Classics

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.

They spent almost an hour in line, yet more and more skiers came, bonding as they waited ... and waited.

Lift lines have been part of the ski experience as long as there have been lifts. Is there such a thing as a line that’s too short?

Beginning after World War II and for the next 40 years, a weekend skier waited in liftline so long that the person next to him had a time to describe where he was born, his best powder day, his favorite music, why he deserved a promotion at the office and … hey, check out those vintage skis over there. Skiers could wait in line for an hour, all for a 12-minute ride up the mountain and the reward of a quick descent.

Snail-paced lift queues—usually exasperating and sometimes bone-freezing—arose from the relentless supply of young baby boomers demanding to ski. Their numbers exceeded the growth of a new ski areas and lifts, even though that growth itself was spectacular. In the 10-year period between 1956 and 1966, more than 580 ski areas with chairlifts and T-bars came into being, many of them previously equipped with ropetows. Yet it wasn’t enough.

The number of U.S. skiers quintupled over the same period. And when a million or more of them arrived at the bottom of the mountain with their kids on a Saturday morning, the place looked like a standing-room only Beatles concert. Waits of 45 minutes and more were common across the country, from Stowe to Boyne to Big Bear.

Some relief arrived with the advent of tripe and quad chairlifts, but the big breakthrough came in the early 1980s with the introduction of the detachable lift. Climbing speeds doubled, and lift-shutdowns from boarding mishaps were sharply reduced. The new chairs and gondolas were line-busters.

In the past five years of the 20th century, North American ski resorts installed 250 high-capacity lifts, collectively capable of carrying more skiers uphill than all of the lifts that existed in the winter of 1965-66 combined.

In the 1950s and 1960s, observed writer Morten Lund, liftlines allowed enough time “to meet a member of the opposite sex, get infatuated, engaged and plan the wedding.”

Today, a Saturday or Sunday liftline scarcely allows time to land an après-ski date. No one wants to regress to slow lifts, but history suggest that long queues once helped develop skiing reputation as an irrepressibly sociable sport. 

Excerpted from the March-April 2008 issue of SKI magazine. John Fry (1930-2020) was editorial director of SKI and Snow Country magazines and longtime president, then chairman, of ISHA. He authored the award-winning book The Story of Modern Skiing. His final book, published posthumously, is Abandon Foolish Scheme: Deathly encounters that you won’t find in bestsellers about dying.

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.

Did a foggy slalom course on a French mountainside tarnish the coronation of skiing’s king?

If history follows form at this month’s Olympic games, a controversy is sure to erupt, whether it’s whispers of non-regulation skis or a suddenly strapping racer using pills to pump up. But nothing is likely to eclipse the dispute at the Winter Olympics 38 years ago, which fueled newspaper headlines around the world. Was a race jury right to have disqualified Karl Schranz—Austria’s greatest racer of the era—in the slalom, allowing France’s Jean-Claude Killy to win his third gold medal, instantly turning the handsome Frenchman into a skiing legend? 

Photo top: Jean-Claude Killy congratulates Karl Schranz on winning the 1968 Olympic slalom. The race jury later disqualified Schranz’s second run, giving the gold to Killy. To this day, Schranz contends he won. Courtesy SKI Magazine.

The previous winter, Killy had dominated the new World Cup circuit, winning an astounding 12 of 17 races, making him the heavy favorite at the 1968 Grenoble Games. He won gold in the first two races—the downhill and the giant slalom—leading up to the historic slalom competition. 

On race day, thick fog enshrouded the course, occasionally lifting to allow a lucky racer to see ahead. Many officials thought the two-run race should be canceled. But the closing ceremony, with its television coverage, was set for the next day. 

In the first run, Killy recorded the fastest time, but Schranz was less than six-tenths of a second back, setting the stage for the final run. Killy started first. 

“At gates 17 to 20, the fog was tremendous, Killy told me a few years ago. “I slowed almost to a walk. Schranz didn’t even finish. He stopped below gates 19 and 20, claiming that an official had crossed his path. He demanded another run. In his retry, Schranz recorded a combined time a half-second faster than Killy’s, but race officials quickly disqualified the second run. The Austrians protested.

As the crowd awaited the race jury’s decision, Schranz proclaimed himself the victor. Killy, meanwhile, sat with friends, trainers and reporters, drinking champagne to celebrate his two gold medals. After several hours, the jury ruled: Schranz was disqualified. France’s new hero had completed his gold-medal hat trick after all.

Schranz’s reaction was immediate. “If Killy were sportsmanlike, he would refuse the gold medal, he declared. The Austrian would never compete in another Olympics. Now a St. Anton innkeeper, he continues to believe he was robbed in the fog on French snow. 

Excerpted from the February 2006 issue of SKI. John Fry (1930-2020) was editorial director of SKI and Snow Country magazines and longtime president, then chairman, of ISHA. He authored the award-winning book The Story of Modern Skiing. His final book, published posthumously, is Abandon Foolish Scheme: Deathly encounters that you won’t find in bestsellers about dying.

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.

The cerebral side of ski instruction grew dominant in the mid-1970s. The approach vanished a decade later, but had made its point that mastering technique is only part of the game.

More than three decades ago, skiing was ripe for a change in the way the sport was taught. Amid a new wave of research in psychology and neurology that supported a holistic approach to how people learn, ski instructors were still shouting orders to tense skiers about the placement of their knees and shoulders.

Jean-Claude Killy, it was revealed, had used a form of yoga to help win the 1967 overall World Cup title and his triple gold at the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble, France. Switzerland’s national ski team won seven medals at the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games after employing a Jungian psychotherapist.

Sportswriter and expert skier Denise McCluggage, who’d studied Zen Buddhism, attracted national attention with her concept of Centered Skiing. She urged skiers to control their skis not intellectually from the head, but viscerally from the body’s physical center—a point located just below the navel.

At about the same time, in 1975, Tim Gallwey, the best-selling author of The Inner Game of Tennis, burst onto the ski scene. Skiers, he said, should learn to focus on mental images of how they wanted to ski down a slope and on how a perfect turn should feel. He went on to co-author the best-selling book Inner Skiing.

The nation’s ski schools mostly welcomed the Gallwey influence. Colorado’s Copper Mountain started a dryland program instructing students to feel the motions of skiing before they even put on skis. A rush of workshops and books, such as Ski With Yoga, appeared.

The Hidden Skier claimed a latent talent and unique style of skiing lay within each of us. In Skiing from the Head Down, two psychologists presented skiing as a total mind and body experience.

It wasn’t long before doubts were raised about overemphasizing the inner approach to instruction. Skiing does, after all, involve a technical activity: sliding down snowy slopes at high speeds. A Zen-like inner peace doesn’t address a student’s need to make it down the slopes in one piece.

By the mid-1980s, the Inner Game schools had mostly disappeared. While racers continued to work on the cerebral aspects of skiing, the ski-instruction establishment largely returned to focusing on execution and technique. Nevertheless, the mental approach of the ’70s has left the sport with an enduring legacy: a reminder to instructors that technical expertise is only the beginning of successfully teaching people how to ski. 

Excerpted from the October 2008 issue of SKI. John Fry (1930-2020) was editorial director of SKI and Snow Country magazines and longtime president, then chairman, of ISHA. He authored the award-winning book The Story of Modern Skiing. His final book, published posthumously, is Abandon Foolish Scheme: Deathly encounters that you won’t find in bestsellers about dying.

A masterpiece of American alpine architecture was nearly lost. Then a skier came to its rescue. 

Timberline Lodge surely rates as one of the most gorgeous examples of mountain architecture ever built. Against the backdrop of the 11,239-foot summit of Oregon’s Mt. Hood, the structure appears to be part of nature itself.

Construction of the lodge originated with a 1930s Works Progress Administration (WPA) government program that provided jobs to unemployed Americans during the Great Depression. In 1935, Oregon ski enthusiasts persuaded an eager WPA to allocate up to a quarter-million dollars to build a lodge at the 6,000-foot-high base of the slope. A crew of 350 workers completed the four-story lodge in just 15 months, entirely by hand, inside and out.

And what a lodge it would be. On a massive stone understory, built to withstand the weight of 20-foot-deep snow on Mt. Hood, architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood constructed a central frame of hand-hewn ponderosa pine beams that soared 100 feet into the sky. A monstrous stone chimney capped America’s largest fireplace. Inside, artisans carved stunning stonework and wood bas-reliefs, wove rugs, forged wrought iron and created beautiful stained glass. Their artwork reflected native wildlife and pioneer folklore.

By the time Timberline opened in 1938, with 70 rooms and a vast, imposing public space, it rivaled Yosemite’s Ahwahnee and surpassed the new Lodge at Sun Valley as America’s greatest alpine hostelry. After World War II, however, the lodge fell on hard times. The ski operation faltered. Rooms were being rented to prostitutes, and finally it was forced to close. Neglect and deterioration followed. But in 1955, tender love and care came in the form of Dick Kohnstamm, a native New Yorker and outdoorsman who’d recently moved to Portland.

Kohnstamm refurbished the lodge and the lifts, using family money and government funding. So successful was the restoration that Kohnstamm was elected to the US National Ski Hall of Fame, and the Park Service placed Timberline Lodge on its National Register of Historic Places. And so it remains, America’s most majestic slopeside lodge. 

Excerpted from the December 2008 issue of SKI Magazine. John Fry (1930-2020) was editorial director of SKI and Snow Country magazines, and longtime president, then chairman, of ISHA. He authored the award-winning book The Story of Modern Skiing. His final book, published posthumously, is Abandon Foolish Scheme: Deadly encounters that you won’t find in bestsellers about dying.

Photo: Ray Atkeson’s darkly emotive 1945 pre-sunrise image of Mt. Hood’s Timberline Lodge ranks among the most beautiful snow scenes ever captured on film. Courtesy of SKI Magazine

Toni Sailer raced to seven World Championship medals in an improbable 24 months—helping him become skiing’s first leading man.

Above: The Blitz from Kitz: Combining three gold medals with his matinee-idol appearance, 21-year-old Toni Sailer was the breakout star at the 1956 Cortina Winter Olympic Games.

The ski world conventionally remembers Austria’s Toni Sailer as the first racer to capture three gold medals in a single Olympics, winning all the alpine competitions (slalom, giant slalom and downhill) at the 1956 Winter Games in Cortina, Italy. After Jean-Claude Killy hat-tricked again in 1968, no man has three-peated. But to appreciate Sailer’s dominance, you have to know what he did two years after the Olympics. In the 1958 Alpine World Ski Championships at Bad Gastein, Austria, he was in a class by himself. He won the giant slalom—in which victory is often decided by hundredths of a second—by four seconds, and he won the downhill as well. And he was second in the slalom, narrowly missing gold. The result was that he easily won the overall FIS World Championship combined gold medal.

At the time, Olympic medalists also received World Championship medals (the practice ended in 1980). So Sailer’s three 1958 gold medals, on top of his Olympic four (including the 1956 victory in the “paper” combined event), gave him seven World Championship gold medals in two years—a feat no other racer has achieved. To top it off, during the same 24 months he won the world’s toughest downhill, the Hahnenkamm. Twice.

How could a racer be so dominant? Going fast is one way to win. Its complement is to travel the shortest distance. Sailer was ahead of his time in perfecting the technique of taking a straight line between gates, using an uphill step to enter turns normally. American Tom Corcoran says watching Sailer’s line in 1958 was a lesson that he never forgot—and one that helped him become America’s top giant slalom skier.

Sailer also had a mental edge. His desire to win was so deeply embedded, he explained, that the goal of coming in first didn’t cross his mind. Rather, he likened his skiing to throwing a stone. “The stone flies by itself, and it lands by itself,” said Sailer. “I get the prize because the stone flew well. Why did it fly well? Because I threw it the right way.”

The 1958 World Championships were Sailer’s final races. Strict Olympic guidelines on amateur status forced him to retire. “I have to make money,” said the 23-year-old, by then Europe’s most famous athlete. And he did. Built like a football player and Hollywood handsome, he became a successful movie and TV actor, and a heartthrob to millions of women.

Sailer long served as chairman of the International Ski Federation’s Alpine Committee, making rules for the sport he once ruled as a competitor. One of his life’s proudest achievements was establishing the children’s ski school in his hometown of Kitzbühel. 

Post-script: Sailer died in 2009, in Innsbruck, Austria. He was 73. With his remarkable competitive success, along with his post-racing career in film and entertainment, skiing’s first leading man was nothing short of a national hero. Heinz Fischer, president of Austria, paid tribute to Sailer as “a top athlete who already became a legend during his lifetime.”

Excerpted from the February 2008 issue of SKI Magazine. John Fry (1930-2020) was editorial director of SKI and Snow Country magazines, and longtime president, then chairman, of ISHA. He authored the award-winning book The Story of Modern Skiing. His final book, published posthumously, is Abandon Foolish Scheme: Deathly encounters that you won’t find in bestsellers about dying. 

SKI Magazine, January 1968