Where are they now?

 Revolutionizing gear and transforming media, Douglas led the way.

Back in high school, all Mike Douglas wanted from Salomon were the gloves and the kneepads. He’d go into the local ski shop, Action Sports in Campbell River, British Columbia, and watch skiing videos. “The coolest skiers all had the blue kneepads with the big ‘S’ and the matching white gloves,” he says.

(Photo top: As a member of the Canadian Air Force, Mike Douglas bombs Whistler-Blackcomb powder. Courtesy Mike Douglas.)

Little did he realize what kind of impact Salomon SA, a French brand that was only known for making ski boots and bindings back in 1985, would have on his life. Nor would the Savoyards realize how a kid from Vancouver Island would help them become a global sporting giant.

Growing up on Vancouver Island was a surprisingly isolating experience, in retrospect. “Powder magazine was our only connection to the outside world,” Douglas told podcaster Mike Powell in 2016. Halfway through his first semester at the University of Victoria, Douglas moved to Whistler, he says, to “get skiing out of his system.” He started hanging around with established freestyle talents like John Smart from the Blackcomb Freestyle Team and began badgering photographers so that he could get into magazines and line up sponsorships. He progressed quickly, finishing in the top three in both moguls and aerials in the 1989–90 season, then moved up to the Canadian national team a year later.

From 1989 to 1993, Douglas gave it his all in an attempt to gain a spot on the Canadian Olympic team—only to be named as “first alternate” for the Lillehammer games in Norway in 1994. Douglas told Powell, “Four of the six top mogul skiers on the World Cup at the time were from Canada, but I wasn’t one of them. I got measured for the uniform in case another member got sick or injured, but never made it to the Games.”

Needing to earn some cash to stay in Whistler, Douglas started coaching for the Blackcomb Freestyle Team. It was a summer spent coaching and skiing on Blackcomb Mountain’s Horstman Glacier that changed his trajectory—and the sport of freestyle—forever. “I was the Canadian development team mogul coach, coaching JF Cusson, JP Auclair and Vincent Dorion at the time,” says Douglas. “After our mogul-training sessions, we’d hit the jumps and halfpipes at the snowboard park and imitate their maneuvers on skis.”

It was a dizzying world, where snowboarders would alley-oop out of a halfpipe and rotate their bodies once, twice, three times before re-entering the half-pipe orbit. Because snowboarders rode at right angles to the fall line, they could spin and land on their dominant leg, or “switch.” The squared-off tails of the dominant mogul skis being used at the time precluded any smooth backward landing.

The impetus to create an entirely new ski—one that would ski almost as well going backward as forward—came from the Japanese team’s mogul coach, Steve Fearing, who “pushed us to conceptualize what our perfect ski would be,” Douglas says.

“We strategically made the decision that we didn’t want to just have a company make what they thought we needed,” he continues. “We were adamant about the design of the skis. We put together quite an impressive video presentation and put it in front of the nine biggest ski companies at the time, but it was rejected by pretty much everyone except for Salomon. Some companies were happy to sponsor us as skiers, but we needed a twin-tip ski that could take the sport into the future.”

In the 1980s, several prominent French Canadian freestyle skiers were nicknamed the Canadian Air Force for their innovative maneuvers in moguls and on the aerial ramp. As a tribute to their mentors, in 1995 the four Salomon skiers would be dubbed the New Canadian Air Force, and Douglas, their coach, would henceforth be known as the Godfather of New School, or the Godfather of Freeskiing. Douglas had always been interested in filmmaking and even made a ski video as part of a class project in high school. From the beginning, Douglas filmed his protégés’ exploits at the summer training camps.

Douglas and his posse eventually signed a contract with Salomon, but the early prototype skis from France were terrible. “This was when carving was big, especially in Europe. Their designer turned the tails up on a 152-centimeter ski called the Axe Cleaver and expected it to work,” Douglas explains.

Ski historians will note that Olin and Kästle, amongst others, made twin-tip skis for ballet back in the 1970s. The TenEighty, however, was nothing like the straight-sided dance numbers used by Alan Schoenberger and Suzy Chaffee. Salomon’s new pipe-and-bumps ski proved to work magic.

Douglas says, “In February of 1997, we got our very first production models, just after JP won the Big Air title at the first U.S. Open of Freeskiing held in Vail.” When the 1998 season hit, “everyone wanted a piece of the TenEighty. It totally blew up the year after Salomon introduced it, and they really got it right this time,” he says. Twenty years later, Douglas would commemorate the ski in a Salomon Freeski TV video called Becoming History: 20 Years of the TenEighty.

While there were worthy twin-tips made by Line, K2, Dynastar and others, the lively pop of the TenEighty’s cap construction and its relatively wide waist profile made it a ski that excelled at park and pipe; and, indeed, all over the mountain.

As the New School movement boomed, so did a whole new range of aerial tricks in the halfpipe and later, the terrain park. Skate- and snowboard-inspired flips, spins, grabs and rotations became the norm. The TenEighty takes its name from the skier boosting three consecutive 360-degree rotations before landing—one thousand and eighty degrees. Douglas himself is credited with inventing the “D-Spin,” a corkscrew-type move that combines a backflip with two complete body spins or rotations.

An entire ecosystem of events took place that often combined skiers and boarders competing in the same terrain parks and halfpipes. After a couple of years of competing in the nascent ESPN X Games, Douglas provided color commentary for the skiing events. The inclusion of slopestyle, halfpipe and big air showed that indeed, “skiing was cool, again.” The TenEighty and its various clones had a knock-on effect that continues to this day; sales of twin-tip skis skyrocketed, while snowboarding’s growth flattened, and then almost flat-lined.

From a visual perspective, the next progression of New School skiing was to take twin-tip skis into the backcountry and use natural features like cliffs, wind-lips and cornices. Again, Douglas and Salomon were ahead of the curve in developing the ridiculously user-friendly TenEighty Pocket Rocket, a floaty, wide powder ski with turned-up tails styled from the original TenEighty. The Pocket Rocket’s appeal went far beyond the jib set, however, and became the ski of choice on big powder days at Whistler Blackcomb, Douglas’s home mountain. Park rats could now flip and spin in spectacular natural locations around the world, accessible via snowmobile, helicopter or even on foot.

By the time Salomon discontinued its run, the TenEighty had become a brand unto itself, with almost 50 different topsheets and iterations, from mogul skis to athlete signature skis to the immensely successful X-Scream mid-fat ski.

While working at ESPN, Douglas learned how big-budget events were covered and in 2004 formed Switchback Entertainment, his foray into filmmaking. “At the time, ski companies had to shell out money for their athletes to appear in Warren Miller, Matchstick Productions or TGR movies, says Douglas. “We went to Salomon and said, ‘How about we try something different? We have the talent and I have a lot of ideas.’”

The clincher for Salomon came when Douglas asked how familiar its marketing team was with YouTube, the new online streaming service that was quickly becoming an obsession with the kids. He proposed that Salomon not go down the path of feature-length DVDs that were favored by other ski companies and instead produce films for a “Salomon Freeski” channel on YouTube. “Let’s look to the future,” Douglas pitched to Salomon. “We can produce five-minute movies or 45-minute documentaries. YouTube doesn’t care how long the content is.”

In a sense, Salomon’s Freeski TV YouTube channel proved as revolutionary from a media perspective as the TenEighty had been from the gear side. Both took an existing format and changed it into something similar, but also completely different. Salomon Freeski TV changed not just the delivery system, but the culture of storytelling around the sport as well.

Salomon got it. And the viewer numbers, which were a challenge to pin down using traditional media-tracking methods, proved exceptional. Rather than filming for one major production each winter, the way that Warren Miller might, Switchback could produce wildly disparate segments that might appeal to different audience demographics. “We started with a fairly conservative variety show concept, but the Freedom Chair broke the mold in so many ways,” Douglas says.

Freedom Chair tells the story of Josh Dueck, a freestyle ski coach from SilverStar Mountain Resort in Vernon, B.C. Under his tutelage, Dueck’s charges had become some of the best New School skiers in the world. Their members included Josh Bibby, Riley Leboe and TJ Schiller—early-adopter pro skiers who made a name for themselves in front of the camera and on the X Games podium. While demonstrating a big-air maneuver to junior-club skiers at SilverStar’s freestyle site, Dueck overshot the landing area, crashed and crushed his spine. Dueck ended up paralyzed from the waist down. He could have chucked the sport and reframed his life, but he doubled down, becoming a multiple-medal winner in Paralympic sit-skiing. Douglas, who knew Dueck through his freeskiing connections, started documenting his racing success but then hatched a daring plan that would eventually see Dueck perform the very first backflip ever on a sit-ski.

From the moment Freedom Chair was screened at film festivals around the world, audiences cheered and were moved to tears by Dueck’s determination, humility and grace in living with what is still a hugely challenging, life-changing, and ongoing situation. Freedom Chair did something that Douglas had wanted to do from the very beginning: create a human-interest saga that you wouldn’t need to be a skier to appreciate.

As Salomon Freeski’s YouTube numbers exploded, Douglas hired Jeff Thomas and Anthony Bonello, immensely creative talents in their own right. They produced snowsports documentaries that featured tight, focused storylines, stunning visuals and concepts so far out that they almost beg description. For instance, they flew to Greenland to film a skier passing through a solar eclipse.

In September, Douglas announced via social media that his long-term relationship with Salomon SA had evolved; he would no longer be involved in the content creation side of things. But he’ll still be the Godfather of New School and a paid Salomon brand ambassador with a focus on ski- and clothing production sustainability.

Douglas, now 55, is a natural to lead Salomon into a new era of environmentally conscious product development. From 2018 to 2023, he fronted the Canadian chapter of Protect Our Winters, the international environmental advocacy group launched by snowboarder Jeremy Jones. Douglas probably has a deeper knowledge of climate challenges than any other skier currently sponsored by a major company. He’ll also work with Salomon-sponsored athletes, designers and production managers on a variety of initiatives, such as creating awareness around PFAS-free textiles used in ski clothing.

In the meantime, Douglas is busy finishing a passion project that has nothing to do with skiing. It’s a feature documentary titled The Impossible Journey, about Danish adventurer Thor Pedersen’s mission to visit every country in the world without flying. Douglas hopes to have it entered into film festivals in 2025. 

Vancouver-based contributor Steven Threndyle reviewed the book I Survived Myself in the July-August 2024 issue.

The first World Cup freestyle overall champion became a Whistler realtor, arts maven and town official. 

Photo top: Stephanie Sloan graces a 1985 bus billboard. All photos courtesy Stephanie Sloan.

She was there. A floss-haired hippie with mirrored specs and, yes, a flower in her hair. Canadian freestyle skier Stephanie Sloan was a fixture at burner parties in the ’70s outside Whistler’s Toad Hall in British Columbia. She witnessed the gestation of hot-dog skiing and the lifestyle of the freestyle circuit alongside Suzy Chaffee and John Eaves. She fan-girled the Crazy Canucks in Tignes and Val d’Isère in 1975, watching them beat the Austrians by being, uh, crazy. She toured Europe, Scandinavia and North America on the freestyle World Cup as one of the few women who could outski the guys.

She came back to Whistler in the early 1980s, just as Blackcomb was reborn as a seventh heaven and at the exact moment summer ski camps became the hip new thing on the glacier. She married the ski racer every other Canadian skier girl wanted to marry, Dave Murray. And then—and then—Sloan joined the Whistler town council to help guide the ski village through its growth spurt and bring the Olympics to town. Now 72, this woman has stories to tell.

Sloan grew up near Toronto and in Calgary, where she learned to race in the mid-1950s and ’60s. Her grandfather, John Turner, was a gallery owner and artist heavily influenced by Canada’s Group of Seven. Her mother, Joyce Turner, followed his artistic path. But when Joyce remarried while Sloan was in her early teens, the family headed back to Toronto, with skiing available in Collingwood, Ontario, at Osler Bluff Ski Club. “Ski racing in the late ’60s saved me,” Sloan says. “It gave me community—we skied and traveled a ton. But it all ended fast. I was headed for the Kokanee Glacier to summer train at age 17 when I broke my ankle. It didn’t heal very well. That was the end of the line for me.”

Instead, Sloan set out for Ottawa’s Carleton University, hoping to study journalism—a plan that didn’t last long. A spring-break ski trip introduced her to the place over which she’d eventually have so much influence: Whistler. With freshman year finished, Sloan checked out of Carleton and moved to a hippie camp near Whistler’s base. “Those were the Soo Valley days,” she says.

Soo Valley is notorious. It was to Whistler what Haight-Ashbury was to San Franciso. Say Soo Valley to a true Whistlerite, and they’ll know exactly what you mean. “With a mere $75/month lease (for the property, not per person),” states WhistlerMuseum.org, “this collection of wooden shacks near the north end of Green Lake, formerly known as the Soo Valley Logging Camp, came to be a focal point of the rebellious ski-bum community. Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that by the spring of 1973 tales of debauchery left local powers wholly unenthused with this shag-carpeted Shangri-la.”

“We were all ski bums,” Sloan says mildly. “It was pretty epic. We’d have these outrageous parties—huge burners where we’d burn scrap in a big fire in the middle of a field.” Someone hired a helicopter once to lift the ski bums up to Wedge Mountain. Sloan was the only woman among 20 guys—“one of the reasons I liked it so much,” she admits now.

At one point, Toad Hall, a rustic cabin acting as the encampment’s base, was marked for demolition. “One sunny spring day,” states the museum’s website, “whoever was milling about was asked to convene out front with their ski gear but wearing nothing else. The photographer, Chris Speedie, orchestrated the photo simply to provide residents with a memento before Toad Hall met its demise.” But the Toad Hall naked skier poster blew up. It’s now a vintage ski memorabilia collector’s major score—there’s one in Kitzbühel’s Londoner Bar with the inscription “Canada’s National Ski Team.” “Yeah,” says Sloan, “I was there the day Speedie took the photograph. Everyone thinks I’m the woman doing the [naked] handstand, but I’m not. I’m so glad I didn’t do that. I was there but that wasn’t me.”

The next winter Sloan headed for France, hoping to earn cash by picking wine grapes. Instead, she got sidetracked, ending up in Geneva working as an au pair. But a spring-break trip to Chamonix compelled her to reconsider nanny life. “I came back and said to the family: ‘Sorry, I gotta go!’”

After a whole winter in Chamonix, in the spring of 1975 Sloan watched a Europa Cup moguls event in which only one woman competed against the men. “Oh, I can do that,” she said to herself at the time. Sloan and her Swedish boyfriend began crisscrossing Europe and Scandinavia, working odd jobs, partying and competing in freestyle events. “Everything was just beginning,” she says. “Ski sponsors were all over [this] brand-new sport. I got sponsored easily, and the money was good.” By the summer of ’76 Sloan was sleeping on a friend’s floor somewhere in Sweden to train on a jump with a water landing in the Baltic Sea. “We trained every moment we could, learning how to flip,” she says.

Sloan remembers those early days of freestyle as a time when “everyone did everything, all disciplines [moguls, aerials, ballet]. We did flips and Wong Banger turns in the bumps, mixing it all up.” Big names on the circuit included Greg Athans and Penelope Street. “Wayne Wong was on his way out at the time,” says Sloan, “but the Bowie brothers were big competitors.” Doing all three events, with a specialty in bumps, Sloan competed on the pro freestyle tour beginning in 1976, winning world championships in 1978 and ’79. In 1980, the first year of FIS World Cup freestyle, she won the overall and combined championships. In 1981 she finished third overall, and retired.

In December 1975 Sloan paused long enough to watch the Crazy Canucks race downhill at Val d’Isère, a race Ken Read won. “I partied with the team after Ken’s win,” she says. Crazy Canucks team members included Read, Steve Podborski, Dave Irwin and Dave Murray. She hit it off with Murray.

Both busy with World Cup circuits, it took until 1981 for Murray and Sloan to retire from competition and get together. By then Sloan was earning money as a ski-action model. The two traveled to Maui to windsurf each summer, and in winter they skied Whistler. Murray became director of skiing at Whistler Mountain, while Sloan coached women’s ski and bump camps on Blackcomb. By 1983 she was heading the Stephanie Sloan Women Only ski programs, and the two took over operations for the Nancy Greene/Toni Sailer–run summer racing and freestyle camps on the Whistler glacier.

Murray’s malignant melanoma diagnosis in 1985 was a serious blow. But, says Sloan, “we thought we could beat it.” They married in 1987, and their daughter, Julia, was born in 1988. Twenty-two months later, with a toddler and a busy ski business, Murray lost his battle with cancer.

“I don’t know how I got through it,” Sloan says now. “I just put one foot in front of the other. David would not want me to wallow. He wanted me to live my life. Julia was a focus; she was an amazing kid—happy and wonderful. I focused on her and being the best mom I could.” The Dave Murray Ski and Snowboard Camps continued to thrive. She moved them from Whistler to Blackcomb in 1991 and ran them until 2000, then sold the business.

Next came small-town politics. Sloan joined the Whistler Arts Council in 1994 and founded Whistler’s Public Art Committee in ’96, then served two terms as a town councilor. From 1996 to 2002 Sloan helped Whistler win the 2010 Olympic bid and assisted in the creation of Millennium Place and the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre. Supporting the family financially as a Realtor, Sloan put her daughter into ski racing and—surprise!—she excelled: Whistler’s Julia Murray competed for five years on the Canadian National Ski Cross Team; she was an Olympian at the Whistler Games in 2010.

Since her recent retirement from real estate, Sloan has kept her hand in sport, now serving as a board member for the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific, which runs facilities in British Columbia that offer training for elite athletes and coaches. But what she’s really passionate about these days is wing foiling, a mix of kite- and windsurfing. With her husband, Realtor Ray Longmuir, she goes to Maui each November. “Because that’s where the waves are breaking,” she says. We’d expect nothing less from a three-time world freeskiing champion who really was there. 

Lori Knowles is co-editor of Ski Canada magazine.

Canadian Olympian and national champion

Our friend Peter Asch recently showed us a photo of his 93-year-old mother, Rosie, cross-country skiing in what looked like full stride. His mom, it turns out, is Rosemarie Schutz Asch, Canada’s national slalom champion in 1953 and 1954, and a 1952 Olympian.

Photo top: Racing for the Canadian team at the 1952 Oslo Olympics, Rosemarie Schutz went on to win the national slalom championships in 1953 and 1954. Photo: Laurentian Ski Hall of Fame.

Peter and Rosie visited us at our home in November. When they arrived, Rosie jumped out of the car and, with a quick gait and warm smile, graciously offered us both hugs. Immediately, her engaging personality and authentic curiosity won our hearts. Peter made it clear that his mother did not like to talk about herself and was understated about her accomplishments, and that proved true. For two hours, over cups of English tea and cream, we were graced by the presence of a true champion with a gift for storytelling who applauded others more than herself.

Born in 1930 in Westmount, a suburb of Montreal, Asch dreamed of being a top figure skater like Norway’s Sonja Henie, the Olympic champion of 1928, ’32 and ’36, turned film star. Her parents could not afford skating lessons, but her dad loved skiing and taught her on the rope tow at nearby Mont Royal. Later, the family built a modest ski house a mile and a half from Mont Tremblant, where the American Joe Ryan had built a single-chair lift in 1938. Asch’s tremendous athleticism and graceful ice-skating skills helped her become one of Canada’s most accomplished ski racers. She claims it was because of her training on the narrow, icy ski trails of the Northeast, where twice she broke her ankle.

Asch remembers identical twins Rhoda and Rhona Wurtele, whom the press dubbed “the Flying Twins.” They were Canadian ski champions in the 1930s and ’40s and the only members of the Canadian women’s Alpine ski team in the 1948 Olympics at St. Moritz (both were injured there). But three years later, when tryouts for the Olympic team were held in Banff, Asch took to the wide-open terrain and soft snow. She earned her place on the Canadian women’s Olympic ski team. “We were locked into our bindings and if you fell, you would break your leg,” she says. “I broke my ankle twice in Saint-Sauveur, Quebec.”

The team (Joanne Hewson, Lucile Wheeler, Rhoda Wurtele and Schutz) competed at the Dartmouth and Middlebury Winter Carnivals, and at Lake Placid. Because she got carsick on the bumpy roads, Asch recalls, she always sat in the front seat during team trips and, thus, was navigator. “Back then we were using maps, so we always got lost and roamed around aimlessly,” she says.

For the 1952 Olympics, Schutz, Wurtele, Wheeler and Hewson boarded a piston-engine DC4 and flew for 18 hours, plus refueling stops, to Oslo, Norway. Stein Eriksen won gold and silver medals there, but it was the 19-year-old American Andrea “Andy” Mead Lawrence whom Asch remembers. During the slalom, she watched Lawrence fall in a hairpin gate and spin out of the course. Asch says, “Andy jumped right up and climbed back and around the gate and still won the slalom gold medal and then repeated with a gold medal in the giant slalom.” Schutz placed 14th in downhill, 23rd in GS and 37th in slalom. Hewson was eighth in the downhill and Wurtele ninth in GS. Like their American counterparts, the Canadian women’s team outperformed the men.

The youngest member of the 1952 Canadian women’s team was Wheeler. Her parents owned the Gray Rocks resort, famous for its early skiing facilities. Wheeler would go on to win a bronze medal in the 1956 Olympics in Cortina, Italy, and then two golds and a silver at the 1958 World Championships.

Asch achieved her greatest ski racing success after the Olympics. She scored victories in downhill, slalom and GS, including at the Canadian national slalom championships two years running. In 1955, she married Robert Asch and hung up her racing skis to raise her family. In 2009, she was inducted into the Laurentian Ski Hall of Fame.

We asked Asch if she had ever skied Tuckerman Ravine at Mount Washington in New Hampshire? She lit up and told us her story:

“We would drive down to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. I would be with four guys and me, but no boyfriend in the group. At the border they asked me to come inside and wanted to know if my parents knew I was travelling with these men. Of course, I told them they did but I was not actually sure about that. They wanted to make sure I was not being abducted. We would arrive at the Harvard Hut, which was halfway up the mountain. All of us would sleep there. Just two girls and all these guys, and we had a party that night and had alcohol punch. I needed a card to get a glass of punch, and everyone was a little high. I was sleeping upstairs, and some guys were next to me (nothing went on), and I was in my sleeping bag. One of the guys next to me vomited. I hopped over to the second-story window and jumped out the window and slept downstairs on top of the stove. The interesting thing is that I got a formal letter in the mail from this fella, Eddie, who apologized for being sick that night. I did not ski over the Headwall but below it. When you carry your skis up and sit on a crevasse and put your skis on—often a ski would slide all the way down the mountain and that was before safeties were on skis. You would have to get yourself down on one ski.” 

Asch is also an accomplished tennis player. At age 80 she won the individual ITF World Tennis Championships, held in Turkey. “I have a one-handed backhand and played for the Canadians,” she says. “I still play tennis if someone plays with me. When I wanted to play indoors, there was this French group I wanted to join. They asked me my name and my age. I told them I was 82. There was no way I could share my real age, which was 92, because I thought they might not let me join in. I played for a few weeks and someone in the group looked me up and was delighted to learn I was 92, and they were thrilled to be playing with me.”

Asch relates how she has friends her age who cannot walk because they have not stayed active. “It speaks well for skiing—staying active,” she says. “I just wanted to be a fancy figure skater, and I have skated all through my adult life, even took up hockey.” Asch plays tennis, and now pickleball, and still cross-country skis with her family.

This year she will turn 94. Rhoda Wurtele-Eaves is going to be 104 and Wheeler will be 90. Hewson passed away on December 1, 2023, at age 93. Robert Asch died in 2022 at 93.

The four women of the 1952 Olympic team took center stage at a Canadian Ski Hall of Fame banquet in Montreal, on November 17, 2023. Seventy-one years after they raced together, they stood side by side and received a rousing ovation for lives well-lived and for their love and contributions to Canadian skiing. 

Authors Rick and Melinda Moulton are ISHA stalwarts. Rick is chairman of ISHA and of its Awards Committee.

At the top of their careers, Phil and Steve Mahre depended on his skis.

For about a dozen years, starting in 1976, Al Davignon was the most influential ski designer in North America and, perhaps, in the world. He created a generation of K2 race skis for Phil and Steve Mahre, who won Olympic medals and World Cup races on the skis he built. Few Americans can say that. The skis he created were widely imitated by other factories around the world.

Davignon learned to ski at age four, in North Adams, Massachusetts. “My mom worked at home as a seamstress,” he says. “I was always underfoot, so she kicked me out of the house. She dropped me off at Dutch Hill, a ski area about three miles away. No one else in the family skied, but I didn’t mind.”

That was in 1954. By high school, Davignon was racing Class A giant slalom and downhill. He was captain of the ski team and a skimeister (four-event competitor). Off snow, he captained and quarterbacked the football team and played second base on the baseball team.

In January 1969, Davignon broke his right leg, then his left leg a year later. At age 19, he retired from FIS competition but not from ski racing. In 1971, during the early years of NASTAR, Davignon won the national championship. “It was an all-expenses paid trip,” he recalls. “That year the nationals were at Mount Snow, Vermont, just 50 miles from North Adams. They gave me $5 for gas.”

In 1972 Davignon entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to major in biomedical engineering. He ski raced and coached, fielding a strong Division II East team in jumping and Alpine. Davignon earned a master’s degree in 1974 but stayed to work on a doctoral dissertation: designing an artificial replacement for the anterior cruciate ligament. And he was a NASTAR pacesetter at Jiminy Peak, with a 3 handicap.

By 1976 Davignon was ready to marry his high-school sweetheart, Denise Renton, and needed a job. He sent 20 resumés to hospitals and 10 to ski factories. Two offers came in, one from a Seattle hospital and one from K2. “K2 promised to pay my expenses to move to Seattle,” he says. “So I wound up in the ski industry.”

That year K2 was working hard to develop a new line of racing skis, under the direction of Bucky Kashiwa (brother of Hank Kashiwa), with assistance from Jean-Claude Killy. “Killy likes to sight down the length of the ski,” Davignon says. “He gets an idea of the ski’s flex pattern by looking along the edge while he presses the middle of the ski with his foot. It was his idea to draw a graph of the ski’s flex pattern.” He continues, “My first project was to design a machine to measure ski flex at every inch along the length and plot it. We looked at those bending curves and compared them to what we learned in on-snow testing. There are separate target curves for GS, slalom and downhill skis. The first skis designed using the curves were the 710 and 810 slalom and GS racers.”

Davignon began working with the Mahre twins in 1977. “At first they were skiing on the wood-core 710, which had a balanced flex pattern,” he recalls. “They said the tail was skidding, and there was no energy coming out of the turn, so we made the tail stiffer. That seemed to help.”

In 1978, Davignon took over K2’s design department. The first production ski he supervised was the 712. In the meantime, he was working fast and furiously in the race department, keeping the Mahres on competitive skis. “In May of 1979 we made 25 different pairs of slalom skis and went to Mount Bachelor to test them,” he says. “I always skied with the Mahres in order to feel for myself what they were telling me. We came back with two workable constructions, both with stiff tails, soft shovels and foam cores. One was all fiberglass. The other had a torsional reinforcement of carbon fiber. We built five more pairs of each and took them to New Zealand. Phillip and Steven settled on the all-glass ski, which became the 710 FO. The carbon ski was just too radical.”

The 710 FO had a continuous steel edge. In 1980 Davignon built a version with the cracked edge originally developed by Dynamic for the VR17 and widely adopted for slalom racers. That softer-flexing edge allowed him to add thicker layers of fiberglass to make the ski torsionally stiffer. “It was an immediate success,” he says. “All through 1980 and 1981 the Mahres skied on the cracked-edge VO. We held three successive testing camps and couldn’t improve on it.”

Development of a world-class giant slalom ski went in another direction. In 1978 Steve Mahre won the World Cup GS at Stratton, Vermont, skiing on the wood-core 810, which had layers of aluminum inside K2’s traditional fiberglass torsion box. In 1979 the twins tried a foam-core version and found it too slow, so K2 made the shovel firmer to bring the ski around faster. In 1980 Davignon built K2’s first laminated GS skis, but by midseason the Mahres were back on their wet-wrap EL skis—basically, a foam-core fiberglass design with 15-inch sheets of aluminum in the tip and tail for stability. “At that point the boys were skiing GS by going straight at the gate and then making a turn,” Davignon says.

During the summer of 1981, Phil Mahre came up with the idea of combining the EL and 812 aluminum-sandwich constructions. Davignon built a few pairs, with short aluminum plates at the tip and tail plus a single full-length sheet inside the wet-wrap box; he called it the EL Combi. “Steven switched to the Combi and won three giant slaloms that winter, including the world championship,” Davignon recalls.

After the Mahres retired in March 1984, Davignon redoubled development of recreational models. The 5500 Unlimited, introduced that year, was an offshoot of the racing program, with the cracked edge. It was a soft-flexing ski that could hold a carved turn on hard snow. Davignon went on to create versions of that ski and the VO with new lightweight, high-strength materials like Kevlar and ceramic fibers. Under his management, engineer Lou Fazio developed the triaxial braiding system, which wove a thin, strong sleeve of fiberglass around the fir-and-spruce core.

By the time Davignon left K2 in 1988, his wife was a registered nurse, and the couple had two kids, Kristen and Harrison. The family stayed in Burien, Washington, while Davignon consulted on snowboard projects for Lamar (owned by Look) and Aggression (owned by Volant). He then went back to his academic specialty and launched a biomedical career, using the newly emerged CAD/CAM technology to improve surgical implant devices. Davignon retired in 2020. 

Seth Masia is president of ISHA. He first interviewed Al Davignon in 1984.

From an island in the Adriatic, a World Cup champion plots his course.

Above: Winner of the 2011 overall World Cup title, Croatian racer Ivica Kostelić was one of the top Alpine skiers of his generation.

The typical ski champion retires as a resort-town business owner, ski coach or TV commentator. But a handful find success outside of skiing entirely. France’s overall 1997 World Cup champion Luc Alphand became a brilliant rally driver, clinching the legendary Paris-Dakar race in 2006. Austria’s super G ace Christoph Gruber is now a pilot for the Tyrol Air Ambulance group. Dominique Gisin, the Swiss Olympic downhill champion in 2014, is also a professional pilot, with a degree in physics from the ETH Zurich.

Ivica Kostelić, winner of seven Olympic and FIS medals, including gold in the 2003 slalom World Championship and the 2011 overall World Cup title, retired in 2017. He’s now 43 years old, the father of four and a rising star in long-distance ocean racing. Skippering his Class 40 sloop, he won once and finished second twice in the first three races this summer. He has a strong chance to win the 2023 Mediterranean Trophy.

Early in his skiing career, he was mostly known as the older brother of the phenomenal Janica Kostelić. Three years younger than “Ivo,” Janica was only 17 when she celebrated her first World Cup victory in January 1999, capturing the combined event at St. Anton am Arlberg, in Austria. Her career nearly ended in December of that year when she blew out her right knee during a terrible crash while training downhill at St. Moritz, Switzerland. After a year of hard rehab, she won the first slalom of the 2001 season, at Park City, Utah, and went on to win eight consecutive slaloms and clinch the first of her three overall World Cup titles at the 2001 Finals at Åre, Sweden.

Ivica would need more patience. After his own knee injury in 1999, he scored his first World Cup victory the day after his 22nd birthday, at Aspen in November 2001. Starting the slalom with bib number 64, he crushed the favorites, including Italian star Giorgio Rocca and reigning world champion Mario Matt from Austria, who later captured the second slalom on Sunday, ahead of Bode Miller.

For the rest of the 2002 season, Miller and Kostelić battled hard on the World Cup circuit and at the Olympics in Salt Lake City. Bode left Utah with two silver medals, in giant slalom and combined. Kostelić didn’t finish his Olympic slalom run but faced off with Miller in a nerve-wracking duel at the World Cup Finals in Flachau, Austria. There, he beat Miller by a few tenths to secure his first slalom globe.

Over the next 15 years, and despite 14 knee injuries, Kostelić remained a star. He claimed the FIS gold medal in slalom at St Moritz 2003, a day after his sister’s gold medal. He clinched his first Olympic medal in combined, behind Ted Ligety, at Sestriere, Italy, in 2006. On January 5, 2003, he won the slalom at Kranjska Gora, Slovenia. (It also was Janica’s 21st birthday, and she won at Bormio that day.) Able to win in both slalom and super G, he won the Hahnenkamm combined trophy four times in a row, from 2010 to 2013.

In January 2011 Kostelić won a spectacular super G, set on the lower part of the treacherous Streif run at Kitzbühel, Austria. That month he achieved a total of seven World Cup wins at four venues, including in parallel slalom at Munich. That’s some kind of a record on the men’s tour! This extraordinary accomplishment helped Kostelić to secure his overall World Cup title that year—a stunning performance for a slalom specialist from Croatia. He also took the championships in slalom and combined, then repeated the combined title the following two years. In February 2012, the World Cup traveled to Sochi for the pre-Olympic series; Kostelić won the combined, then injured his knee in the downhill. At the time he stood 218 points ahead of Marcel Hirscher in the overall World Cup standings but was sidelined for 11 races and had to be content with a disappointing fourth place at the end of the season. He claimed two more wins on the World Cup tour the following year, in combined and slalom at Kitzbühel and Kranjska Gora, plus the silver medal in combined at Sochi in 2014, before slowly fading. He retired in February 2017 to pursue other goals and take better care of his family.

With four Olympic silver medals, from 2006 to 2014, in slalom and combined and five crystal globes, as well as 27 victories and 67 podiums in several World Cup specialties, Kostelić was among the greatest performers in modern ski racing.

Like Swiss downhiller Peter Mueller and Italian ace Alberto Tomba, Janica and Ivica Kostelić were city kids—rare birds among top skiers. They grew up in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, and trained at Sljeme, a small hill of 300 vertical meters (1,000 feet) just outside of the city. The area had a racing tradition, and from 2005 to last winter, some exciting World Cup races took place there.

Papa Ante Kostelić was a world-class handball player, a member of the Yugoslav national team and a coach at Cannes on the French Riviera. He enjoyed masters-level ski racing, too. And he was a voracious reader of books on physical and mental training written by established experts, especially from the Eastern Bloc. He shared his knowledge and experience with Janica and Ivica, who proved gifted in coordination, balance and dedication.

In those days, most Yugoslavian ski racers came from Slovenia, the northernmost province, which has the Julian Alps. Croatia is better known for its long Adriatic seacoast. The Kostelić family also faced major logistic and economic problems when the Independence War started in 1991.

To make a living in those terrible days, Ante took up spear fishing in the Adriatic Sea, off the stunning island of Mljet, about an hour by boat from Dubrovnik, where he owned an off-grid cabin. He sold fish to restaurants on the larger island of Korcula nearby. He’d been taking the kids there since they were infants. Ivo began spearfishing at an early age and was an expert at 12. The kids also learned to sail in a dinghy and could circumnavigate the island.

They could ski train in summer and fall on distant Austrian glaciers, but it was expensive. Early on, the young kids usually slept in a tent or in Ante’s old Lada car. To save money, they often walked up the glaciers above Kaprun instead of riding the cable cars. Lift operators on the glaciers sometimes let them ski for free.

At age 16, Janica scored some promising results at the 1998 Nagano Olympics in Japan. When former ski racer Vedran Pavlek retired to become manager of the young Croatian Ski Association, he was able to organize a pool of major sponsors, including Salomon, which provided excellent tools to the Kostelić kids.

In summer 2001, a few months after her glorious triumph in the overall World Cup standings, I spent a few days with Ante and Janica at their cabin in Mljet. That month, Ivica was returning to snow at Zermatt after another injury he sustained in January, a few weeks after scoring his first World Cup points in slalom at Sestriere. He regularly phoned his dad to report on his physical and technical progress, and Ante diligently recorded his comments in big notebooks. “I have many of them—I am writing down everything concerning their career as athletes,” said Ante at the time. “Ivica is doing fine. I trust him to finally break through this winter,” he added with a grin. And that fall in Aspen, that’s exactly what happened.

Kostelić became a great defender of tradition in Alpine ski racing, claiming that the best racers need to compete in all specialties. He also defended the combined race and was not afraid to criticize the establishment in matters of course settings and general organization of the sport. Like Miller and former greats Pirmin Zurbriggen and Marc Girardelli, Kostelić enjoyed competing in all disciplines.

He was also great fun. One of the highlights of that exciting 2002 season was to see him jumping on the concert stage in the finish area at Adelboden, Switzerland, after finishing second in the slalom behind Miller. Borrowing a guitar from one of the musicians, he did a creditable Chuck Berry turn, singing “Johnny Be Good” as the audience cheered. Nowadays, he often tours with a pick-up band, including, as drummer, Canada’s Jan Hudec, Olympic bronze medalist in super G at Sochi.

Always looking for new challenges, immediately after hanging up his race skis, Kostelić crossed Greenland on skis with a friend. They took 18 days to cover 582 kilometers (360 miles) in freezing weather and strong winds—a physically punishing trip.

Kostelić still felt strongly driven to compete at a top level but knew he needed a sport that wouldn’t stress his knees. Eventually, he discovered the thrill of offshore sailing and racing.

“Sailing is a different way to enjoy nature,” he explains. “It’s a bit similar with skiing, as you are inside nature all the time and you are actively using the power of nature for your own propulsion. It’s a constant dialog with the wind, and it inspires you in many different ways.” He adds, “Nothing is comparable to the sea. The sea is freedom. And we have lost a lot of freedom in today’s world. And the fact that you are sitting on a floating object, raise a piece of cloth and sail around the world for zero dollars says a lot about sailing.”

Kostelić’s Class 40 yacht is a high-performance sloop designed for offshore racing with a solo skipper or two-person crew. He spent a year sailing on his own, making mistakes and learning from them, then began racing in the summer of 2022. More mistakes, more learning. In November that year he had to drop out of a single-handed transatlantic race, the Route du Rhum, after storm damage took out his autopilot.

Kostelić loves the challenge, comparing it to racing downhill. “The Streif is a super-difficult slope to ski, even if you are not racing,” he says. “Crossing an ocean as well. But racing makes those things so much more difficult.” In skiing, he continues, “the top 30 are separated by only a few seconds, so you really must put a very strong effort to be able to race well. The performance level on the ocean is not that high, but it’s quite different because, after you finish the Streif, you go back to the hotel, and take a nice little shower, and have a nice dinner, that’s it. When you are done with your day on the ocean, the sun goes down, this doesn’t change anything. You’ll still be wet and miserable, and you’ll still race through the night, through the storm, waves and sleep deprivation, and in this it’s a different sport.”

Whether he wins the Mediterranean Trophy or not, Kostelić will sit out the 2024 racing season. “I have a strong wish to continue racing, because I have started off quite well,” he says. “But I’m taking some time off to be with my family at home. I have a big family now with four little kids. My parents are getting old. It’s getting more difficult to leave home. So I don’t have any bigger plans for the future. I’ll see how things are developing.”

Editor's note: Kostelić finished second in the season's final two races, clinching the Mediterranean Trophy.

Frequent contributor Patrick Lang wrote about the 2023 FIS Congress in the July-August 2023 issue.

Please subscribe to see article content.