Technique

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Seventy years ago, the rhythmic fall-line turn was the acme of skiing elegance.

Above: In Skiing Simplified (1966) Doug Pfeiffer accepted the formal Austrian technique of sweeping the tails.

For about 15 years at the height of skiing’s boom era, the mark of excellence for a ski instructor was Wedeln. These seamless heel-thrust turns, performed on a relatively flat ski, were generated mostly by lower body movements, including an up-unweight to lighten the skis for lateral thrust. The skier’s torso faced the direction of travel (downhill) while the legs and feet gently and rhythmically pivoted the skis left and right. The effect was a graceful leg-pendulum movement, complemented by a stable torso and rhythmic pole plants. Done correctly, these turns were purely parallel, entirely eliminating the stem.

Around 1955, Stefan Kruckenhauser, head of the Austrian Ski Academy (and therefore the pope of all Austrian ski schools) chose the name Wedeln (tail-wagging) to describe these turns. He enshrined it as the top goal for expert skiers in his 1957 book Ősterreichsicher Skilehrplan.

It could be said that Wedeln evolved from the Kurzschwung (short swing), a rhythmic and rapid linking of turns with hard edge-sets that provided speed control in steep terrain and narrow passages. Wedeln’s primary function, in contrast, was playful turning (as opposed to speed control), and it was mostly performed on gentler terrain or in deep powder.

Wedeln became the mark of good skiing as it allowed a skier to demonstrate high levels of mobility, speed control and skillful play. In that last sense, it served more of an aesthetic purpose, reflecting a joyful personal expression of skiing. Wedeln differed from short swing by requiring softer edge engagement and lesser ski displacement across the fall line. Practitioners often described their ski-snow interaction as Schmieren (smearing). Variations of Wedeln also emerged, driven by terrain and snow conditions, and differing in the degree of ski displacement and commensurate edge engagement. And the technique became the bread and butter of racers negotiating flushes and gate combinations with little off-set.

Schriebl flush
Stratton's Austrian instructors ski a flush. Hubert Schriebl photo.

As with many innovations, it is difficult to pin the invention of Wedeln to a particular person. According to St. Anton native and ski-school director Dixi Nohl, Kruckenhauser filmed and analyzed local racers as they perfected the style while training in endless slalom flushes set by their coach, Toni Spiss (see “When Krucki Ruled the World” in the March 2005 issue of Skiing Heritage).

Wherever it came from, Kruckenhauser and his successor, Professor Franz Hoppichler, elevated Wedeln into a trademark of Austrian skiing.

The method of teaching laid out in the Austrian ski manual was:

  • Straight runs with rhythmic vertical movement.
  • Repeat the above with rhythmic alternate pole plant.
  • Add SMALL pivoting of the skis to the end of each up movement.
  • Reduce vertical movements until torso and arms remain on one plane, legs developing leg pendulum movements!
  • Rinse and playfully repeat! [my addition].

The ability to wedel elegantly became the price of entry into the Austrian teaching system. European skiers were suckers for novelty, and they flocked to the ski areas that boasted the best “tail-wagging” instructors. Periodic demos by instructors at the morning meeting places served as visual evidence of the elegance and grace of skiing in this manner.

Gamma: Handbook of Skiing
In Handbook of Skiing (1981), Karl Gamma suggests it might be permissible to pivot the skis around the boots.

Other European national ski schools skied the same turns, but they failed to benefit by neglecting to name and market the style. The French, for example, built on their concept of virage aval (“turn to the valley”), emphasizing the need to face the torso downhill when skiing the fall-line. Their toute neige, tous terrains (all snow, all terrain) approach always offered a broad selection of techniques and styles of turning. In 1959, Georges Joubert and Jean Vuarnet published Wedeln à la française, identifying the turn as a “thrust-pivot” and placing it not at the top of the learning progression but as an intermediate step en route to the “modern christie,” a more completely finished speed-control turn.

The French soon made headlines by promoting avalement (“swallowing”), especially for bump skiing. This technique required the skier to fold and turn the legs and feet to absorb the impact of bumps and/or the accumulating pressure of a well-edged turn finish. In contrast to the rotary movements used to make medium- and long-radius turns, the French ski school emphasized virage aval when linking short-radius turns. In response, Kruckenhauser advised that in bumps, Wedeln could begin with a down-unweight instead of a hop.

Both French and Austrian techniques won the attention of the skiing public. Skiers waiting in line for the tram could be heard debating the merits of one technique over the other.

Wedeln with glove
Doug Pfeiffer added: Hold a glove between your knees to learn the fashionable tight stance.

Some instructors began talking about carving in the late 1960s. By 1972, when Warren Witherell’s How the Racers Ski came out, an emphasis on carving began to eclipse all other forms of skiing. Witherell suggested that a ski’s design should be a more powerful driver of the turn, not the skier’s comparatively weaker efforts to pivot. Aided by radically evolving ski design, carving emerged as the new signature of expert skiers. As new flex patterns and shorter lengths have complemented deeper sidecuts, carving remains the holy grail of excellence in Alpine skiing to this day.

Snowboarding may have led the way in this development. If carving can be explained technically as the edged ski’s tail following the same path as the tip, its psychological definition is the thrill of lateral acceleration—the serotonin-producing risk-taking generated by leaning into the turn while feeling the dynamic support of edged skis beneath the body. I believe carving is here to stay. At the recent Interski in Levi, Finland, it was evident that the entire ski world carves, addicted to the accelerating turn.

For recreational skiers who are not addicted to speed, preferring instead to feel secure, veteran instructors will continue to encourage a flatter ski with a skidded parallel turn to control speed, at least on easy groomed terrain. People who don’t take lessons, and who are therefore uninfluenced by theory, will continue to ski all sorts of inconsistent techniques, including the occasional fall-line descent with rhythmic skidded turns.

The joy of skiing is experienced at all levels of skill acquisition. To that end, while carving is the current pinnacle of Alpine skiing, Wedeln and Kurzschwung, rotation and avalement are alive and well in the recreational skier’s repertoire. 

Horst Abraham wrote about student-centered teaching in the March-April 2023 issue.

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The "horse-kick" turn, introduced by Emile Allais, evolved into down-unweighting.

In the library of ski techniques, ruade is a rarity. At one time it had significant currency in some upper echelons of skiing but is now virtually extinct.

Illustration above: Édouard Frendo’s book introduced ruade—and down-unweighting—to the world.

It was developed in France in the 1940s, and championed by Emile Allais, for the purpose of making short-radius parallel turns. The French wanted skiers to get beyond the stem christiania as soon as possible, and felt that up-unweighting and shoulder rotation imposed too ponderous a tempo to work for short-radius, parallel turns, especially at lower speeds, on steeper slopes and in difficult snow.


Allais' book explained down-unweighting
through active retraction.

What was needed at turn initiation was a way for a skier to unweight and rotate the skis in a single motion, then get the weight back down on the skis instantly. How do you do that on stiff, seven-foot wooden skis while wearing low, soft boots and using imprecise cable bindings?

The French solution was the ruade—literally a “horse-kick.” The idea was, starting from a tall stance, to pull the feet up and rock forward, thereby lifting the tails while keeping the tips planted on the snow. This was the


Squaw Valley aces Dodie Post and
Stan Tomlinson demonstrate ruade.

introduction of what would later be called down-unweighting. Start to finish, ruade was much quicker than up-unweighting, and it put the skier back on the snow in a lower, more athletic posture to control the rest of the turn. Keeping the tips on the snow provided a pivot point, making it easy to swing the tails sideways while they were unweighted. In loose snow this technique had the added benefit of getting the skis out of the snow during the edge change, thereby avoiding catching an outside edge.

In 1946, Édouard Frendo, then director of Chamonix’s École Supérieure de Ski et d´Alpinisme, provided a detailed exposition of ruade in his book Le ski par la technique française. He described the novel down-unweighting move this way: “The kick is executed only by a sudden bending of the legs under the thighs, by strong bending of the knees and maximum ankle flexion, without a jump. It therefore represents a considerable time saving and allows faster, shorter turns.”

It’s important to note the emphasis on the skier actively pulling the feet up. This isn’t passively down-unweighting by relaxing muscles in the legs, hips and back and letting your body fall. It’s actively down-unweighting by contracting muscles to make your body fold. This novelty would show up later, in a highly evolved form, in Jean-Claude Killy’s skiing. George Joubert called it avalement.

Allais followed in 1947 with his own book, which appeared in the U.S. under the title How to Ski by the French Method—Emile Allais’ Technic [sic]. This book was refreshingly light on text and laden with visuals, providing page upon page of graphically annotated photos and photo sequences.

Ruade comes to California

When Allais came to America in the late 1940s, he brought ruade with him. He had particular influence in California, especially at Squaw Valley, where he founded the ski school. Tyler Micoleau, a denizen of the early Tahoe ski area, wrote two books in the early 1950s, The Squaw Valley Story and Power Skiing Illustrated, in which he described Allais’ influence in general and the use of ruade in particular. California, a melting pot of different approaches to skiing, embraced ruade. Hans Georg, a Swiss veteran of the 10th Mountain Division who settled in Mammoth, gave it special mention in his 1954 book, Modern Ski Systems, and wrote a feature on the technique for the January 1956 issue of SKI.


PSIA Alpine Team's Mike Hafer uses
the active retraction and forward move-
ment of ruade in steep, wet spring snow.
Ron LeMaster photo.

It’s possible that this American infatuation with ruade was a misinterpretation of Allais’ message, focusing on the exotic and radical and interpreting it as essential and fundamental. It’s also possible that French nationalism motivated the École du ski français (ESF) program to highlight a technique that no one else had ever imagined. In a personal communication, Maurice Woerhlé recalls being told by Georges Joubert that, on returning from the U.S., Allais washorrified to learn that la ruade had become the final stage of the ESF program. Allais had regarded it mostly as a training tool. Bill Lash, who with Junior Bounous got to spend some time with Allais at Squaw Valley, similarly reports that Allais treated it as an exercise.

Ultimately, ruade in its mid-20th century form faded from sight. Woehrlé described it as “quasi-impossible to learn.” Better equipment reduced the need for such dramatic movements for making short turns, and the technique never osmosed very far beyond the Sierra Nevada


Ruade in the 21st century. A snowboarder
uses ruade to start an efficient carved
turn. Ron LeMaster photo.

mountains in the U.S. The French, too, lost interest.

The technique’s fundamental components, however, didn’t disappear from skiing or, for that matter, from snowboarding. Active down-unweighting, which to my knowledge was first described in Frendo’s book, has been alive and well ever since. And the mechanism of making the skis turn by keeping the tips pressed to the snow while unweighting the rest of the ski is used all the time, even though it’s not a named technique in any system I know of. 

The author would like to thank Maurice Woehrlé and Bill Lash for their help in developing this article.

 

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By Ron LeMaster

The keystone of skiing for decades, it’s largely been replaced by terrain-unweighting. 

Photos above: Fred Iselin demonstrates “lift and swing” in a stem christiania. From Invitation to Skiing, F. Iselin and A. C. Spectorsky, 1947.

Exhortations of “down-UP!” used to ring from the lips of instructors and aspirational skiers as they initiated their parallel turns with up-unweighting. Countless one-page instructional tips in ski magazines reminded readers of its importance. Today, this former foundation of sound skiing is considered déclassé by many technically minded skiers. What happened?


The new Austrian technique of the 1950s
eschewed rotation, but still espoused up-
unweighting. It was all in the knees and
ankles. From The New Official Austrian
Ski System
, 1958.

The idea of “unweighting,” freeing the skis from the snow to facilitate starting a turn, goes back to the earliest days of Alpine skiing. And the obvious method of doing it was to toss the body upward. This was expressed well by Charles Proctor and Rockwell Stephens in their 1936 book, Skiing – Fundamentals, Equipment and Advanced Techniques. “[the] Christiania … starts with a rise or upward lift of the body, followed by a pronounced dip… The primary purpose of the rise and dip is to unweight the skis, for it is obviously easier to flick the heels out and thus start the turn when they are unweighted than when the runner’s weight is pressing them down into the snow.” In the days when slopes were ungroomed and the skis were long and stiff, “flicking the heels” demanded some significant unweighting. Brute force was needed, and the big “down-UP!” provided it. The technique was a cornerstone in ski instruction systems of all nationalities. Tyros were introduced to the first part of the movement pattern with “Bend zee knees!” The “UP!” came with the stem christiania, coupled to a strong upper-body rotation in the direction of the new turn.

Even as slopes became packed down and upper-body rotation disappeared from some teaching systems, making short, snappy turns with stiff wooden skis was more of an exercise in linked edge-sets than the linked arcs that became possible with the second generation of metal and fiberglass skis. Linking those edge-sets required significant “flicking of the heels” and pivoting of the skis, which in turn required significant and prolonged unweighting. Up-unweight was still the obvious choice.

Except in moguls. Once there were enough skiers on the slopes to create them, skiers figured out that they could employ the bumps to do the unweighting. Better skiers realized that oftentimes a bump could provide too much lift, turning each mogul crest into a ski jump. To avoid catastrophe, they learned to make the “down” but forgo the “UP!” entirely. Skiers’ bodies were still getting projected upward, but it was being done by the terrain, not the legs. Whether or not this is up-unweighting is an academic question, but the “down-UP!” was gone. (Some called this “down-unweighting,” but many technical aficionados argue that down unweighting is something quite different.)


Mike Rogan, PSIA Alpine Team coach,
flexes to absorb most of the unweighting
force as he links two short turns. Ron
LeMaster photo.

As skis and slope grooming steadily improved, the nature of short turns on all terrain has become more and more like skiing in moguls. The reason for this was revealed by Georges Joubert and Jean Vuarnet in their 1966 classic, How to Ski the New French Way (Comment se perfectionner à ski). At the beginning and end of a turn, the skis are traveling on a slope that is shallower than the fall line. So making a turn on a smooth slope is like skiing through a dip, and linking turns on that slope is like skiing through moguls. The sharper the turn and the steeper the slope, the bigger the “virtual bumps.”

A key aspect of improved ski design has also reduced the need for unweighting: The skis initiate turns more easily, and shape tighter arcs due to their shorter length and deeper sidecuts.

Through time, the details of the up-unweighting movement evolved. Before the Austrian school stormed the ski world with wedeln, short-swing and their innovative system of the late 1950s, skiers were taught to flex and extend at the ankles, knees, and waist. The new Austrian method encouraged skiers to do it all at the knees and ankles, thrusting the knees forward as they were bent, while remaining erect from the waist. This became the fashion, even though the best racers of the time bent much less at the ankles and more at the waist. In the mid 1960s, it became apparent that the best racers were skiing in more of a seated position: still bending their knees a lot, but bending more at the waist and less at the ankles. This presaged the advent of tall plastic boots in the 1970s that greatly limited the range of ankle flex but greatly improved the skier’s ability to work the skis. Since then, that way of moving up and down has remained with us.


PSIA Alpine Team member Josh Fogg
uses a variety of unweighting techniques, 
including up-unweighting, to achieve
different ends in each turn. Ron LeMaster
photo.

Today, snow grooming and ski design are so good that not only is less unweighting usually required than in the old days, but that which is needed is often provided by the dynamics of the turn itself. The skier simply goes along for the ride or, in more dynamic turns, flexes to absorb the excess unweighting that the turn would otherwise produce.

This is not to say that up-unweighting is gone from the repertoire of the good skier. Whether you define up-unweighting as leg-powered lift, or broaden the definition to include terrain-induced lift, it’s still with us. Even under the narrower meaning, it’s the sharpest tool in the skier’s kit for many situations. Used with a bouncing rhythm, it’s a go-to technique for introducing tyros to powder snow, and all experts often find themselves doing a big down-UP with a forceful upper body rotation in heavy, unpacked snow. In good skiing generally, unweighting by extending is often useful, effective and commonplace. Moreover, it gives your leg muscles a chance to relax, expands your chest so you can breathe deeper, gives you a better view of the slope below, and just plain feels good. 

 

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Whatever Happened to Avalement? "Swallowing" remains relevant today. Early photos made it look like back-seat driving.

Photo above: This photo montage from Georges Joubert and Jean Vuarnet’s 1966 Comment se perfectionner à ski, published in the U.S. as How to Ski the New French Way in 1967, shows Jean-Claude Killy performing avalement: deeply flexing in the transition between turns with a forward movement of the feet.


The shot that launched a thousand Jet Stix. Patrick Russell makes a singularly extreme turn while winning the 1970 FIS World Championship slalom, leading to wide misunderstanding of avalement. From September 2002 Skiing Heritage.

For many, simply hearing a faux francophone utter the word “avalement” conjures images of skiing’s French new wave of the early 1970s: Patrick Russell winning the FIS Championship slalom in Val Gardena. American hotdog skiers sitting waayyyyy back, supported by Jet Stix. And serious skiers everywhere coming to grips with a low, feet-apart stance often derided as “the outhouse crouch.”

I can’t think of another element of advanced ski technique that was so widely misrepresented, which misrepresentation led so many astray, yet was so important and continues to be so.

Avalement was a natural response to advances in ski design in the 1960s. When skis were made primarily of wood, and the only metal in them was their segmented steel edges, ski designers were faced with a tradeoff between making skis that were soft enough to be bent into reverse camber, yet strong enough to not break. Stein


Patrick Russell, in Joubert’s 1970 Teach Yourself to Ski (originally Pour apprendre soi-même à skier), demonstrates avalement in a non-racing setting.

Eriksen, for one, was known to be partial to softer skis because he could make a sharper, faster turn with them. On the flip side, he was also known for breaking more skis than others. As the sole structural material, wood also made it hard to produce a ski that, while flexible along its length, remained stiff in torsion, a design parameter tied to gripping on hard snow.

By using metal and fiberglass structural sheets to control the bending properties, engineers made skis that could flex more easily without breaking, and whose stiffness lengthwise and torsionally could be controlled more independently. Box-construction fiberglass skis, such as the Dynamic VR7, were particularly good in the latter regard.

Enter Jean-Claude Killy, thought by many to be the most technically innovative skier of our time. Killy understood better than anyone else—whether intuitively or cognitively—that the new skis could in many situations turn themselves by carving rather than being steered by the skier, and in a way that was more effective and


PSIA Alpine Team member Bart
Flynn uses carbon-copy technique
​​​​​​in 2021. Ron LeMaster photo.

efficient. This led to some significant things happening in the turn: The skier didn’t need to apply as much pressure in the last part of the turn to make the ski bend, or angulate as much to make it hold. This allowed Killy to reduce and often eliminate the edge set that others made at the end of the turn. The ski could also be made to bend earlier in the turn, where there was less available pressure. So avoiding protracted unweighting going into the turn became desirable. Getting the skis engaged, bent, and drawing turning force from the snow earlier in the turn required that the skier be inclined earlier too, so as to be balanced against that force.

In short, making turns on smooth, packed snow became much like skiing in moguls. And what are the most distinguishing technical characteristics of mogul skiing?


SKI Magazine editor John Fry
knew how to grab the public’s
attention when he alerted them
to the new wave.

Flexing at the end of the turn to absorb the force of the bump. Sliding your feet forward as you ski into the bump to prevent being pitched forward. Then extending once you’ve passed over the bump to keep your skis in contact with the snow for speed and direction control, and so you’re prepared to absorb the next bump.

Georges Joubert observed Killy’s movement of absorption and dubbed it “avalement.” Literally, “swallowing.” Dick Barrymore’s great documentary of the 1966 FIS World Championships, in Portillo, Chile, contains telling footage of Killy, Karl Schranz, Guy Périllat and others in the slalom. The difference between Killy and the rest is immediately evident. Just as striking is footage of Killy and Périllat training slalom on a rutted course. Where Périllat struggles to stay in the course, getting jolted by the ruts and leaving the snow going into every turn, Killy is unflappable.

In November 1967, SKI Magazine ran a cover story introducing avalement with the unfortunate headline “Look! They’re Sitting Back!” The article, written by Joubert and Jean Vuarnet, was far more nuanced than its title suggested. It was part of a series of articles that John Fry, SKI’s editor, ran to introduce America to Joubert and Vuarnet’s new book, How to Ski the New French Way. There was a wealth of worthwhile information in what was being published, but the skiing public was ready for a revolution and struck at the flashiest piece of bait: avalement.

The press recognized avalement’s appeal and played to it. Unfortunately, they often illustrated it with easily misconstrued photos of great skiers at extraordinary moments. As a result, legions of would-be avant-garde skiers were sent down a dead-end rabbit hole.


Marcel Hirscher shows the degree to which avalement has been adopted in modern slalom racing.

Did avalement die with the rise of extreme skiing or the advent of shaped skis? Hardly. The constant evolution of skis and ski boots, coupled with snow making and grooming, has enabled skiers to generate, to ever greater degrees, the very dynamics that gave rise to avalement in the 1960s. (Unfortunately, those same dynamics have been partly responsible for the rise in knee injuries.) We haven’t changed our technique, just our nomenclature. Cheapened by the misuse of the term in the ’70s and the ski community’s constant pursuit of novelty, “avalement” all but disappeared from our lexicon in the 1980s. Current fashion refers to the technique as “retraction.” Maybe in a few years we’ll call it “swallowing.” 

Regular contributor Ron LeMaster wrote about “The Comma Position” in the last issue of Skiing History (May-June 2021).

 

 

 

 

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By Ron Lemaster

Form over function? Sure, with the help of stretch pants and cool hip angulation.

Those of us of a certain age remember the “comma position”: that very stylish, very modern, very Austrian stance many of us aspired to in the late 1950s through the ’60s. Its confluence with metal skis and stretch pants oozed cool modernity, helping elevate skiing culturally from an outdoor sport for vigorous sportsmen and women to an aspirational leisure activity for the upper middle class—akin to tennis and golf.


Top racers like Christian Pravda
were the model for the Austrian
instruction system. The comma
was there, but not so pointed at
the bottom.

The comma position was old wine in a new bottle. It was hip angulation and its concomitant outwardfacing posture of the upper body—what came to be known as reverse shoulder and what we now call counter—but in a feet-together stance—and with stretch pants. Angulation, both at the hip and the knees, and counter had been essential elements of alpine skiing for a long time. They had played a more limited role in earlier decades, however, because the harder-to-turn skis of the era often required upper-body rotation from the skier to initiate a turn. That movement put the skier in a posture antithetical to hip angulation. Even so, in the later phases of many turns—especially on packed snow and in slalom turns—good skiers would angulate and counter.

As skis became more flexible, boots stiffer, bindings more solid and the slopes more packed, technique changed. A skier no longer had to throw the whole body into the turn, and the comma position emerged as a thing: an essential element of what the skiing world regarded as the new Austrian approach to skiing, epitomized by wedeln.

In fact, Stefan Kruckenhauser, Rudi Matt and the rest of the Austrian school responsible for codifying this style of skiing did not consider it uniquely Austrian. In their landmark book, The New Official Austrian Ski System, they asserted it was built on their study of the best skiers of all nations, especially racers, who skied similarly.


Stein Eriksen made an aesthetic
statement with amplified angles
and reverse-shoulder counter.

It’s hard to argue that the comma’s ultra-narrow, leg-and-feet together stance served a positive functional purpose. While hip angulation and counter were components of all the best competitive skiers’ technique, the tight stance never was. Its appeal was likely due to the way it aesthetically complemented stretch pants and to the fact that you had to be a pretty good skier in order to wiggle your way down the hill with such a functional handicap. The tight stance became to skiing what tail fins had become to American cars.

Stein Eriksen, certainly one of the best skiers of the twentieth century, employed significant angulation and counter during his dominating competitive career. But in the 1960s he carried the comma position to extremes. Sunlight seldom shone between his knees, and his commas came to look more like elbow macaroni. The public was wowed. Many aspired to ski that way. Few could. It looked sexy but was an example of form preceding function.


Today's best skiers, such as Alexis
Pinturault, still depend on hip 
angulation and counter.

The narrow stance lost currency by the mid-1970s when most of the world moved on to the more feetapart, utilitarian look of “The New French Way,” which persists today. But skiers continued to angulate at the hips and counter with the upper body. They still do and always will, because those elements of ski technique—the functionally important components of the comma position—are essential to making turns on skis. Stretch pants or not, there’s no getting around that.

 

 

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By Ron Lemaster

Toni Seelos and Dick Durrance helped build the bridge to the modern carved turn by letting skis "do their magic."

Photo above: Dick Durrance at Oak Hill, Hanover, New Hampshire in 1939. Lane Memorial Library.

In 1933, 18-year-old Dick Durrance returned to the U.S. from his boarding school days in Bavaria with a secret weapon he’d acquired while on the continent: a technique he’d seen Toni Seelos use to dominate his competition in the Alps. Up until that time, the stem Christiania was the ne plus ultra of ski turns. Hannes Schneider, imperator of the most influential ski school at the time, felt that the stem christie was all just about anyone needed to navigate in a controlled manner around the slopes.


Dick Durrance demonstrates the Tempo
Turn on pine needles, in the 1934
Eastern Ski Annual. Ron LeMaster.

Seelos, a racer, understood that Schneider’s favorite turn was inherently a braking maneuver, and figured out how to weave his way through race courses without getting his skis so sideways, especially the stemmed ski. What Seelos came up with, and what Durrance copied, is what we might consider the Cro-Magnon species of the modern parallel turn. And Durrance was the only skier in North America who used it.

In the fall of 1933, when Durrance began winning slalom races by 20 seconds and more for Newport High School in New Hampshire, the ski press badgered him for his secret. He called it the “Tempo Turn,” and the name stuck.

The tempo turn quickly became the talk of competitive skiers. In the 1934 edition of the U.S. Eastern Amateur Ski Association’s Annual, Otto Schniebs and John W. MCrillis wrote an article, “The High Speed Turn,” in which they dissected Durrance’s technique. In the text they referred to them as “high-speed turns,” but included a print of some movie frames of him skiing on pine needles and captioned as ‘a tempo.’” (Another article in the annual titled “Pine Needle Skiing,” by Henry E. Mahoney, describes the Newport Ski Club’s slalom and jumping training on the surface.)

What’s in a Name

As Durrance described it, the tempo turn was specifically the turn as Seelos executed it: in a tall stance with the feet close together. Durrance also said that particular style didn’t suit him well, and that he went on to develop a technique with a lower, feet-apart posture in which he was more stable.

Other prominent people in U.S. skiing didn’t bother to make the distinction. All turns made at speed with the skis parallel were tempo turns. Schniebs and McCrillis, in their book Modern Ski Technique, have a section titled “High-speed (Tempo) Turn” and in the 1936 book Skiing by Charles Proctor and Rockwell Stephens, there is a section titled “High-Speed Christiania (Tempo Turn).”


A how-to diagram on the Tempo Turn, in
the 1934 Eastern Ski Annual. 

Up to this point, tempo turns were mostly considered a tool for racers and daredevils. The name “high-speed” said it all. Schniebs and McCrillis even warned that “The turn cannot be done without considerable speed.”

Then, in 1938, Benno Rybizka’s The Hannes Schneider Ski Technique presented us with “Parallel Christiania (Tempo Turn).” Finally, we had a name that was not only unintimidating, it was more descriptive.

Aspirational Turns

All avid skiers now had a technique to which they could aspire. And, not unimportantly, one that was clearly identifiable: It was pretty easy to see if you or your friends could make it down the hill without stemming.

The tempo turn wasn’t completely subsumed by the parallel turn, though. Fred Iselin and A. C. Spectorsky, in their 1947 book Invitation to Skiing, a well-illustrated and comprehensive instructional work based primarily on the Arlberg system, said “every tempo turn is a parallel turn, but not every parallel christie is a tempo turn.”

Their treatment of the tempo turn puts it, in its intent and execution, squarely in the category that Durrance did. It’s for going fast, and getting the ski to do the turning, not the skier. There wasn’t a big windup followed by upper-body rotation in the direction of the turn. Rather, you lean forward and toward the center of the turn, and let the skis do their magic. In this regard we might expand our view of the historical significance of the tempo turn to include being the progenitor of the carved turn: the aspirational turn of the 21st Century.

Dick Durrance himself would probably agree. In The Man on the Medal, John Jerome’s great biography, Durrance said, “With nothing but a weight shift, you could cut a carved turn, letting the camber of the ski do the turning for you. I called it the tempo turn
for some reason, and thought, ‘Boy, this is really the ticket.’” 

SKI LIFE

SKI Magazine, October 1973

 

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By Ron LeMaster

 

 

1969: Modern ski techniques place much importance on pole planting for both long parallel turns and short swing. However, many advanced skiers have limited success in assimilating the latest refinements into their own skiing because their ski poles are too long. Long poles tend to set a skier’s weight back on his heels and interfere with setting up a good rhythm for short swing.

The old rule of thumb—that poles should reach up to the armpit—is obsolete, in the opinion of many instructors who now advocate shorter poles, particularly for advanced skiers. To check for proper pole length, place the tip of your pole in the snow as if you were about to make a turn. If your poles are short enough, the wrist-to-elbow section of your arm will be parallel to the ground. Checking proper length in a ski shop or in your home, place the pole grips on the floor, grasping the shafts just below their baskets. Again, your lower arm should run parallel to the floor.
—Stefan Nagel (Certified, U.S. Eastern Amateur Ski Association)

2020: In September 1969, when this tip appeared in SKI, the method it described might have been new to some, but was already current practice. Since then, good skiers have gradually migrated to shorter poles. A person who skied with 52-inch poles in the 1960s was probably using 50-inch poles in the 1990s, and might be skiing with 46-inch poles today. Competitive mogul skiers are likely to use poles even shorter than that.

But even though poles have gotten shorter, the method described in this tip still works. The key is to place the tip of your pole in the snow as if you were about to make a turn. In the illustration above, the skier is in a tall stance. For various reasons, the stance of good skiers at the moment they plant their poles has typically gotten shorter over the years, especially when making short turns. Keeping your forearm level to the snow dictates a shorter pole.

In the 1960s, skiers typically up-unweighted to start their turns. Today, they’re more likely to avoid actively unweighting, and in high-performance turns will flex through the transition between turns to absorb forces that would otherwise launch them off the snow. Competitive mogul skiers are at the extreme end of this spectrum, always deeply flexed at the moment they plant their poles. —Ron LeMaster 

In the 1960s, skiers generally stood taller when they planted their poles than they do today — as demonstrated in the photomontage (right) by Michael Rogan, current coach of the PSIA National Alpine Team. So while pole length has gotten shorter, the rule of thumb described in this timeless tip still applies. Photomontage by Ron LeMaster.

 

 

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By Ron LeMaster

1967: You need balance, courage and most of all proper angulation for a good sharp parallel turn. All these qualities can be built up by a little acrobatic exercise which I call the Javelin Turn, but which is really an exaggerated, intentional crossing of the fronts of the skis. There is no other exercise that illustrates so clearly how the hip must be placed for angulation in the parallel turn. In normal parallel skiing, the inside ski, boot, leg and hip must lead the turn. In the Javelin, the inside of the body has to lead or you will fall.
To practice the Javelin turn, start off as in any parallel turn, and then pick up the inside ski of the turn. As the turn progresses, keep pointing the tip of the lifted ski farther and farther to the outside of the turn, so that by the end of the turn, the lifted ski is at right angles to the tracking ski. Make sure to keep the tip of the lifted ski well off the snow.

Two or three Javelin turns early in the day will get you set in the correct, powerful “lead with the inside” that is the secret of a really good carved parallel turn. —Arthur Furrer (Ski School Director, Bolton Valley, Vermont)

2019: The exercise described here has been in constant use by savvy instructors and coaches since it was described in the pages of SKI Magazine by Art Furrer in 1967. A Swiss “trick skier” who was featured many times in SKI during the 1960s, Furrer named the maneuver after the model of ski he promoted at the time: the Hart Javelin.

To this day, the Javelin Turn is the go-to exercise for developing good hip angulation and its concomitant countered posture, in which the pelvis and torso face somewhat toward the outside or downhill ski. That posture is a key element of what American instructors commonly refer to now as “upper and lower body separation.” Javelin turns also demand that the skier balance over the outside ski, another important skill.

This article first appeared in the January-February 2020 issue of Skiing History.

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Kitzbühel’s Karl Koller formalized short-ski instruction for beginners, reshaped children’s learning, fostered terrain-based teaching, and was a dominant force in Interski.

By John Fry with Barbara Thaler

The man who systematized the use of short skis to accelerate learning is alive and well, and about to celebrate his 100th birthday. Karl Koller shook up the world of ski instruction in 1953 when he demonstrated to the International Congress of Ski Instructors how in his Kitzbühel ski school, the year before, he had successfully employed 150- to 170-centimeter skis to teach novices to make simple turns with skis parallel, bypassing the traditional snowplow and stem progression. And that’s not all he did.

Austrian junior champion in downhill and jumping in the 1930s, Koller was the first man after the war to win the Hahnenkamm Combined title, in 1946. For 25 years, from 1950 to 1975, he headed Kitzbühel’s renowned Red Devils ski school. He built what was, at one time, the world’s most successful children’s ski school, Kollerland. He invented Kollerhelp, a device that children could hold onto when first learning to ski. He inaugurated terrain-based teaching. He introduced the early season wedel week in Kitzbühel. He invented the “Golden Ski Book,” honoring any skier on holiday who completed runs on 50 slopes around Kitzbühel. Indeed, Koller was the heart and brains of Kitzbühel’s ascendency as a ski resort—home of the world’s most famous downhill race, and of more famous natives like triple Olympic gold medalist Toni Sailer, Anderl Molterer, Christian Pravda, Hias Leitner, Ernst and Hansi Hinterseer, as well as nordic and snowboarding medalists.

Short Ski Teaching
As wedeln—the quick ski turn with reverse shoulder action—grew in popularity in the 1950s, the conventional method of teaching beginners with the old Arlberg system—snowplow to stem to stem christie turn, with rotation—looked increasingly obsolete. Students had to unlearn V-shaped ski turns in order to turn with skis parallel.

Koller sensed that the solution was to have students make parallel turns from the beginning, eliminating the old, slow, stage-by-stage Arlberg progression to parallel. But it couldn’t happen if beginners started on conventional skis of 200 centimeters and longer—skis that they would later own, but were too cumbersome for novices.
Koller first experimented with the use of short skis in 1952. He got a factory to make the skis—the Kitzbüheler Schul-Ski. The next year, he spoke about the radical new development in teaching at the 3rd Interski Congress of instructors at Davos. Eventually 93 ski schools in the Tyrol alone took up short-ski teaching.
Independently, and probably unaware of Koller’s teaching in the early 1960s, Clif Taylor with Morten Lund in the United States popularized GLM, the graduated length method of ski teaching (see sidebar). GLM involved a progression through three or four lengths of skis, more complicated and arguably less efficient than Koller’s kurz-ski method. GLM did not make lasting inroads in Europe. 

To meet the demand from ski schools around the world, Head Ski began full-scale manufacture of short skis. Others followed. But with the advent in the early 1990s of Elan’s SCX and Kneissl’s Ergo, and the introduction of high-performance carving skis under 190 cm in length, the special use by ski schools of short teaching skis came to an end.
  
Skiing Polymath
Karl Koller was born in 1919, the youngest of ten children. As a three-year-old he suffered from skin problems. A doctor recommended fresh air, and from that time on he spent every possible minute outdoors. He competed in both nordic and alpine skiing, and played soccer in summer. In 1936, he became Tyrolean Youth Champion in downhill and jumping.

Nothing stood in the way of his skiing career except World War II. Drafted, he became a member of the Greater German Reich National Ski Team. From 1943 to 1945 he was a mountain guide for the German Army at the Mountain Medical School in the neighbouring village St. Johann in Tyrol.
“I also had to teach the Nazi bigwigs how to ski,” he says, his face darkening.

During World War II, Koller met his wife Hilde in Zurs. Their son was born in 1944. At the end of the war he wanted to become an instructor, although his family didn’t like the idea. “At the time two instructors had fallen ill with syphilis and died,” Koller recalls.
In January 1946 he won the Hahnenkamm Combined, finishing second in the downhill. As stipulated in the regulations, he competed with the same pair of skis in the slalom and the downhill.

“The 1946 downhill on the Streif was unforgettable,” recalls Koller. “It had rained all through the night. The slope was like an ice skating rink. Worse, thick fog reduced visibility down to no more than fifty metres. There were no directional gates. ‘Another one’s coming,’ called out the fans, who could only ascertain whether a racer was approaching in the thick fog by the sound of their skis rattling on the hard snow.”
  
The Red Devils Ski School
In 1947 after gaining certification, Koller founded the new Association of Kitzbühel Ski Instructors and Mountain Guides in 1950, uniting two Kitzbühel ski schools. Under his leadership, the reconstituted school expanded rapidly.

It was important to Koller that his instructors have a clean, neat appearance. With his best friend, painter Alfons Walde (see Skiing History, July-August 2012), he developed a uniform—black trousers, red sweater and a red pointed cap. The Rote Teufel (Red Devils) ski school was born. The instructors were often required to attend five o’clock tea, the hottest society gathering of the day. They had to appear in uniform, always with a tidy haircut. 

“One day,” recalls Koller, “Anderl Molterer came to ski school finely dressed, crisply pressed trousers, nice shoes, a smart sweater. When asked if he didn’t have work clothes with him, Anderl said: ‘No, I always work in these clothes.’”

The famous Ski Instructors Ball and New Year’s firework display with ski show were Koller ideas. He also introduced Wedel Weeks: To promote lessons, he created tests for pupils at four levels of turning skill. You needed an instructor to succeed. On Friday, at the end of ski week, an award ceremony was held at 5 o’clock tea in the hotel Zur Tenne.

Along the way Koller was elected president of the Austrian Ski Instructors Association, and chairman of the Kitzbühel Tourism Association. He and his wife Hilde came to run a boarding house, Das Kollerstüberl, in the center of town. 

Teaching children in a new and different way
In 1960 Koller introduced specialized teaching for children in his Red Devils Ski School. He was convinced that children should be introduced to skiing in a playful way. He built a special terrain playground of steep curves, hillocks, jumps and gates. Koller’s approach was so innovative that in 1968 he brought children with him to make a demonstration at the 1968 Interski congress of instructors at Aspen.

His ski school was among the first to enable its instructors to share in profits, a seemingly benevolent idea. But Koller came to see it as a mistake. The instructors, or employees, now had a voice in how the ski school was run. He was no longer totally “the boss,” free to invent new ideas as he wished. Innovations like short ski teaching were questioned. The costly construction of a building to house the instructors caused the ski school’s profits to decline. Arguments ensued. Finally in 1975, angry, he left the ski school to concentrate on teaching children, founding his own school, Koller Kinderland.

Koller is the author of two books, Freud und Leid zu meiner Zeit (Joy and Sorrow in My Time) and Kitzbühel zu meiner Zeit (Kitzbühel in My Time). He has documented and archived every development in Kitzbühel, neatly filed in folders and bound books, which he keeps in his garden house.

His wife, to whom he was married for 54 years, died in 1997. One of his grandchildren, Alexander, won the overall World Cup of snowboarding and the World Cup of boardercross in 1998. Koller enjoyed cross-country skiing regularly until he was 95 years old. He suffered a health setback in 2017 when he broke his femur. But he battled back, diligently completing his rehab—typical for a man who has lived a century of “never giving up.” 

ISHA chairman John Fry prepared this article based on the writing and research of Barbara Thaler of the Kitzbühler Ski Club.

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The sport underwent a revolution more than a century ago, when skiers gradually shifted from a single shaft to holding a pair of poles.

By Luzi Hitz with Seth Masia

At a military cross country race in Chamonix, in 1908, the French and Italian squads showed up each with a single long pole, as they’d been taught by their Norwegian instructors. But the Scandinavians pulled a fast one: All their racers pushed off with two poles and sprinted away in a modern diagonal stride. The northern platoons took the first eight places out of 30 finishers. A couple of the locals were so disgusted at being passed that they threw away their “grands batons” and raced pole-free, finishing ninth and 13th. It marked the end of the single-pole era, at least for ski competition.

Double-poling was not new. Right from the beginning, hunters on skis used a spear for balance and propulsion. But if need arose, a hunter could use his bow as a second pole. Dating from 5,000 years ago, rock art in northernmost Karelia (Russia) shows ski tracks with pole plants on either side. Saami (Laplander) reindeer herders traditionally used two poles (see the Moses Pitt woodcut from 1680, and a better-known drawing in Per Högström’s 1747 description of the Saami.)...

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