2000s

Open to Public?
On
Full Access Article for Public

Racer, writer, broadcaster, coach.

Photo top: Race face on, Ballard speeds through a Master's race at Mammoth.

Lisa Ballard grew up on skis and skates in Lake Placid, New York. She had the genes for it: Her dad, Phillip Feinberg, was an avid skier, racer and ski club official, and her mom, Phyllis Krinovitz, was a champion figure skater.

Ballard won her first ski race at age six, the Candy Bar Slalom at Mt. Pisgah, N.Y.—so called because the trophy was a candy bar. “That was great motivation for getting into ski racing,” she says. She both skied and skated until age 11, then had to pick one or the other. She picked racing because victory was determined by the clock.

During her sophomore year at Saranac Lake High School, Ballard transferred to Stratton Mountain School. She won the Vermont state downhill at Killington, which qualified her for the Eastern Cup GS, and she won again. She was then promoted to NorAm, named to the U.S. Ski Team at age 16 and raced on the Europa Cup in 1978. Her peers were women like Heidi Preuss and Tamara McKinney. Ballard recalls, “The mentality around women and ski racing was that you had to make it by the time you were 16, otherwise you were done. We now know much more about sports science and athletic development. Girls develop physically earlier than boys, but the mental piece can take much longer.”

In 1979 Ballard, at 18, skied in the pre-Olympic downhill on Whiteface. Her dad was the starter for the women’s events. Her fans in Lake Placid anticipated that she would make the 1980 Olympic Team, but Ballard broke her leg in a downhill at Killington, and that was that.

Dartmouth team 1982
Ballard (center) with Dartmouth team, at the 1982 NCAA championships on her home hill, Whiteface, New York.

Instead, she went to Dartmouth. Back then, once you went to college, the U. S. Ski Team doubted your commitment to racing. Today, however, many athletes from college teams go to the World Cup. Ballard credits her Dartmouth teammate Tiger Shaw for making this breakthrough. He graduated to the U.S. Ski Team in 1985 and raced in the ’88 and ’92 Olympics. Ballard believes Shaw’s success created the change whereby college ski racers now have the chance to compete on the world stage.

Ballard graduated in 1983 and took a job at an investment bank on Wall Street. Disillusioned within a year, she was ready when Stratton teammate Kim Reichhelm invited her to a pro race at Okemo. Before heading to Dartmouth, Ballard says, “I knew at the end of college that if I wanted to keep racing, there was always the pro tour. It was very equivalent in the minds of the athletes in terms of racing competition and in some ways a better opportunity because you could win prize money and get direct sponsorships. This was the way to become a professional ski racer because back then, the World Cup, though elite, was still considered amateur.”

Reichhelm talked Ballard into entering the Okemo race, and she qualified for the round of 16, which guaranteed prize money. She had a blast and called her old coach Herman Goellner, saying “Herman, I want to quit my job and ski race again.” He put together a dryland conditioning and on-snow program for her. She quit her desk job and went to Europe to train.

Ballard raced on Jill Wing’s Women’s Pro Ski Racing Tour for six years. In 1989, en route to the pro tour’s world championships at Sierra Summit, California (now China Peak), the airline misrouted her racing skis to Japan, and she was not able to race. Instead, Hugh Arian of Echo Entertainment, the producer of the event’s television coverage, asked her to do guest commentary. She agreed and turned out to be a natural broadcaster.

When Ballard retired from the pro tour after the 1990 season, ready for a change but still wanting to stay involved in skiing, her agent, Fred Sharf, hooked her up with the Travel Channel, which hired her to host a new series, Ski New England. At the same time, ESPN brought her in as a commentator for women’s pro ski racing. This launched Ballard’s full-time career in broadcast television, which would continue over the next two decades.

She became a field producer as well as an on-camera host. During this time, she also did some writing and consulting; one project was helping Ski Industries America (now Snowsports Industries America) with its image work. John Fry brought her in as a fashion editor at Snow Country and as director of the National Skiwear Design Awards. After a year, she became the magazine’s instruction editor.

When shaped skis were introduced in the mid-’90s, Ballard helped the world learn how to carve on them. She joined the design team at Head, helping create its first complete line of women’s shaped skis, then a line of ski boots in which both the shell and the liner were lasted for a woman’s foot. “I named them the ‘Dream’ series because they were my dream ski boots,” she says.

But Ballard wasn’t done racing. In 1991, at age 29, she joined the Masters racing circuit as her first husband, Jason Densmore, was an avid Masters racer at the time. “I’m not much of a spectator, and it looked like a lot of fun,” she explains. However, as a pro, she had to regain her amateur status by petitioning the then-U.S. Ski Association. That year, at the U.S. Alpine Masters National Championships in Vail, Ballard raced downhill and won. She raced GS and won. And then she had the slalom—not her specialty. She remembers this race like it was yesterday. She had a good first run. The second run she almost crashed three times because she was so nervous, but she won and that set the hook for her future. She had a lot of friends who were racing on the circuit. It was fun, and a different type of ski racing.

From her home in Hanover, New Hampshire, Ballard spent 20 years racing on the New England Masters circuit and served on its board of directors. She went to the regional and national championships every year. After her son, Parker Densmore, was born in 1996, she kept racing, bringing him to her races and eventually attending his, too, as a coach for the Ford Sayre Ski Club.

By the mid-2010s, Ballard had won more than a hundred national Masters’ titles and quit counting. After dabbling at the FIS Masters Cup—the World Cup of Masters racing—in 2016, she started racing more frequently on the international Masters circuit and has now garnered eight globes, more than any American, male or female. For the 2023–24 season, she’s the defending super G champion, second in GS and fifth in slalom among all women in all age groups.

Ballard with trophies
Defending super G champ on the international Master's circuit.

Ballard is still involved with U.S. Ski and Snowboard, entering her sixth year as chair of the Masters working group. She calls herself a pied piper, trying to get folks back into ski racing or start ski racing as an adult. She hopes to make people understand that ski racing is a sport you can do your whole life, just like golf, tennis, swimming, track and field or mountain biking. “They all have Masters programs that keep you active and fit,” she says.

In a national survey, one of the barriers to Masters ski racing is the lack of training opportunities. Ballard has hosted women’s ski clinics around the country since 1991, and some 8,500 women have gone through her program. “I knew how to put ski instructional programs together, so why not Masters race camps?” she says. “It filled a need while helping raise money for local junior or Masters programs. She now directs Masters training programs and camps in the Rockies, the Northeast and in South America.

After Ballard met her second husband, the outdoor writer Jack Ballard, she moved to Montana in 2011. The family—Lisa, Jack, Parker and Jack’s kids Micah, Dominic and Zoe—live near Red Lodge Mountain, where Lisa coaches when she’s not travelling to races or hosting clinics elsewhere. “I never planned to be a ski coach, but I love every day on the hill,” she says. “I feel extremely rich in experiences, and to me that is really important. I tell my son, ‘You have to follow your heart and do what you care about most.’ I have met some amazing and wonderful people. I feel very fortunate, and the rest comes easy when you love something.” 

Melinda Moulton wrote about Wini Jones in the July-August issue. In October, Lisa Ballard was elected to the ISHA board of directors.

Feature Image Media
Image
Timestamp
Wed, 08/17/2022 - 1:32 PM
Open to Public?
On
Full Access Article for Public

In 2019, long-distance runner and ski mountaineer Kilian Jornet—with the goal of just testing “how his body will perform”—completed 51 laps on Tusten ski area in Molde, Norway, in 24 hours. He climbed 78,274 feet, crushing previous 24-hour records by a ridiculous margin. To be clear, Molde is at sea level. Jornet climbed 1,535 feet, 51 times, on roughly a one-mile piste. That works out to skinning up at about 2.25 mph for 25 minutes and resting a couple of minutes during a 36-mph schuss. Fifty-one times.

Photo above: Kilian Jornet has been rewriting the record books for ski mountaineering and high-altitude running for more than a decade, sometimes merely as a result of his training regimen. Right: An early ski-endurance competition, the 24 Hours of Aspen attracted elite athletes, television audiences and sponsorship dollars in the 1980s-1990s. YouTube photo

That’s nothing for the Catalan Jornet, who grew up in Chamonix. For more than 15 years he’s been methodically assaulting the records for high-altitude marathons and ski mountaineering. In his recent five-year “Summits of My Life” project, he set the fastest known times (or FKT) for the ascent and ski descent of major mountains including Kilimanjaro, Denali, Aconcagua, the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, at times shaving hours off previous records. Some of his records have since been broken by Ecuadorian mountain guide Karl Egloff.

Climbing and skiing massive verticals has become a passion with today’s endurance athletes, who are repeatedly blowing by many of the world's best times. Which begs the question, when did vertical-feet-skied become a thing?

Before smart watches and phone apps made vertical-feet scorekeeping easy, it was possible to estimate your numbers from the number of runs completed. Heliski operators charged by the vertical foot, and kept accurate count. You could keep track of your bragging rights whether for 24 hours, a week, a season or a lifetime. Heliski operations certified guest accomplishments with pins and special million-foot prizes, like Mike Wiegele’s silver belt buckles and limited-edition powder suits at Canadian Mountain Holidays.

One of the first vertical-foot-based competitions was the late 24 Hours of Aspen. After 13 events in 16 years, declining television ratings scuttled the show in 2003. But it left behind a slew of records. Chris Kent of Canada did 83 laps for 271,161 feet for the men’s mark in 1991. That’s 216 miles of skiing at an average 66 mph. Kate McBride and Anda Rojs set the women’s vertical record of 261,360 feet in 1997.

Once the genie was out of the bottle, lift- and rotor-assisted records started to topple. In 1994, Canadian speed skier and Chamonix resident Mark Jones logged 212,000 vertical feet in just 12 hours at Les Grands Montets. Next, Dr. Mark Bennett racked up 294,380 feet in 14 hours in the Yukon in 1997 for a new “daylight” world record. Fourteen months later, former U.S. Ski Team racer Rusty Squires chartered a specialized high-altitude helicopter and recorded 331,160 vertical feet in 10 hours and 15 minutes at Big Sky, Montana.

In the meantime, the guides at Wiegele’s were determined to set a record based on the normal constraints of commercial heli-skiing, with a full group of skiers and a single machine. In 1998, Swiss extreme skier Dominique Perret, Chris Kent and Austrian guide Robert Reindl, with Edi Podivinsky and Luke Sauder of the Canadian Alpine Team, logged 353,600 vertical feet in 14½ hours.

Austrian Ekkehard Dörschlag owns the
24-hour record for vertical climbed.

By this point recognition was growing that assisted vertical-foot records were as much about money as skill and endurance. As ski mountaineering boomed (it’ll be a full medal event at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics) interest focused on self-powered athletes. In 2009, Austrian Eckhard Dorschlag set a 24-hour world record of 60,350 feet. Ultra-marathoner Mike Foote broke that in 2018 with 68,697 feet. A few months later Norwegian Lars Erik Eriksen took it to 68,697 feet. Then Jornet obliterated that.

Born in 1987, Jornet has captured more Skyrunner World Series and Skimo (ski mountaineering) World Championship medals than we have room to list. He still holds the mark for the Innominata ski traverse on Mont Blanc linking Chamonix and Courmayeur (8 hours 42 minutes), as well as the fastest ascent/descent of Mont Blanc from Chamonix (4:57) and of the Matterhorn from Breuil-Cervinia (2:52).

As for why all the fuss over vertical speed records advancing every season, Nick Heil, writing in Outside, quoted Foote: “How many push-ups can I do in a minute? How long can I hold my breath? How far can I ski in a day? In the end, it’s all arbitrary and contrived, but it gets people to ask, what am I capable of?” 

 

Snapshots in Time

1958 Be Careful What You Wish For
A penetrating statistical study of the ski industry in Colorado and New Mexico has been published by the University of Colorado. Pointing out that a great many more tourists visit Colorado and New Mexico in June, July and August than in the other months of the year, the authors ask if it is not possible to develop the winter tourist industry so that tourist facilities can be used all year. — “Skiers Under Scrutiny in Colorado and New Mexico” (SKI Magazine, October 1958)

1970 The Continuing Death of the Ski Bum
Once upon a time, the ski bum was the ultimate ski insider. As neither an entrenched member of the ski-area management nor a local profiteer, he enjoyed a free-swinging life with lots of time to ski and unlimited access to the inner circles of the ski establishment. It is, therefore, ironic that as the need for ski workers grows, the reputation of the ski bum diminishes. Ski bums, industry management will tell you, are bad news; the title is now synonymous with “hippie.” Many employers won’t consider hiring ski bums, even for temporary jobs. As a result, there are fewer of the old-time ski-bum types than ever before. — Janet Nelson, “But They’re Employed” (SKI Magazine, January 1970)

1978 Risk v. Reward
I have been skiing o.b. for many years. Skiing out of bounds is extremely dangerous. Inevitably some crazy powder addicts (myself included) will continue to leave the “safe” confines of patrolled areas. After reading Lou Dawson’s account and subtle hints (“... how far can you crawl with a spinal fracture?”), I realized certain steps must be taken to ensure the safety or at least the survival of o.b. skiers. Education is what is needed on this topic. — Steven Harrison, Central Valley, New York, “Whistling in the Dark" (Letters, Powder Magazine, Spring 1978)

1981 Crowds and Crashes
The rapidly increasing skiing population has led to an alarming increase in inconsiderate and out-of-control skiers who are a serious menace. Last season, an out-of-control skier crashed into me. He never so much as asked if I needed help. I’ll have a scar I’ll carry for the rest of my life. For too long ski areas have allowed Bonzai Bombers to endanger others on the slope without adequate punishment. It’s time something was done to protect the rest of us from these slope-side criminals. —Thomas F. Warda, Rochester, N.Y., "Slope menaces" (Letters, Skiing Magazine, October 1981)

2007 Bode Rules
Call them the Bode Rules. This year every athlete on the U.S. Ski Team is required to stay in official team housing. Every racer on the team is also prohibited from having a celebratory drink with the coaches after a big win, because it’s a slippery slope from that to, say, being photographed carousing with Miss March 2002 draped on your arm during the Olympics. U.S. Ski Team chief Bill Marolt implemented the stricter guidelines after the strongest American squad in decades limped away from the 2006 Torino Games with only two medals—neither of them won by the phenomenally gifted Bode Miller. —Nathaniel Vinton, “Ski Fast but Party Slow”(SKI Magazine, February 2007)

2021 A Woman’s Place Is On Patrol
“When there are women on a team like this, it lends an important voice and perspective to the job. I can say that having women on patrol keeps everyone connected. Men muscle their way through the job and women do it with finesse,” said Addy McCord, 64, one of the longest-standing professional patrollers in the industry. — Shauna Farnell, “A Surge of Women in Ski Patrols, Once Nearly All Men” (New York Times, February 11, 2021)

Feature Image Media
Image
Timestamp
Wed, 08/17/2022 - 1:32 PM

In 2019, long-distance runner and ski mountaineer Kilian Jornet—with the goal of just testing “how his body will perform”—completed 51 laps on Tusten ski area in Molde, Norway, in 24 hours. He climbed 78,274 feet, crushing previous 24-hour records by a ridiculous margin. To be clear, Molde is at sea level. Jornet climbed 1,535 feet, 51 times, on roughly a one-mile piste. That works out to skinning up at about 2.25 mph for 25 minutes and resting a couple of minutes during a 36-mph schuss. Fifty-one times.

Photo above: Kilian Jornet has been rewriting the record books for ski mountaineering and high-altitude running for more than a decade, sometimes merely as a result of his training regimen. Right: An early ski-endurance competition, the 24 Hours of Aspen attracted elite athletes, television audiences and sponsorship dollars in the 1980s-1990s. YouTube photo

That’s nothing for the Catalan Jornet, who grew up in Chamonix. For more than 15 years he’s been methodically assaulting the records for high-altitude marathons and ski mountaineering. In his recent five-year “Summits of My Life” project, he set the fastest known times (or FKT) for the ascent and ski descent of major mountains including Kilimanjaro, Denali, Aconcagua, the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, at times shaving hours off previous records. Some of his records have since been broken by Ecuadorian mountain guide Karl Egloff.

Climbing and skiing massive verticals has become a passion with today’s endurance athletes, who are repeatedly blowing by many of the world's best times. Which begs the question, when did vertical-feet-skied become a thing?

Before smart watches and phone apps made vertical-feet scorekeeping easy, it was possible to estimate your numbers from the number of runs completed. Heliski operators charged by the vertical foot, and kept accurate count. You could keep track of your bragging rights whether for 24 hours, a week, a season or a lifetime. Heliski operations certified guest accomplishments with pins and special million-foot prizes, like Mike Wiegele’s silver belt buckles and limited-edition powder suits at Canadian Mountain Holidays.

One of the first vertical-foot-based competitions was the late 24 Hours of Aspen. After 13 events in 16 years, declining television ratings scuttled the show in 2003. But it left behind a slew of records. Chris Kent of Canada did 83 laps for 271,161 feet for the men’s mark in 1991. That’s 216 miles of skiing at an average 66 mph. Kate McBride and Anda Rojs set the women’s vertical record of 261,360 feet in 1997.

Once the genie was out of the bottle, lift- and rotor-assisted records started to topple. In 1994, Canadian speed skier and Chamonix resident Mark Jones logged 212,000 vertical feet in just 12 hours at Les Grands Montets. Next, Dr. Mark Bennett racked up 294,380 feet in 14 hours in the Yukon in 1997 for a new “daylight” world record. Fourteen months later, former U.S. Ski Team racer Rusty Squires chartered a specialized high-altitude helicopter and recorded 331,160 vertical feet in 10 hours and 15 minutes at Big Sky, Montana.

In the meantime, the guides at Wiegele’s were determined to set a record based on the normal constraints of commercial heli-skiing, with a full group of skiers and a single machine. In 1998, Swiss extreme skier Dominique Perret, Chris Kent and Austrian guide Robert Reindl, with Edi Podivinsky and Luke Sauder of the Canadian Alpine Team, logged 353,600 vertical feet in 14½ hours.

Austrian Ekkehard Dörschlag owns the
24-hour record for vertical climbed.

By this point recognition was growing that assisted vertical-foot records were as much about money as skill and endurance. As ski mountaineering boomed (it’ll be a full medal event at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics) interest focused on self-powered athletes. In 2009, Austrian Eckhard Dorschlag set a 24-hour world record of 60,350 feet. Ultra-marathoner Mike Foote broke that in 2018 with 68,697 feet. A few months later Norwegian Lars Erik Eriksen took it to 68,697 feet. Then Jornet obliterated that.

Born in 1987, Jornet has captured more Skyrunner World Series and Skimo (ski mountaineering) World Championship medals than we have room to list. He still holds the mark for the Innominata ski traverse on Mont Blanc linking Chamonix and Courmayeur (8 hours 42 minutes), as well as the fastest ascent/descent of Mont Blanc from Chamonix (4:57) and of the Matterhorn from Breuil-Cervinia (2:52).

As for why all the fuss over vertical speed records advancing every season, Nick Heil, writing in Outside, quoted Foote: “How many push-ups can I do in a minute? How long can I hold my breath? How far can I ski in a day? In the end, it’s all arbitrary and contrived, but it gets people to ask, what am I capable of?” 

 

Snapshots in Time

1958 Be Careful What You Wish For
A penetrating statistical study of the ski industry in Colorado and New Mexico has been published by the University of Colorado. Pointing out that a great many more tourists visit Colorado and New Mexico in June, July and August than in the other months of the year, the authors ask if it is not possible to develop the winter tourist industry so that tourist facilities can be used all year. — “Skiers Under Scrutiny in Colorado and New Mexico” (SKI Magazine, October 1958)

1970 The Continuing Death of the Ski Bum
Once upon a time, the ski bum was the ultimate ski insider. As neither an entrenched member of the ski-area management nor a local profiteer, he enjoyed a free-swinging life with lots of time to ski and unlimited access to the inner circles of the ski establishment. It is, therefore, ironic that as the need for ski workers grows, the reputation of the ski bum diminishes. Ski bums, industry management will tell you, are bad news; the title is now synonymous with “hippie.” Many employers won’t consider hiring ski bums, even for temporary jobs. As a result, there are fewer of the old-time ski-bum types than ever before. — Janet Nelson, “But They’re Employed” (SKI Magazine, January 1970)

1978 Risk v. Reward
I have been skiing o.b. for many years. Skiing out of bounds is extremely dangerous. Inevitably some crazy powder addicts (myself included) will continue to leave the “safe” confines of patrolled areas. After reading Lou Dawson’s account and subtle hints (“... how far can you crawl with a spinal fracture?”), I realized certain steps must be taken to ensure the safety or at least the survival of o.b. skiers. Education is what is needed on this topic. — Steven Harrison, Central Valley, New York, “Whistling in the Dark" (Letters, Powder Magazine, Spring 1978)

1981 Crowds and Crashes
The rapidly increasing skiing population has led to an alarming increase in inconsiderate and out-of-control skiers who are a serious menace. Last season, an out-of-control skier crashed into me. He never so much as asked if I needed help. I’ll have a scar I’ll carry for the rest of my life. For too long ski areas have allowed Bonzai Bombers to endanger others on the slope without adequate punishment. It’s time something was done to protect the rest of us from these slope-side criminals. —Thomas F. Warda, Rochester, N.Y., "Slope menaces" (Letters, Skiing Magazine, October 1981)

2007 Bode Rules
Call them the Bode Rules. This year every athlete on the U.S. Ski Team is required to stay in official team housing. Every racer on the team is also prohibited from having a celebratory drink with the coaches after a big win, because it’s a slippery slope from that to, say, being photographed carousing with Miss March 2002 draped on your arm during the Olympics. U.S. Ski Team chief Bill Marolt implemented the stricter guidelines after the strongest American squad in decades limped away from the 2006 Torino Games with only two medals—neither of them won by the phenomenally gifted Bode Miller. —Nathaniel Vinton, “Ski Fast but Party Slow”(SKI Magazine, February 2007)

2021 A Woman’s Place Is On Patrol
“When there are women on a team like this, it lends an important voice and perspective to the job. I can say that having women on patrol keeps everyone connected. Men muscle their way through the job and women do it with finesse,” said Addy McCord, 64, one of the longest-standing professional patrollers in the industry. — Shauna Farnell, “A Surge of Women in Ski Patrols, Once Nearly All Men” (New York Times, February 11, 2021)

Open to Public?
Off
Feature Image Media
Image
Timestamp
Wed, 08/17/2022 - 1:32 PM
Author Text
By Warren Miller

At a certain point in life, it’s best to reward joy, not athletic achievement. That way, you can never lose. 

Most of us these days refuse to accept the fact that our bodies are aging before our eyes. There was a time in college when I could play basketball for four hours straight and not get tired. I could paddle a hundred-pound redwood surfboard all day or ski summit to base from first chair to last and not take a break. As I look back on my modest athletic career, I realize that the way I measure success has changed as much as I have.

In 1962, after surfing for 25 years, I gave it up and started racing sailboats. I knew that racing my catamaran didn’t require the agility of a teenager. I raced sailboats for 20 years, until I found myself getting beat by people half my age. So I moved on. To windsurfing.

I even moved to Maui for three months out of the year so I could do as much windsurfing as possible before my body wore out. When I was 65, I surfed from Maui to Molokai. About the same time, I came to realize that I would never ride the giant waves at Hookipa. Slowly it came into focus that my pursuit of any particular sport was changing at the same rate that my body was wearing out. I finally gave up windsurfing because it was just too hard on my body.

A while back, I pedaled my mountain bike to the top of Vail Mountain and then coasted down. I didn’t enjoy going up, but I really enjoyed coming down. That was about the same time Vail announced its lifts would haul you and your mountain bike to the top for a few bucks. My wife and I did just that. We coasted from the top to Mid-Vail, where we had a nice lunch and then coasted on down to the village.

In route we passed a lot of sweaty people pedaling up. We also passed the bike patrol administering first aid to a tourist who had hit a tree. We coasted all the way back to our house without turning a pedal. We didn’t set any speed records, but I loved how the wind felt on my face as I careened down the mountain. Were we lazy? Probably. But at my age, I didn’t feel the need to tell my friends how fast I pedaled to the top. The first liar never has a chance in these kinds of conversations.

When it comes to skiing, I have long maintained that moguls on the hill are like heartbeats: You only have so many of them in your knees, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. My knees wore out a long time ago, and since bumps make you turn in specific places, I avoid bumps the way I avoid political discussions.

Yes, I would still like to be able to jump cliffs, but my body won’t do that anymore. Come to think of it, my body never did jump cliffs—I just filmed other people doing that. But because of advances in snow grooming and shorter, wider skis to match my wider body, I can still ski down a hill at a speed that gets my adrenaline going. It remains a thrill like no other.

Is there a moral to this story? No. There is a lesson, however: As you age, recalibrate your values to reward joy, not physical prowess. No one keeps score on what you’re doing except you. Are you the fastest person in the over-50 age group to run up Mt. Baldy in your underwear? Who cares?

As I get older, I measure my athletic achievements by the width of my smile. This won’t give you bragging rights around the dinner table with your grandkids, but it does keep life interesting. Don’t give up on athletics; just reset your standards—and definition of success.

Climbing Mt. Everest is very difficult. A few years ago, a young Norwegian rode his mountain bike from Norway to Nepal, towing all his climbing equipment in a small trailer. Then he climbed Mt. Everest alone. At the summit, he snapped a few pictures, climbed down and pedaled his bike all the way back to Norway.

There is a lesson in this story: No matter what you do, there always will be someone who does it better. So do everything for the fun of it, and never mind keeping score. 

This column was published in the February 2008 issue of SKI magazine. Miller’s autobiography, Freedom Found, My Life Story, was published in 2016. He died in January 2018, at the age of 93.

 

Category
Open to Public?
Off
Feature Image Media
Image
Timestamp
Wed, 08/17/2022 - 1:32 PM
Author Text
By Warren Miller

The temperature rises, the snow corns up and you find yourself asking: How fast is too fast?

I love spring skiing. The toasty temperatures loosen up an old body (as much as that’s possible), the soft, easy-turning snow makes everyone feel like Killy and, let’s face it, a lot of pretty bodies come out from under layers of ski clothes to bask in the mountain sunshine.

But as I was standing behind the safety of a large tree on a recent spring afternoon watching people race by, I didn’t need a radar gun to know that they were all going a lot faster than they did a few years ago.

Warm, late-season weather and soft snow certainly promote this supersonic pace. But there’s another simple reason: The invention of the shaped ski has made it easier and easier to go faster and faster on snow that is groomed so smooth that even a senior citizen can ski faster than racers did in the Harriman Cup Downhill in 1948. I know, because I’m a senior citizen and I raced in the Harriman Cup in 1948. The ski equipment of the 1940s made it impossible to ski at even today’s just-out-cruising speeds.

As more and more skiers get comfortable with today’s equipment, the speeds will get faster, and one of the more common sights on the slopes will be people hiding behind trees or continually looking over their shoulders to dodge other people as they jet down the mountain.

Is there a solution to high-speed skiing? I don’t think so. A ski patroller chasing a high-speed skier down a hill to catch him and take away his lift ticket only compounds the danger—now you have two people skiing too fast on the same run. This raises the basic question: At what speed are we skiing too fast? Is it a mathematical equation that takes the speed of everyone else on the hill and then divides it by the number of skiers per acre and sets an average speed? Then, if you ski a certain percentage above that speed, you pay the consequences. And what resort is going to pay to have a slope sheriff patrol every run?

Recently I skied in great powder snow in Montana. Sixteen inches of goose-feather stuff, and I skied at a comfortable pace for me—I wasn’t skiing fast, but I also wasn’t going slow by anyone’s standards.

I skied by someone who was going a lot slower than I was—and I probably scared the dickens out of her. A hundred yards down the hill, someone raced by me in the deep powder so he could get first tracks. All of us were having a great time in the powder and skiing at much different speeds, so how is some sort of speed standard going to be established?

There was a time when a major destination resort, such as Vail, Colo., or Mammoth Mountain, Calif., only had a few hundred skiers on the hill at one time. I know, because I usually was one of the few hundred.

Now, on President’s Weekend, these megaresorts may hit 20,000 skiers—or more—on their slopes. Because of the large crowds, should everyone ski slower? If they are all forced to slow down, will they ever come back? Is there a moral to this story?

No.

Is there a happy ending? Probably. Should we all have to take a test and then wear a number on our parkas that says this is the maximum speed we can ski or our lift tickets will be pulled? Not yet.

As it has always been, skiing is about freedom. It’s a sport built on the ability to fly down a mountainside—at any speed or in any style that works for you. That hasn’t changed. But skiers and riders now have to be more aware that better gear and better grooming has all of us enjoying that freedom at speeds that would have won the Harriman Cup Downhill in 1948.

Enough of this. I’m going skiing tomorrow—and I might scare myself occasionally. But I’ve purchased a helmet in case someone speeding down the slopes runs into me before the lifts close. 

This column was originally published in the March-April 2007 issue of SKI Magazine.

 

Category
Open to Public?
Off
Feature Image Media
Image
Timestamp
Wed, 08/17/2022 - 1:32 PM
Author Text
By Edith Thys Morgan

Retired after 105 World Cup downhill starts, he launched "American Downhiller" -- a movement and a movie.

The award-winning 2020 film American Downhiller chronicles the U.S. men’s downhill ski team, from their earliest days as laughingstocks in the eyes of their European competitors to Bill Johnson’s breakout gold medal and the success that followed. Produced by Ski Racing Media, the movie has a long backstory, one that starts with Marco Sullivan.

In the Beginning


Sullivan in flight, La Parva, Chile. Photo:
Courtesy Marco Sullivan.

Born in 1980, Sullivan grew up in the Tahoe City Trailer Park, fondly called “Sin City” or “Little India” by its residents. Located on the south bank of the Truckee River, just 200 yards from Lake Tahoe’s outlet dam, the park offered cheap rent in an idyllic setting. World-class climbers and skiers settled there, in trailers they expanded using recycled construction material from the era’s building boom. People didn’t bother to lock their doors; kids rode bikes and tossed footballs in the streets.

Photo above: Marco Sullivan celebrates his final World Cup race at Kvitfjell, Norway, in 2016.

Sullivan and his older sister, Chelsea, had the run of the place, loosely supervised by the neighbors, including their uncle, Mark “Sully” Sullivan, and his girlfriend, Debbie. Marco’s dad, Paul, operated heavy equipment for Perata Excavation, and mom Rena worked in human resources at Squaw Valley (now Palisades Tahoe), and waited tables in the evenings. The ski area job netted the family season passes.

Growing up, Paul and Mark had raced for the Lake Tahoe Ski Club. Mark would go on to coach at Squaw, ultimately managing the Squaw Valley Ski Team. “He took me to the World Cup in Heavenly when I was five, and I got a picture with Stenmark and Zurbriggen,” Marco recalls. “After that I was hooked.”

The Mighty Mites

Sullivan joined Squaw’s Mighty Mites, who progress from watching routes through the resort’s famed chutes and cliffs to pushing each other down and over them, bell to bell, day after day. Speed is the inevitable consequence, in the tradition of Jimmie Heuga and the Poulsen and McKinney kids. Sully famously attributed the perpetual flow of U.S. Ski Team stars to the “real head coach,” the peak called KT-22. According to Sully, repeatedly lapping KT’s 2,000 feet of continuous vertical rock and roll was all a kid needed to succeed.


Weeks after retiring, Sullivan became
NASTAR National Pacesetter, succeeding
AJ Kitt. NASTAR photo.

Marco Sullivan embodied that. “Coming up through the ranks, I never felt like it was weird to want to be on the U.S. Ski Team or in the Olympics,” he recalls. “There were so many people around who had done it.” Watching over them all was his uncle, who made sure the Sullivan kids had everything from hand-me-down equipment to bunk space at training camps. “Ironically, Sully was never my actual on-hill coach, and I don’t remember receiving a lot of technical coaching from him,” says Sullivan of his uncle. “But he always ensured that I had the opportunities that were necessary.” 

The term “coach” insufficiently captures what Sully did. He inspired, collaborated with, facilitated, entertained, bolstered and, mostly importantly, believed in the people around him. When he and fellow Far West coach Noel Dufty co-hosted an annual camp in New Zealand, an extraordinary run of World Cup speed skiers from the Western Region ensued.

Sully and Dufty championed a community approach to ski racing. “The whole idea was of working together and not worrying about who owns it,” says Dufty. “We took the good from all kids being together.” Sullivan took full advantage of the opportunities. Most of his pack attended North Tahoe High School, where they would start skiing at lunchtime and then take their afternoon classes as independent study.


Sullivan faces the press at Sochi, 2014.
USSA photo.

The next piece fell in place when Trevor Wagner, fresh out of Sierra Nevada College (now University), joined Squaw’s coaching staff. Instead of logging gates and timed runs, the kids spent their competitive juices on KT. “Skiing faster than super G speed all the time, you get so comfortable with the speed that it feels normal,” says Wagner. “You start to look farther down the hill, your vision is longer, and everything slows down.”

Reacting to terrain also develops the elusive “touch” that no coach can teach. And for the Tahoe skiers, that translated into results. “When we hit FIS age, it was natural to be fast,” says Sullivan. “I never felt like there was a ton of pressure.”

The U.S. Ski Team and Beyond

In 1999, at age 18, Sullivan won the Junior National Championship Downhill at Snowbasin and was named to the U.S. Ski Team. During his first year on the team, he won a bronze medal in slalom at the 2000 World Junior Alpine Skiing Championships. The next day, he blew out his knee in the GS, which ended up forcing Sullivan to make a crucial career pivot.

“It hurt too much to come back skiing tech, so I gravitated to speed,” he explains. In December 2001 he started racing on the World Cup and made his Olympic debut two months later, at the Winter Games in Salt Lake City. He finished ninth in the downhill, the best finish for the U.S. team in that race. The following season, Sullivan won the U.S. Super G title—on his home turf at Squaw—and went on to compete in the 2006, 2010 and 2014 Olympics, and the 2003, 2007, 2009 and 2013 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships.

On the World Cup circuit, Sullivan established himself as an elite glider—comfortable at high speeds and calm in bumpy conditions. He missed two seasons, 2005 and 2011, due to injuries, but in 2007, he earned his first podium at the Lake Louise downhill. Later that season, he scored a downhill victory at Chamonix and finished fourth overall in the World Cup downhill standings.


Marco Sullivan and wife Anna Goodman.
The couple coach the Palisades Tahoe
Ski Team.

Favorite Son

If Sullivan’s devoted fan base had a clubhouse, it would be Squaw’s Le Chamois. After Sullivan’s win in Chamonix, the “Chammy” hosted an epic welcome home celebration. Of all the legendary Squaw skiers, Sullivan may be the most beloved. During the heart of his career, 50-plus fans—led by his sister—convened for an annual pilgrimage to Beaver Creek for the Birds of Prey World Cup, packing the stands in their green “Marco Rocks” hats and “Marco for Mayor” buttons. They love Sullivan the athlete, but even more so the person; fun, humble, friendly and always giving back more than he receives.

Eddie Mozen started the Squaw Valley Masters Scholarship, which funded Sullivan for five years as a junior racer. Sponsored athletes are asked to give back to the skiing community. “Marco was the poster child,” says Mozen, who ticks off all the ways the racer gave back to the program, even for years beyond his sponsorship. “He ‘got it’ from day one.”

The Sully Legacy

Even as Sullivan found international success, his uncle, Sully, kept him grounded. “He just kept racing really simple,” says Sullivan. “He really believed in doing a few fundamentals correctly, not overanalyzing and always bringing humor to it.” Sully also made everyone—not just the stars—feel like a part of the team. “He did it in a way that was really subtle,” adds his nephew. “Nobody really realized what he was doing until he was gone.”

Sully passed away from cancer in 2014, at age 63.

American Downhiller

Sully’s influence lived on, specifically in Marco’s natural inclination to lift others up to enjoy the ride. In 2010, around the time when U.S. athletes first created their own websites, he passed on using marcosullivan.com, choosing instead AmericanDownhiller.com, a brand intended to be larger than himself. His teammates collectively adopted the term “American Downhiller,” celebrating their rogue spirit in the European-dominated sport.

The name evokes the go-for-broke culture embraced by U.S. speed skiers, the camaraderie built around a shared love of speed, courage in the face of danger, persistence in the face of adversity and brashness in the face of doubt. The crew built on longstanding traditions and added new ones, like an iconic beat-up jeans vest for the fastest American Downhiller of the week. Encouraged by his future wife, Canada’s World Cup slalom specialist Anna Goodman, Sullivan trademarked the term.

Sullivan retired in 2016, donning the ceremonial American Downhiller jean vest at the finish of his final World Cup race and getting doused in Champagne by teammates and competitors alike. He ran his last race at the U.S. Alpine National Championships in Sun Valley, dressed in lederhosen.

Sullivan ultimately earned three national titles, four World Cup podiums and one World Cup victory, and he quietly set the U.S. record for the most World Cup downhill starts, at 105. That’s one more than Bode Miller has. Significantly, Sullivan walked away healthy and still loving the sport, its own accomplishment.

Meanwhile, Anna had retired from World Cup racing in 2012 and pursued a degree in economics and conflict resolution at Westminster College in Salt Lake City while also racing for its ski team. In 2016, she and Sullivan settled back in Tahoe.

Soon after, Sullivan thought it would be cool to run an American Downhiller training camp with his buddies. The program launched in the spring of 2017. Helmet company POC jumped on board, creating American Downhiller gear and funding a series of short webisodes for Ski Racing. Those episodes evolved into the American Downhiller movie, showcasing the full cast of unsung heroes behind the hard-won successes.

The movie tapped into a past that had been largely ignored by the non-racing ski culture. “For these guys, being a downhiller was a footnote and all of a sudden it got brought back out,” says Sullivan. For downhillers to unite under one banner, which included welcoming women downhillers into the club and treating them with equal respect, took someone with Sullivan’s cred and humble demeanor.

The American Downhiller Camp

Just as the movie connected the athletes from past to present, the American Downhiller camps (spring in Mammoth, fall in Saas Fee) built a bridge between World Cup athletes and the kids. The star-studded coaching staff includes Alice McKennis Duran, Leanne Smith, Stacey Cook, Laurenne Ross, Daron Rahlves, AJ Kitt, Bryce Bennett and Steve Nyman. Lessons go beyond technique, including mental skills, which one typically learns only from experience. Says Sullivan, “A lot of what we teach is getting your mind in that capacity of wanting to go fast. Then fear goes away.”

Ultimately, he sees American Downhiller as a national platform from which to pass along a wealth of speed experience to successive generations of skiers. Anna’s business acumen and attention to detail complement her husband’s ambitious vision. In addition to the camps, weekend speed clinics take place at ski clubs across the country. “You can do a lot with a jump, a wave track and some glide turns,” says Sullivan. “You can work on the skills no matter where you happen to be.”

Last season Anna assumed the role of head FIS coach at Palisades Tahoe, while Sullivan took on the U-16 kids. He also has a side business making concrete countertops and furniture. One of his first commissions? The upstairs bar at Le Chamois.

In the summer, when they are not working at ski camps, the couple enjoys all that Tahoe offers, especially mountain biking. Before assuming year-round coaching duties, Anna had competed on cycling’s Enduro World Series tour. Now, when they get a break from camps, the pair load up the travel trailer for weekend trips. At the Lake Tahoe Ski Club annual fundraiser, Sullivan sets up tables while rallying support for the Sully Scholarship that he and his sister started. Every year, the scholarship goes to “an athlete who works hard, is a good teammate and is driven to achieve their goals in the sport of skiing.” Which is to say, an athlete in the Sullivan mold.

To those who suspect that speed events are dying at American ski resorts, Sullivan grins: “It’s not going anywhere. It’s always going to be there.” And it’s always going to be cool. 

Regular contributor Edith Thys Morgan spent nine years on the U.S. Ski Team, competing in three World Championships and two Olympics. She last wrote about “The Skiing Cochrans” in the May–June 2021 issue of Skiing History.

Category
Open to Public?
Off
Feature Image Media
Image
Timestamp
Wed, 08/17/2022 - 1:32 PM
Author Text
By Warren Miller

Is it too late to start working out for the ski season? It depends.

This is the time of year when any health club worth its mortgage is advertising: “Tune Up Your Body for the Ski Season, Enroll Now!” Most people who belong to a health club are in such good shape that they don’t need that extra tuning up just to drive three hours to stand in a lift line. And for those of you who don’t belong to a health club, it’s already too late to join to get in shape for this season.

Right about now, large groups of the needing-to-get-rid-of-the-flab crowd congregate at sports bars. They’re drinking toasts to the passing of the bikini-watching—or wearing-season. They used to look forward to watching attractive people skiing in stretch pants. But skiers today wear clothes so baggy they look like a sack of cats on the way to the river.

By the way, never talk to anyone about losing weight. All I ever hear about is the 12 pounds that a friend lost while he was on a diet of cabbage and beets for three months and working out three times a week with a personal trainer who charged $100 an hour. The only thing that much exercise will get you ready for is to die healthier.

There are all types of exercises that will get you in shape for skiing. There are those you can read about in magazines, there are thousands of different get-in-shape videos, there’s soft aerobics and hard aerobics, yoga, Pilates, push-ups, sit-ups and jogging. But most people train by remote-control channel surfing. If you have good hand-eye coordination, a precise mental time clock and a capacity for remembering numbers, you can click from one sporting event to another and miss every commercial during a weekend of football.

Regardless of which exercises you do, you have to determine what being in shape means to you by comparing yourself to others. At Boyne Mountain in Michigan, which is a little over 400 feet high, I have heard people standing at the top talking about where they should meet on the way down. “Halfway, by the big pine tree,” seems to be the most common place to stop, rest and talk about how the run has been so far. In their own minds, every one of these skiers is in great shape.

At the other end of the spectrum is Chamonix, France, where two gondolas rise 10,000 vertical feet. This is a place where the locals think nothing of skiing nonstop from top to bottom. The first time I skied there, almost 40 years ago, I rode up on a construction tram, which consisted of a platform about the size of a sheet of plywood. James Couttet and I balanced each other on either side of the platform as we rode up. On the way down, I probably stopped 45 times to take movies of almost every turn the former world champion made. I also stopped a lot of times because I was tired.

I was in better shape then than I am today, because I was four decades younger. My mind is still willing, but my body isn’t. However, being a 14-year-old kid trapped in a senior-citizen’s body is still better than the alternative.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and start my first workout of the season. There’s still a lot of time left to get in sufficient shape to do more than three sit-ups at a time. Then I’m grabbing my skis and boots—and heading straight to Michigan. 

This column was originally published in the November 2004 issue of SKI Magazine. Photo courtesy Warren Miller Entertainment.

Category
Open to Public?
Off
Feature Image Media
Image
Timestamp
Wed, 08/17/2022 - 1:32 PM
Author Text
By Jeff Blumenfeld

Lack of snow deters not the true believer.

Photo above: German sand-skiing speed record holder (nearly 60 mph) Henrik May shows his form on the sands of Namibia.

Snow is unquestionably top of the heap for sliding. Not to get all Poindexter on you, but skis slide easily thanks to a very thin layer of meltwater between the skis and the snow.

So what happens if it doesn’t snow? Or what if it’s one of those three warmer seasons that shall remain nameless? That’s where history has proven skiers will ski on just about anything, especially sand.


Boasting the tallest dunes in North
America, the Great Sand Dunes
preserve has been the hub of U.S. sand
skiing for decades. National Park
Service photo.

For decades, the mecca for sand skiing in the U.S. has been the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve near Alamosa, Colorado, North America’s tallest dunes. Opened in 1932 as a national monument, it became a national park in 2004.

Each fall, ski bums return to Great Sand Dunes to ski or board 34-degree, 742-foot-high dunes in a tradition that, for many, begins the new ski season. One enthusiast tells OutThereColorado.com, “Sand is not as slippery as snow, so it’s like skiing in slow motion. You have to make shallow turns, but it’s definitely real skiing. That’s why we come back every year—because we’re jonesin’ to ski.”

The Great Dunes skier was accurate, if not precise, about the relative slickness of sand vs. snow. To get technical (stay with me here): dry sand has a dynamic coefficient of friction of about .55 compared to snow at about .03—depending on the snow and the ski wax. So sand is about 18 times more resistant to gliding than snow. But if you dampen the sand a bit (just a bit) the coefficient can go down to a range of .3 to .45, depending on the size of the sand grains and how wet the conditions are. Ancient pyramid-builders poured water on desert sand to more easily drag massive sleds. And that’s why savvy sand skiers hit the Great Dunes slopes after a rain.


Great Sand Dunes was declared a
National Monument in 1932, and visitors
grabbed whatever was at hand to start
sliding. Cooking pots were fast enough.
NPS photo.

At the Great Dunes, sandboards can be rented outside the park and are more popular than skis. It seems that while sand doesn’t appear to damage the base of alpine skis, it may dull edges and jam bindings. Sandboard bases, much harder than snowboard bases, are usually treated with paraffin-based wax to reduce friction, and it works like a charm on rain-soaked sand.

Sand skiing in the Colorado desert is not without risk. Great Dunes sand can reach 150 degrees F., lightning can occur at any time during the warmer months, and in high winds, those Covid masks come in handy. Eye protection, long sleeves and pants are helpful to avoid getting sandblasted.

Still, sand is better than other sliding surfaces known to lure skiers.

Members of the Facebook group Elite Skiing report sliding on volcanic ash, pine needles, scree (loose stones), shale, coal slag, carpet, soap flakes, powdered mica, and even gravel and barite mixed with used motor oil. During the heyday of the New York State Borscht Belt in the Catskills, Grossinger’s resort hotel experimented with ground-up collar buttons (see Skiing History, May/June 2020).

For millions of snow-starved Europeans, there’s one word: plastics. So-called dry slopes are part of a cottage industry tracked by Dry Slope News, established in 2018. “People have been skiing on slopes without snow for over a century, but the earliest artificial surfaces manufactured especially for skiing date from the 1950s,” says editor Patrick Thorne.

“Since the first few dry slopes appeared, close to 2,000 have been built in more than 50 countries worldwide. At the height of dry skiing’s popularity in the early 1980s, there were reports of over 300 in Great Britain alone.”

Sand Skiing Gets its Start in Africa

Some 44 countries offer sandboarding today according to Sandboard.com.

Modern sand skiing dates back to 1927 when French athlete, mountaineer, aviator, and journalist Marie Marvingt (1875-1963) combined her careers as a surgical nurse and military aviator, to create aluminum skis for an experimental medevac airplane to land on Saharan sand in Morocco and Algeria (see Skiing History, March-April 2020).

By then a decorated hero of World War I and credited as the world’s first female combat pilot, Marvingt hired a metal shop in her home town of Nancy to forge personal skis from solid aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. She determined metal sand skis were better than wood and certainly better than walking up dunes in sandals, reportedly testing them on sand for 50 miles. One year later, she started a ski school for Berbers, along the snowless Moroccan coast.

Marvingt’s legacy continues in the northern African country. Today, people who engage in guided ski touring on the snows of Mount Toubkal or take advantage of the lift service at Oukaimeden in the rugged High Atlas Mountains in southwestern Morocco, also head a few hours southeast to the edge of the Sahara Desert to sand ski or sandboard for bragging rights.

Four thousand miles farther south, in Namibia, the German-born Henrik May, 45, has been pioneering the sport of sand skiing for two decades, according to Powder magazine (July 2013). There, the Namib Desert is home to some of the largest dunes in the world, thousands of miles from the nearest snow.

May’s company, Ski Namibia (ski-namibia.com), is one of the very few dune ski-specific operations in the world and has been featured by NBC’s Today Show and the CBS reality show, The Amazing Race. He started his touring company in 2003 and since then has logged thousands of ski descents. He set a Guinness world speed record in 2010, reaching 92.12 km/h (57.24 mph) on sand. He introduced Wustenskisport, or dune skiing, to the internet with guided runs usually between 200 to 400 vertical feet after climbs of around 20 minutes.


Charles Pierpont, of the Cape Cod
Sand & Pine Needle Ski School, flashes
a wedge turn in 1937. Christine Reid, 
New England Ski Museum.

Back in the U.S.A.

Sand skiing in the United States dates back at least to 1937 on the Cape Cod, Massachusetts, side of Nantucket Sound. According to the New York Times (Sept. 12, 1937), “Some of the dunes near Centerville are unusually long, permitting runs of 100 and 150 feet, on which a skier can attain speeds of about forty miles an hour. . . Wooden skis slide easily on the sand and gain speed, particularly when the sand is covered by short grass or pine needles.”

At any rate, those Centerville dunes are long gone, according to Patti Machado, town of Barnstable Director of Recreation in Hyannis, Massachusetts. “We do not have any dunes. I think that the beach topography may have been different back then,” she emails Skiing History.

One famed sand skiing competition was Sandblast in Prince George, British Columbia, held every August from 1971 to 2003. It attracted thousands of spectators to a dual slalom race among so-called “sandblasters” who didn’t want summer to get in the way of their favorite sport. Just north of the city by the Nechako River is a steep hill called the Cutbanks where 10 to 15-sec. races were once held on a 500-foot slope of sand and gravel. It was popular over the decades and people traveled long distances to participate, including filmmaker Warren Miller, according to FreeThoughtBlogs.com.

Amazingly, no one was ever seriously injured. But according to the TV show BC Was Awesome, hosted by Bob Kronbauer, in 2003 some yahoos descended in a three-wheeled couch. The resulting crash scared off the insurance companies, leading to a permanent ban.


The 1980 Epoke Beach Classic, in
Redondo Beach, California, attracted
media, which trumpeted "sand skiing
is sweeping the country. Peter Graves.

Sand and Deliver

Sand skiing was also popular as a cross-country competition on Pacific Ocean beaches during that era. In 1980, Bjorn Arvnes of Norway, winner of the 1977 American Birkebeiner, won the sand XC skiing title at the Epoke Beach Classic at Redondo Beach, California. Event producers were Larry Harrison, a rep for NorTur, the U.S. importer of Epoke Skis, and Peter Graves, NorTur marketing director.

The sand skiing stunt appeared on NBC’s Real People, page one of the Los Angeles Times, and even in the National Enquirer, which wrote breathlessly that “sand skiing was sweeping the country.” Tom Kelly, who handled event promotion with Graves, tells Skiing History, “It was a hugely successful media event for the time, garnering national coverage for Epoke.”

Other favorite North American sand skiing locations are Jockey’s Ridge State Park in North Carolina, White Sands National Park in New Mexico, Idaho’s Bruneau Sand Dunes and St. Anthony Sand Dunes, California’s San Bernardino Mountains, and Sandbanks Provincial Park in Ontario.

In the end, sand has an enduring advantage over snow: It doesn’t melt. 

ISHA VP Jeff Blumenfeld’s most recent contribution to Skiing History was “The Day They Threw Cow Chips in Las Vegas” (January-February 2021).

Category
Open to Public?
Off
Feature Image Media
Image
Timestamp
Wed, 08/17/2022 - 1:32 PM

From her home base in Monaco, Pernilla Wiberg, Sweden’s all-time top female alpine racer, is a TV commentator, advocate for World Cup racer safety, entrepreneur, and homeschooling mom.

When you’re a world champion, an Olympic champion, a World Cup overall champion and a successful TV commentator, you’re not the average mom. But last March, Swedish alpine ski-racing legend Pernilla Wiberg found herself at home in Monaco, doing what many of the world’s moms were doing: homeschooling her kids and busting outdoors for exercise.
     “It’s a rollercoaster,” says the 50-year-old Wiberg of parenting, pandemic or not. “It’s not easy and there is not [only] one way to succeed.” 

Wiberg and her husband Bødvar Bjerke, a former Norwegian national alpine team coach, share parenting duties for their son and daughter, ages 17 and 13. Most winters, Bjerke covers for Wiberg when she travels extensively for her TV work, from late October through March. Last spring, while the family hunkered into quarantine in Monaco, back in Sweden Wiberg’s brother, sister and mother carried on their lives with no restrictions. 

“Nobody can say right now if the approach that Sweden has taken with COVID-19 will in the end be the right one or not,” says Wiberg of the nation’s less-restrictive “herd immunity” policies. “It will take some years.”

Wiberg’s journeys include regular trips to the Pernilla Wiberg Hotel in Idre Fjall, a small ski resort and former mining village tucked up close to the Norwegian border in the northwest part of Dalarna in Sweden. The ski-in, ski-out hotel was built in 2003, shortly after Wiberg retired from racing.  “It was the perfect project to jump into,” says Wiberg. She drew on lessons learned as a world-class athlete, from navigating sponsors and negotiating contracts to “doing mistakes,” she says. Today, Wiberg is engaged in all aspects of the hotel, from designing skier-friendly features—including small drying cupboards and lots of hooks for gear in every room—to overseeing marketing and consulting on menus. Her fierce dedication to skiing has shifted from winning races to sharing her love for the sport...

Pernilla Wiberg
Category
Open to Public?
Off
Timestamp
Wed, 08/17/2022 - 1:32 PM

Using the website for research

The skiinghistory.org website has become an invaluable research tool for students and writers. An increasing number of journalists now rely on the site as a fact-check resource. Here’s a quick summary of some of the techniques that can quickly find accurate information on names, places and dates.

First, there are three major search tools available: site search (also called text search), page search and magazine-archive search.

The site search tool will survey the main skiinghistory.org website content, including the index of back issues and the indices to SKI, Skiing and Snow Country magazines and the ski bibliography. To use it, find the white rectangular text-search box in the upper right corner of the page. Enter the word or phrase you want to search for. This could be a name, a place, a topic, or a date. Then hit Enter or Return. You'll get a list of all the pages within this site which contain that word or phrase. You may go to each page in turn by clicking on its title.

Hint: If you’re looking for a multi-word term, like a name, put it in quotes. That will narrow down the search results dramatically. For instance, searching for Hannes Schneider will return all pages with the name Hannes, (Hannes Nothnagl, Hannes Trinkl, etc.), and all pages with name Schneider (Othmar Schneider, Herbert Schneider, etc.) but "Hannes Schneider" in quotes will return only Hannes Schneider himself.

Some of the pages that come up are very long – especially the magazine index and bibliography pages. Rather than scroll through these documents line by line looking for the reference you want, use the page search tool. While holding down the Control key, hit the letter F. A small text-search box will open at the top or bottom of your screen (top or bottom depends on the software installed on your computer). Once again, type in the name, place, race or other term you’re looking for. Then use the up and down arrows to move to the next occurrence of that term within the page.

Finally, the Skiing Heritage archive in Google Books has its own very efficient internal search tool. Use the text search box and check the box labeled "seach all issues,' or scroll down to "Browse all issues" where you can read each issue organized chronologically.

Once there, you’ll see a text search box. Put a check in the “Search All Issues” box, then enter your search terms in the box and hit the Enter or Return key. As usual, putting your search term in quotes will narrow the search results. –Seth Masia

Open to Public?
Off
Feature Image Media
Image
Timestamp
Wed, 08/17/2022 - 1:32 PM

Finally perfected after 30 years, the carving ski failed to gain a popular following. In its place, we got a ski that has made resort slopes less safe.
By Jackson Hogen

For most of modern skiing’s history, the execution of a perfect turn has been an unobtainable ideal. Leather boots and wooden skis weren’t able to initiate and sustain a continuous, seamless carve. In the January 1967 issue of SKI magazine, Olympic gold medalist and Jackson Hole ski-school director Pepi Stiegler described a teaching method of getting the skis on edge so “the skis are literally carving the turn for you.” He called it the “Moment of Truth on Skis.” 

“To start the turn, the skier should have the feeling of his weight going forward on the uphill ski and twisting the skis downhill. The resulting sensation is of a drift in the direction of the turn. At some split second during this process, the skier senses a moment to apply the edges and start the skis carving.”

At the time, the invention of plastic boots and the use of metal and fiberglass in ski design had brought the grail of the carved turn within reach. Stiegler, who became the NASTAR national pacesetter, clearly saw the desirability of recreational skiers knowing how to carve a turn. 

The year before he died, the incomparable Stein Eriksen sent ski historian John Fry a package that included several photos of Stein in his iconic reverse-shoulder stance, along with a letter in which Eriksen asked Fry whether he should be considered the inventor of the carved turn. Ever the diplomat, Fry replied that he doubted an uninterrupted carve was possible on 1950s-era equipment, “but if anyone could do it, it would be you.”...

Category