I was imitating Toni Sailer in a way. Before his triple gold medal win at the 1956 Olympics, Toni took several days off from skiing. “That’s what you should do,” he advised.

After resting, I made a comeback at Chamrousse in the February pre-Olympic races, where I won the downhill, as I would the following year in the real Olympics, when I again followed Toni’s strategy of taking a week off. 

Throughout my career, I took inspiration from other top racers in order to optimize my skiing. I watched the way Adrien Duvillard carved his turns. I even copied the weightlifting exercises that I saw Soviet high jumper Valery Brummel do on TV. In 1952 at Val d’Isère when I was a boy, I watched in amazement when Italian champion Zeno Colò started so violently that the starter, who had put his hand on his shoulder, was carried down the hill.  

In the weeks that followed, I continued winning. The season was about confronting each race, one day at a time.  At Sestrières, Italy I won the Kandahar downhill. I liked the course and the beautiful section coming into the forest. We pulled off an all-French podium in the downhill: Killy, Orcel, Périllat. I also went away with a win in the combined. 

The season ended in the USA in March. What was your experience there?

I was on a cloud. I had no doubts, no worries, no anxiety. Going to the States was something we’d been looking forward to. I was close friends with the American racers Billy Kidd and Jimmie Heuga, the son of a French Basque shepherd who had immigrated to the United States. Both were magnificent skiers. I'd met Jimmie in the summer of 1964, my first visit to the U.S. Then in 1965 and 1966 I'd competed in races organized by Bob Beattie. Nothing compared to my U.S. arrival in March 1967, though. A press conference was held when we stopped in New York. We met the governor of Massachusetts. Sports Illustrated, which featured me on its cover three times in my career, ran headlines like “Lafayette, They Are Back.” TIME Magazine hailed me “King Killy.” 

For me, though, the most important thing was to stay on track for the rest of the season, and finish the job.

The Franconia event was very important…

Huge crowds—thousands more spectators than had ever appeared at a U.S. alpine ski event—thronged the slopes of Cannon Mountain, New Hampshire. I won the downhill. I made the last difficult turn above the finish faster than anyone, and it was later named Killy’s Corner. I also won the GS, the slalom and the combined. I had won decisively in all three alpine disciplines, exactly like the gold medal hat trick I performed 11 months later in the Olympics at Chamrousse.

By then I was sure to win the World Cup. It was a special moment of satisfaction, though the season wasn’t yet over.

There were two more events, Vail and Jackson Hole. How did you approach them?

Winning the Nations Cup became the objective that pushed us as a team, not to give an inch. Plus, our own Marielle Goitschel had the chance to win the women’s overall World Cup, which would have been a double triumph for France. It’s always a great moment when you win as a team.

There were four races in Vail: one slalom, one downhill and two one-run giant slaloms. I won all of them. The last race, on Sunday, counting for World Cup points, was held in a terrible snowstorm. 

At Vail, four or five of us shared the same room in the home of our host, Suzie Meyer. It was a fun time. From Vail, I traveled with Louis Jauffret and our friend Bernard Cahier, a famous motor racing journalist, to California, where racing car designer Carol Shelby was waiting for us in his workshop near LA airport. We flew in Carol’s personal plane to Riverside, where we drove all day long on the circuit. 

After a night in Las Vegas, we went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for the World Cup Finals. Here two more races—a giant slalom and a slalom—would be held. I was tired; I’d had a sinus infection the previous days. In order to save energy and have a little fun, I inspected the giant slalom course in a sled! I won the race. It was amazing! Including Europe, I had just won nine races in a row—three  downhills, two slaloms, and four giant slaloms. 

In the last race, the slalom at Jackson Hole, I DQ’d. But I had already earned the maximum World Cup points, 75, in each discipline, ending the season with the maximum possible 225 World Cup points. The Evian mineral water company, first sponsor of the World Cup, paid for my father to come to Jackson Hole, bringing with him the crystal trophy. The official presentation was held later in Evian, France.  

The trophy presentation took place in Jackson Hole’s Cowboy Bar. It was preceded by a reception, with free margaritas and pisco sours for all. It was wild night. I remember that the sheriff came to make order in the streets and—I don’t know how—Marielle (Goitschel) dropped him to the floor. He finally understood who we were, and everything turned out okay.  

The season was over, or almost. There were still a couple of races in Switzerland when I got home. I won a GS at Verbier, and Mauduit beat me in Thyon. But it was on the American tour that the bulk of the job was finished.

Who were your main rivals during that magic winter?

The winter of 1967 was notable for an incredible density of talent. No fewer than 14 skiers from seven different nations placed second in the races that I won. In the overall World Cup, I scored almost twice as many points as the runner-up, Austrian Heini Messner. He was a classic skier—a reserved man but consistent and hard to beat. He was followed in the standings by my teammates—Périllat, Lacroix and Mauduit—and my great buddy Jimmie Heuga. Four times during the season I’d found myself on top of the podium with Jimmie.  

It was an era when an amateur spirit was still felt in the sport. There was a real affinity among us skiers from all different countries. Once on the course, we were rivals, but it didn’t alter our relationships. People talked about a rivalry with Karl Schranz, but the battle took place on skis. The rest of the time we got along really well. With all the skiers of that era, there are plenty of shared memories, moments of laughter, and anecdotes.

This incredible season generated a remarkable level of media coverage and fame. How did you handle it?

Media attention quickly came from beyond the few newspapers and magazines that typically cover international alpine skiing. After my win at Wengen, the media following us were no longer the usual ones like Paris Match and the French television show, Cinq Colonnes à la Une. The popular mass tabloids were onto us. They wanted to know everything about us. . . not just our lives as athletes. By the end of the 1967 season, the tour was a media frenzy.

Guy Périllat warned me in January, at the Tennein Kitzbühel, where we traditionally celebrated our success. He said, “Watch out, don’t get caught up in what happens around you. It brought me down after my 1961 season [Ed. note: In that season Périllat won all the downhills, followed by a dry spell that lasted several seasons.] But I know that won’t happen to you because you know how to keep things in perspective.”

With my experience of 1967, I learned how to deal with the constant presence of special correspondents from the French and international press. I had to be able to open the doors, then close them. That was also what I did the following Olympic season in Grenoble. A 30-minute press conference every day and that was it.

The American tour proved hugely rewarding for me. I had offers from sports agents. I was offered $200,000 to join the professional circuit and manage a ski school in the States. A lot was expected of me, but I had to stay focused on the Olympics the following year.

When did you become aware of the exceptional nature of the 1967 season?

I never really grasped it entirely. I didn’t realize what I’d achieved. Of course, there were the numbers: winner of 19 races out of 29, including 12 World Cups out of 17, and seven of the season’s combineds for a total of 26 first-place finishes. But I never said to myself, “Wow, that’s fantastic!” It’s taken me 50 years to realize how remarkable it was.

In Grenoble in 1968, by comparison, things were actually relatively simple. There were three races within a set period of time, at a date identified well in advance, with an objective that was fairly clear. The 1967 season was a more complicated, elaborate construction. Comparing them is like comparing a sprint and a marathon. 

In the summer of 1967, I quickly moved on to something new. I had an overwhelming passion for motor sports. I won The Targa Florio with Bernard Cahier and drove 1000 KM of Monza, the 24 hours of Le Mans, and the 1000 KM Nurbürgring behind the wheel of a Porsche or an Alpine. It was good to experience other sensations, and new challenges. Now, 50 years later, I’ve had the pleasure of revisiting this incredible season at the request of Skiing History. Thank you!

Yves Perret, who heads a sports media agency in Grenoble, is former sports editor of the Dauphiné Libéré newspaper, and was editor-in-chief of Ski Chrono.

By Michel Beaudry

Nancy Greene of Canada came from behind to win the 1967 inaugural World Cup overall title by the slimmest of margins in a thrilling final race.

Nancy Greene Raine is a force of nature. A two-time overall FIS World Cup champion (1967-1968) and an Olympic gold and silver medalist at the 1968 Winter Games, Greene Raine was raised in the ski-mad town of Rossland, British Columbia. Her contributions to the sport are legion. Along with husband Al Raine, she was an early promoter of Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains in BC before being drawn east to Sun Peaks in the mid-1990s, where the couple has played an integral role in making it one of the country’s most successful year-round mountain resorts. Her namesake program—the Nancy Greene Ski League—has been the gateway to racing for young Canadians for nearly 50 years. In January 2009, she was appointed as a Conservative member of Canada’s Senate.

In this exclusive interview, conducted in November 2016, Greene Raine, 73, looks back at the 1967 World Cup season, which she won by the slimmest of margins after mounting a late-season comeback.

Only one race left. And the young ski racer they call Tiger knows exactly how high the stakes are. Considered by many to be out of the running for the inaugural World Cup after failing to score any points for nearly two months, 23-year-old Nancy Greene of Canada has mounted an impressive comeback these last few weeks. It started with a third in Franconia, followed by a big-time win in Vail; then came Jackson Hole and a crushing victory in yesterday’s giant slalom. Suddenly her main rival is within reach again. But France’s Marielle Goitschel is still the overwhelming favorite. The only way Tiger can be crowned 1967 overall champion is by winning the slalom today. It’s all or nothing.

Still, Greene is coming into Sunday’s race with a big head of steam. “By this point in the season,” she explains, “I know that if I ski well I can beat anyone. So I’m going for victories, not for fourth-place finishes.” Her giant slalom result on Rendezvous Mountain the day before underscored that attitude: She dominated the one-run race by 1.72 seconds. She’s now only one win away from the title. She knows she can do this.

But the two-run slalom offers its own challenges. “The first run is always a bit of a gamble,” she says. “You want to go flat out and take risks, but you also want to make it to the second run.” Clearly, the same thing is running through the minds of her opponents. For when Sunday’s first run is completed and the times tallied, barely a tenth of a second separates Greene from Goitschel and French teammate Florence Steurer. The ski gods obviously want a dramatic finish to the season.

Who is this Canadian woman who dares to challenge the French skiing juggernaut of the late 1960s? And how the heck has she managed to hoist herself atop the World Cup standings?

Disappointment in portillo

Although Nancy Greene’s story really begins in the remote mountain town of Rossland, British Columbia, one need only revisit the 1966 World Alpine Skiing Championships in Portillo, Chile to get a glimpse of her exceptional drive to succeed.

“I went down to South America with very big goals,” she begins. “I fully expected to be on the podium there.” Makes sense. As a sixteen-year old newcomer to the Canadian Team, Greene had witnessed her mentor and roommate, Anne Heggtveit, win gold at the 1960 Olympics in Squaw Valley. And it had inspired the teenager tremendously. Now, six years later, the experienced racer thought she too could bring skiing glory to her country. But could she really do it? “I was too nervous in the slalom and didn’t perform very well,” she says. “But the downhill was coming up and I knew I was skiing fast.”

Alas, the downhill proved even more disastrous. “I remember my coach quietly telling me in the start gate: ‘Win it! Win it for me, Nancy.’” She sighs. “I guess that got me a little too excited. Near the bottom of the course there was this big roll over a road tunnel. In training, I’d always wind-checked before hitting it. But on race day I decided to take it straight.” Bad decision. “I crashed and somersaulted right into a retaining wall made of ice. I knew I had a good run going. I could even see the finish line…So frustrating.” 

Her best event, the giant slalom, was next. But badly bruised from her downhill fall (and skiing with an undiagnosed fractured tailbone), Greene finished just out of the medals in fourth place. 

Meanwhile, the French team, Les Bleus, had dominated the championships: Two out of every three medals had gone to them. As for Marielle Goitschel, she had won everything but the slalom…and only teammate Annie Famose had skied faster in that race. 

But Tiger didn’t come away from Chile entirely empty-handed. Says Greene Raine: “Rossignol had just come out with a new fiberglass ski they wanted me to try, called the Strato. So I tested a pair in La Parva before the World Championships. And I loved skiing on them. But I decided that I shouldn’t switch skis before such a big event, and I hid them under a huge stack of ski bags so I wouldn’t be tempted.”

Nancy returned home with her new skis and an even greater determination to win. “My coach, a former racer called Verne Anderson, also lived in Rossland,” she says. “And together we trained with a veteran who’d been a fitness trainer in the military. He knew nothing about skiing. But he knew everything about weight training.”

Greene had another secret weapon. The Canadian Team was now based out of Notre Dame University in nearby Nelson, BC. “It was so practical to have a place where everyone could live and work and study together,” she says. Smiles. “Besides, training with the men’s squad meant there was always somebody to chase.”

Things were also progressing well on-snow. And the more she skied on her new Rossignol skis, the more Nancy realized how much they suited her style. “They were 207cm giant slalom skis, and they really set me up for the season. In those days the thinking was that fiberglass skis were great on hard snow but you needed metal skis to go fast on softer snow.” She stops. Laughs. “Well, I trusted those Stratos so much that when I left for the first European races of the 1967 season, I left my metal skis at home.” 

It was a radical decision—and a risky one, given the dramatically different way ski races were being organized that year. “We really didn’t know much about this new circuit called ‘The FIS World Cup’ when we got to Europe in January,” she says. “I’m not even sure the Canadian Ski Association fully understood what was going on. We were all a bit surprised by the changes.”

And yet from the moment she came charging out of the gate that year, Tiger made her presence felt. Two World Cup races in Oberstaufen, Germany (a slalom and a giant slalom) and a gap of 1.24 seconds between her and the next finisher in the GS. At the second World Cup stop, in fabled Grindelwald, Switzerland, Greene won twice more, this time adding downhill points to her mounting World Cup lead. Five races, four victories. The Europeans were in shock.

Greene continued to ski well, if not quite at the same scintillating pace. In Schruns, Austria she was third in the slalom and fourth in downhill. Though they were closing the gap, the French women were still behind in the race for the overall crown.

But the members of the Canadian Team had race obligations back in North America and were scheduled to return home. Would Greene be forced to accompany them? “It wasn’t common practice to leave athletes behind to compete on their own in those days,” explains Greene Raine. “But at the last minute, our coaches decided that my teammate Karen Dokka and I would remain in Europe for one more event.”

They didn’t have it particularly easy. “We were responsible for everything,” she says. “We even had to prep and wax our own skis. Still, it was a lot of fun. It felt very liberating to be left alone like that.” But the lack of team support began to show and she failed to earn any points at the next two races in St-Gervais, France. Still, when she left for home in February, many on the circuit were convinced Tiger was making the biggest mistake of her career. By missing the last European stops, they argued, she was leaving the door wide open for her rivals to score points.            

The World Cup points formula was complex that year: only the top three results in each discipline would count toward an athlete’s total in the race for the overall title. “But my dad, the engineer, had crunched all the numbers,” she says. “He was confident that there were still enough races in the spring for me to make up the point deficit.”

And so was Nancy. “I knew that I had to start strong in those first March races in New Hampshire. And if I could do that, well…” Although it was less than the victory she needed, Tiger managed to scratch her way onto the giant slalom podium in Franconia. But it was during the slalom the next day that she had her big revelation.

“The Canadian Team had been working with plastic boots since the previous spring,” she remembers. “One of our coaches, Dave Jacobs, had struck a close relationship with Bob Lange and so the Canadian men had been testing his boots for some time. Well, my feet were so small that it took Lange a long while to make a boot my size. But by March of ’67 they were done, and I received my first pair just before the slalom in Franconia.” A pause. “I remember skiing with them that afternoon. I couldn’t feel a thing. ‘I can’t ski with those,’ I thought. ‘Way too stiff.’”

But the skies cleared that night and Nancy watched the day’s mushy March snow freeze into a hard, firm surface. “I was still struggling with my decision: go with my soft leather boots or try the stiff plastic ones. But then I realized: ‘It’s going to be boilerplate tomorrow. What better time to use the new boots?’”

It wasn’t love at first try. “I was all over the place on my first run… skiing really raggedy. But I got the hang of those boots by the second run and skied really well. Unfortunately I didn’t finish—I caught a tip near the bottom of the course. Still, I knew what I could achieve in those boots with a little practice.”

She never looked back. By the giant slalom in Vail, Greene was in full form again, winning the run by more than half a second. Only the World Cup finals remained. “My dad was still tabulating the points,” says Greene Raine. “’All you have to do,’ he said, ‘is win the last two races and the title is yours.’”

Last Stop, Jackson Hole

For some athletes the pressure would be unbearable. But Tiger thrives on it. Like a laser-guided missile, Greene launched into her Grand Teton weekend by blowing her competitors away in the season’s penultimate race. By the next day and the start of the slalom’s second run, Greene was in a three-way tie for the race lead. The overall title was now within her grasp. But the Canadian had to win the run.

“The course-setter for the second run has provided the racers with a choice,” she remembers. “There’s an elbow set halfway down the course. The rhythm goes one way, but if you jam your skis hard, you can straight-line the gates, and come out of the elbow with way more speed. But it’s risky…” 

Greene sees the trick passage during inspection and thinks, ‘I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m going to shoot the gate.’ But it might prove costly. While most of the women take the easier route, the racer just ahead of her attempts the straighter line, catches a tip at the top of the elbow and takes out all the gates.

Now it’s the Canadian racer’s turn to worry. “There I am standing in the start gate thinking to myself: ‘If they re-set the course any different than it was, I’m hooped.’” 

Meanwhile, the announcer at the finish line is whipping up the crowd. What he doesn’t know is that there are loudspeakers at the start too. Says Greene Raine: “I’m still in the start gate, waiting for the course to be cleared, and all I can hear is the emcee saying over and over: ‘The next racer is Nancy Greene. She needs to win here, folks, second place isn’t any good.’” She laughs. “I think it’s around the fourth time that he says ‘this could be the most important moment in her life’ that something snaps inside me. ‘This is ridiculous,’ I think. ‘It’s Easter Sunday. Look at the view. What a beautiful place this is.’” She pauses for a beat. 

“I’ll always remember that moment,” she says. “It was like an out-of-body experience. And it put me in just the right frame of mind to race that final run.” Another stop. More laughter. “Well, I shot the gate just like I’d planned, and made it safely to the finish line. I think I beat Marielle by 0.07 of a second in the total time.” But it was enough. Tiger had just won history’s first ever World Cup of skiing by the merest of margins: four points (176-172). It was a racing tour de force rarely matched since. And it ensured Nancy Greene’s place in the ski pantheon of all-time greats.