Ski Racing

In 1972, Dan Mooney dropped off the U.S. Ski Team. Nine months later, he raced head to head with Jean-Claude Killy—and won.

In the spring of 1972 I was 21 years old. A couple of years earlier I had fought my way onto the U.S. Ski Team, with my sights on the ’72 Winter Olympics. I was hurt and frustrated at subsequently not making the cut for Sapporo. Then in March, I was disqualified in the first run of the slalom at the national championships at Mt. Bachelor. Before the race had even ended, I caught a ride back to the condo and sat alone, sipping beer while contemplating my future. I couldn’t expect the team to carry me four more years until the 1976 Olympics. I had the sinking feeling that I was at the end of my ski-racing career.

I thumbed through the latest issue of Ski Racing magazine, not paying particular attention to its contents. What caught my eye was a full-page ad promoting the last two World Pro Skiing Tour races of the season, to be held the next week in Steamboat Springs and Vail, Colorado.

Pro ski racing, created by former U.S. Ski Team Coach Bob Beattie, was in only its third season. “Beats” had already recruited some Olympians for the tour, starting with Billy Kidd, who became the 1970 World Pro Champion, and Spider Sabich, pro champion in 1971 and ’72. After Sapporo, Beats recruited Hank Kashiwa and Tyler Palmer. I knew Tyler well.

I phoned Beattie, and he invited me to try to qualify in Steamboat. But first I needed to get to Colorado, and I only had about 10 dollars to my name. I figured it was going to take $300 to travel there, pay the entry fee and leave me a little for food and a beer. The only person I could ask for that type of a loan was my mother, a war bride who was born and raised in Germany. She expected me to go back to college if I left the ski team. She said no at first, but I promised that if pro racing didn’t work out, I would make a beeline to Denver and register for spring quarter. She was silent. I held my breath. Then she said, “Ach du liebe, Danny, you are the wild one in the family.” She agreed, on condition I pay her back and keep the promise.

Early the next morning Ken Corrock drove me to the bus station. I arrived in Steamboat on a Wednesday afternoon and got signed up for qualifying on Thursday morning. In pro racing, you didn’t get to the money round until you were down to 16 racers, and there were more than 100 skiers trying to make it to the group of 16.

Then my skiing just clicked. I was on fire. The first round, I had the fastest time. I won in the afternoon round, too. People noticed, including Beattie. He told me after the second qualifying round that I was looking really good. I started to think this pro racing thing might just work.

I aced the Friday qualifiers and was in the money round after four qualifying races. Ski racing was fun again. I was hanging with my friend Tyler, and life seemed grand.

In Saturday’s giant slalom I made it to the quarterfinals. In Sunday’s slalom I got to the semifinals. In two days I made about $1,500, which would be about $12,000 in 2023. I went to Vail the next week and made another $500. $2,000 in two weeks! I was in heaven—I had done what I wanted to do, made a name for myself at the pro level and had momentum going into the next winter. I had a good chance at sponsorship for the 1972–73 season.

I repaid my mom the $300 and never went back to college. Tyler and I flew first class to the Bahamas for two weeks.

I went home to Squaw Valley for the summer. My old friend Warren “Hoot” Gibson, coach of the junior ski team there, had put together an amazing summer training program, and I wanted to work out with his kids while looking for sponsorship, starting with K2, my supplier on the ski team.

Brutal training

Warren’s program was intense. Every morning at 7 a.m. we cycled from Squaw Valley to Truckee High School, about 30 miles round-trip. In the afternoon, we did a five-mile run on the high school track, then on Monday and Wednesday hit the weight room, doing did 10 reps at each of the 10 stations. On Tuesday and Thursday we did sprints: 10 440-yard laps (four miles in all), followed by 10 220s, with a one-minute rest period between laps. If you didn’t complete your lap in the allotted time, you had to do a bonus lap. On “Black Friday” we did both weights and sprints.

I protested that the program was overkill. Warren put his arm over my shoulder and said, “I hear that Jean-Claude Killy is going to join the pro tour this year. Do you want to get in the starting gate against him and not be in the best physical condition possible?”

“What, me race Killy, head to head? That will never happen.”

“But what if it does?”

He had me. I did the 30-mile cycles, the five-mile runs, the 440s, the 220s and the weights. The pain was unreal. It was a long summer and fall.

In early June I made my call to Gordy Eaton, director of racing for K2. He listened politely and then explained that it was still too early in the year for a decision but that he would throw my hat in the ring. I agreed to call back in July.

That month I went to Aspen for a World Pro Skiing press conference, and Tyler was there. I talked him into coming with me to Squaw to join Warren’s program. When he got there and saw the enormity of it, he, too, protested. But Warren had the gift of gab and had Tyler on board in less than five minutes.

I called K2 again in July and got the same answer. They strung me along until October, then told me that Spider Sabich would be their only racer on the pro circuit that year. I was furious. If I had known that in June, I’d have had time to line something up. Now, with less than two months until the first race, it was too late. I would have to go in as an independent and hope to have some good early results. Then maybe some sponsor would pick me up.

Over the summer, we had learned that Rossignol was putting together a team of skiers from different countries for the pro tour. They needed an American because the tour was an American invention and we did all of our competitions in North America. Beattie had arranged for Tyler to be the American.

At the end of October, with less than four weeks to go before the first race, Beattie called to tell Tyler that Lange had come up with a much better offer for him. When Tyler told me this, I felt a glimmer of hope. “Rossignol will have to replace you with another American,” I said.

Without hesitation, I phoned Rossignol and got through to the director of racing, Gerard Rubaud. I had met him once, and when I introduced myself now, he was nice enough to tell me he knew me. I didn’t waste any time and explained to him that Tyler had just signed with Lange, which means he needed an American. “With three weeks till the first race, I am calling to let you know I’m your guy,” I said.

Gerard responded, “This is all news to me. Let me make a few phone calls, and I will call you back.”

When he did, Gerard offered to pay my expenses to train with the team for two weeks in Vail and then to compete in the first two races. If I finished third or better in either of those races, he’d offer a contract to keep me on the team for the season. If I failed, I’d be on my own.

In Vail, plucked by Rossignol from the depths of despair, I trained with Alain Penz and Pierre Pouteil-Noble, from France; Otto Tschudi, from Norway; and Malcolm Milne, from Australia. I knew Otto pretty well, but no one else. I tried to stay out of the way and keep a low profile. I was nervous but hung in there, and by the time we left for Aspen, for the first race, I felt pretty good.

No Luck in Aspen

At Aspen, I had no problem making it into the round of 16. But in my first heat I walked out of a binding and disqualified. One chance gone, three to go. The next day in the slalom I qualified but fell in the first round. I couldn’t afford mistakes like that. Aspen was a bust, and I left frustrated but not defeated. (Ed: It wasn’t a glorious weekend for Killy or Sabich, either. They both struggled to qualify. Killy, unsponsored and racing on borrowed K2 skis, then lost the first round of GS to Harald Stuefer; on Rossignols, he fell in the quarterfinals of slalom. Sabich crashed in the first round of GS and lost to Ken Corrock in the first round of slalom. Stuefer won the GS, and Hugo Nindl the slalom. Penz took second in both races.)

In Vail the next weekend, I skied out of the course in the round of 16 on Saturday. I had one chance left, the slalom on Sunday. At least Killy, now skiing for Rossignol, got to the finals in GS, where he lost to Stuefer.

This was it, Sunday morning. I could feel the pressure before I even got out of bed. I kept saying to myself, “You can’t make mistakes today, you have to ski perfect, you have to go after it, you have to concentrate.” I made it into the semifinals with four racers left: myself, Tyler, Sabich, and Killy. I was matched against Tyler, and Sabich against Killy. The losers would go on to race for third and fourth place, the winners for first and second. Tyler, a slalom specialist, had won a World Cup slalom in Kitzbühel the previous winter. He grew up in New Hampshire, where all they do is practice slalom on boilerplate ice. I skied well, but he took me and moved on to the finals.

Last Chance at Vail

Spider beat Killy. And there I was, paired against the greatest ski racer in history. He owned three World Championship gold medals, three Olympic gold medals and six World Cup titles. He was my idol. I was going to get only one chance, and slalom was not my strong event.

I headed to the lift for the ride to the start. Tyler appeared out of nowhere to share the chair. “Moondog,” he said, “You can beat him. He doesn’t know who you are. He doesn’t know you ran 10 million 440s this summer. He is in your house. You need to beat him out of the start, go into the first jump ahead of him or neck and neck. You do that, and you’ve got a shot at the deal.” He made me a believer.

Some 5,000 fans lined the course and the finish area. Beattie was announcing through loudspeakers set up along the course, and he was good at working up a crowd.

When that gate opened, I shot out like a cannon, getting an early lead. Through the early gates, I could feel Killy’s presence right on me. We hit the first jump side by side, and as we neared the second jump, he took a slight lead. We hit the second jump and sprinted to the finish. He took the first run by 2/10th of a second, not a huge lead. Going back up the lift, Tyler pumped me up again.

“See, he’s not so bad. 2/10th of a second. You’ve got him! He’s nervous, he didn’t expect you to be so close! Nail him out of the start again, get to the first jump and turn on the afterburners.”

For the second run, we switched courses, and in the starting gate I pounded my ski poles in the snow, taking deep breaths. I looked over at Killy. To my surprise, he was just standing there looking at me, so I stopped fussing and stared back. This went on for about 15 seconds, and—call me crazy—I swear I saw fear in his eyes. At that moment I said, loudly, “Okay, let’s do this!” I think the starter may have been quietly rooting for me because he said, “Mr. Mooney has indicated he would like to proceed with the second run. Do we have a clear course? Racers ready?”

When those gates opened, it was clear that Killy had no intention of letting me beat him. And me? Well, I had something to prove. We raced like men possessed: hitting gates, taking chances. We hit the first jump neck and neck. Through the middle of the course it was more of a slugfest than a ski race. Nearing the second jump, Killy faltered slightly and I gained a slight lead. At the jump I led by about half a ski length, just enough so I could no longer see him in my line of sight. I landed and focused on the finish, five gates to go. I put everything I had into it, and more.

I crossed the finish line and looked over my shoulder to see where he was. No Killy. I came to a stop. The finish area was eerily quiet—even Beattie was silent. I looked up the hill and there between the second jump and the finish was Killy, standing on the hill and putting his ski on. Then Beattie came on the PA: “Ladies and gentlemen, I have the official ruling from the chief of course. Jean-Claude Killy landed wide off the second jump, hooked a tip and missed a gate, officially disqualifying. The Moondog has done it. He has upset Killy and taken third place!”

Tyler was the first one to me. He wrapped his arms around me and slapped my back: “You did it, Moondog, you pulled it off! You son of a bitch! When did you become a slalom skier?”

A crowd gathered. I had press and TV people asking me all these questions. How did I do it? What was my strategy? I was speechless. Then, working his way through the crowd, coming towards, me was Jean-Claude. People stepped aside to give him room. He put out his hand to shake mine and said, “Congratulations, Dan. Today you skied like a true champion. You deserved to win.” I think I said thank you, or at least lipped it.

At five o’clock, I met Gerard at his hotel room. He handed me a contract from Rossignol. I thought of the condo in Bend where this roller coaster adventure had begun. Then I picked up the pen. I had only one thought: “Moondog, you’re going to the Show.” 

Dan Mooney finished the season as the eighth-place prizewinner on the pro tour, earning $10,100. Killy trained hard over Christmas break and came back with a Team Rossignol contract to win the season championship, and $28,625 in prizes.

With her 87th World Cup win, Mikaela Shiffrin eclipsed Ingemar Stenmark’s record that stood for 34 years. Shiffrin went on to add her 88th victory on the final day of the 2022-23 season.

One prominent fan was particularly happy on March 11, when Mikaela Shiffrin broke Ingemar Stenmark’s 34-year-old record of 86 World Cup wins. Stenmark himself, watching on television from his home in Stockholm, was ecstatic. He had been looking forward to this day for a special reason.

“Finally, I won’t be troubled again about this overall record—hopefully for the rest of my life,” the reclusive Swede had told a former Italian racing rival. It was only four years since Lindsey Vonn’s many injuries put an end to her quest at 82 wins. Vonn would surely have surpassed Stenmark were it not for her spate of injuries, especially those from the horrific crash at the 2013 World Championship super-G, which took her out of the 2014 Sochi Olympics and probably cost her a dozen World Cup wins.

Serial gold medalist Ted Ligety has observed, acutely, that part of success for any athlete is avoiding injuries. He added a fundamental truth about all high-risk sports: you have to be so good technically that you can win without running 100 percent all the time.

Ligety thus identified Shiffrin’s core strength: She skis with such consummate balance that she rarely crashes and has suffered no major injuries, other than a strained knee a few years ago. With that level of skill, Stenmark predicts that Shiffrin, now 28, will reach 100 wins. She only needs 12 more in the coming winters, after winning 14 this year (and 17 in 2019).

Comparing Shiffrin’s career to those of earlier athletes is neither objective nor useful. Until amateur rules were relaxed in the 1980s, top skiers like Toni Sailer, Jean-Claude Killy, Nancy Greene and Annemarie Moser-Proell often stepped down around age 25 simply in order to earn a living, whereas Bode Miller retired at 39. The early Alpine tour visited about a dozen resorts for some 24 races. Today’s schedule packs in twice that many. On the other hand, one might argue that Shiffrin’s endurance­—her ability to rest and rebound between tightly scheduled races—is itself a remarkable achievement.

An open heart

Yet there is much more to admire in her! Shiffrin’s articulate personality has illuminated the World Cup circuit for the past 12 years. Search YouTube for her soundbites and video interviews, and you get a sense of what she openly shares with competitors, friends, coaches and reporters: the highlights and upsets, the joys and sorrows, the life lessons, the tragedies and rebounds. While many racers mouth platitudes in interviews, Shiffrin’s instinct is to open her heart and speak frankly, with self-aware intelligence.

This was particularly poignant after the sudden death of her father, Jeff, in early February 2020. Mikaela wrote of her family’s heartbreak, referring to him as “our mountains, our ocean, our sunrise, our heart, our soul.” She is now also very open about relationships, notably with hunky Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, 30, the 2020 overall World Cup champion and top speed specialist.

Her genuine candor is often amusing. In San Vigilio, Italy, moments after scoring her 84th World Cup victory at Kronplatz, Shiffrin broke a taboo in women’s sports when she casually told an Austrian TV reporter that she was “… in an unfortunate moment of the monthly cycle, so I’m more tired right now.”  She added, with a laugh, “We just normalized talking about that.”

The translation to German missed the point. “She was so busy that she had no time to train on her bike,” the reporter said, live on air. On social media, Shiffrin posted the interview clip with video of her riding a stationary bike. “So nice to get my monthly cycle. Just in case anyone else is confused, we’re talking about my period. #normalizeperiods.”

Not crazy for records

Shiffrin dislikes the word “record.” It first came up in December 2018, at Semmering, near Vienna, after her 36th slalom win. She was embarrassed at being told this was one more than the slalom victories of her childhood hero, Marlies Schild. “Marlies, for me, is always going to be the best,” Shiffrin said. “I wouldn’t be where I am without being able to watch her ... yeah, (the record) is incredible, but she deserves that spot in my mind. If I can inspire any young athlete as much as she inspired me, then I did my job in this sport. On paper I’ll hold the record, great, but to me she will always be the greatest slalom skier because she pioneered a new style of slalom skiing.”

In Åre, after she passed Stenmark’s score, a Swedish TV reporter asked what she would like to say to Ingemar. “Not too crazy for records, it should never be happening,” she began. “I never believed someday I would be in this position, it’s pretty incomprehensible. No matter whatever I do, it will never compare to what you achieved in your life. The biggest dream for me is to be mentioned in the same sentence with you, after your very inspiring career.” She explained that she had been exchanging text messages with the Swedish star and felt honored by some of his comments.

She’s also uncomfortable being called the GOAT. “All I can really see in my mind is an image of a baby goat, or like a fainting goat. That’s what comes in my head,” Shiffrin said once. “I just kind of laugh.” She added that the label doesn’t belong to just one skier.

Rediscovered

In January, as Shiffrin closed in on Vonn’s mark of 82 wins, the U.S. media swiftly rediscovered her. Suddenly, 10 months after her painful Olympic experience in China, American reporters resurrected the wonder girl who had won three medals at Sochi (2014) and Pyeongchang (2018). Despite poor TV coverage in the United States, and the absence of U.S.-based reporters on the World Cup tour, Americans were interested again. Her triumphs in Sweden made headlines, as did her post-season media tour. Her appearances on Today and Jimmy Fallon put Alpine racing back in the spotlight. Not bad for a country where fans had to watch the races on expensive streaming services.

Shiffrin’s modesty, humanity and good-humored sincerity were forged by her parents, Jeff and Eileen. The family mantra was, “Be nice, think first, have fun—and make a few good turns.” It’s not surprising that her priorities created sympathy among top champions from other sports. In 2021, Shiffrin tweeted support for Simone Biles, who was subjected to a hate campaign after skipping several competitions following an attack of “twisties” during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Seven months later, when disaster struck on Chinese snow, Shiffrin faced the same kind of hideous hate messages on social media. She didn’t run away from reporters and gave sincere, often poignant, answers when trying to explain what was happening. Biles reached out to help, writing “I know this all too well, I’m sorry you’re experiencing this, people suck. Just remember how AMAZING you are, we’re all cheering for you, proud of you, love & support you. Go kick some ass Saturday! But most importantly, embrace the moment. Have fun [heart] love ya!!!”

Colorado Governor Jared Polis declared March 11 “Mikaela Shiffrin Day.” In early April, Vail threw a huge welcome-home party. She was overwhelmed by the empathy shown by the public, especially the younger kids, whom she hopes to have inspired by her attitude and her “few good turns.”

Epilogue: At age 25, Marco Odermatt has scored 24 World Cup victories, 13 of them this season. He also won two FIS gold medals and three crystal globes, while scoring a men’s record 2,042 World Cup points (Shiffrin posted 2,206 points this year). If he stays healthy, within a decade Stenmark’s phone may well ring again when Odermatt breezes past 86 wins for a new male record. 

 As the heir to journalist and World Cup founder Serge Lang, Patrick Lang has followed Alpine ski racing circuit since the 1950s. He wrote about Hermann Maier in the November-December 2022 edition of Skiing History.

Long-time ski journalist Patrick Lang has covered Shiffrin since she made her World Cup debut in 2011.

What to Expect When You're Inspecting

By Edith Thys Morgan

When Alpine skiing athletes head to the Beijing Olympics, they will do so with an unprecedented lack of knowledge about the venue. While Nordic and freestyle events will be contested at known recreational venues in the Zhangjiakou Competition Zone, 140 miles from Beijing, the Alpine events will be in the more mountainous Yanqing Zone. Remote Xiaohaituo Mountain, 55 miles northwest of Beijing, receives little, if any, natural snowfall. All of its facilities, including the race trails designed by Bernhard Russi, were constructed for the Games.

It is not unusual to build a venue explicitly for the Olympics, nor for athletes to have had limited exposure to the venue. Ideally, however, FIS holds at least one World Cup test event in the year prior or, failing that, a Continental Cup–level competition. In 1988, for example, the Nakiska resort was built to host Calgary’s Alpine events, and in the season before the Games it hosted women’s NorAm and men’s World Cup competitions. New venues in both Sochi and PyeongChang hosted World Cup races prior to the Games.

The Alpine venues for Beijing, however, have hosted no World Cup events because of the pandemic. The only test event was a series of FIS competitions with, at most, seven Chinese athletes—none of whom were World Cup level— in each event. They competed on a downhill course that was shortened from 890 meters drop to 470. Compounding the mystery is an air of secrecy surrounding every aspect of the Games. Those who have first-hand knowledge are tight-lipped to preserve their livelihoods, and information flows on a need-to-not-know basis.

WHY IT MATTERS

Test events accomplish many things. First, they give organizers a dry run  testing everything from the venue itself—things like terrain and safety features, snowmaking and course set—to the logistics of running a world-class skiing event. These include timing systems, course workers, safety protocols, schedules, transportation, access and many other processes.. Second, test events reveal which areas may need improvement or even wholesale change. Such was the case at PyeongChang’s Jeongseon Alpine Centre, where sections of the downhill course laid out in the summer were entirely reset after testing by top-level athletes. Terrain features, like the spectacular bumps that are typically built into new courses, can’t be called safe until run at race speed. Finally, testing also gives athletes a chance to become familiar with the courses, which can in turn help their preparation.

WHAT WE DO KNOW

Piecing together point-of-view footage and the venue’s topography—long, flattened ridges that run along spines, then dive down steep pitches—a few things are clear. Where it is steep, it is very steep—especially the 68-degree pitch out of the start and another sustained plunge with four full downhill turns. Those translate to high speeds—but how high, nobody knows. And where it is flat, especially in the narrow canyon runout at the bottom of the course, it is very flat.

The “Whiteface” section of the course may be an homage to the 1980 Olympic venue or to the prevailing temperatures. This past October the mercury dipped to 9 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind, as one visitor described, “blows like crazy.”

The snow is entirely man-made and will be, Russi promises, the consistency of concrete. This is a good thing to forestall course deterioration but will make it nearly impossible to reshape any terrain features after the forerunners give the course its first real test, a few days prior to the event.

EQUIPMENT CHALLENGES

The lack of testing presents a unique challenge for ski technicians. Typically, they arrive armed with their own experience plus a database of historical snow and weather conditions for the venue. In Beijing they will have nothing to go on but the data gleaned from previous skicross and snowboard events in Zhangjiakou’s “Secret Garden” —some 30 miles away—as well as climate and geographical information. Chemist Thanos Karydas, founder of Dominator wax, gathered winter data on the area: average annual snowfall of 5cm/2 inches, high winds, very low temperatures, sunny days and clear nights. He knew it would not be business as usual. Karydas explains, “The rule with wax is that it has to be harder than the snow,” to which he adds, “and everything that is in the snow.”

In this case, that includes heavy concentrations of clay and salt in the snowmaking water (piped in 7.5 km/4.6 miles from two reservoirs), as well as the sand blowing in from Mongolia and debris from the massive earthmoving during trail construction. Dominator formulated a special series of Beijing waxes for extreme cold temperatures, extremely aggressive snow and massive daily temperature swings due to sun exposure.

WHAT THE ATHLETES SAY

World Cup ski racers are trained by their sport to be adaptable, and in press interviews they have been mostly optimistic, seemingly comforted by the egalitarian lack of information and experience. In other words, nobody will have an advantage. Some have voiced concern over the restrictions and logistical hoops that are outlined in their International Olympic Committee-issued “playbooks” and gleaned from athletes who recently returned from China. Others, like Swiss downhill favorite Beat Feuz, sum up the understandable frustration of having a third straight Olympics in a place devoid of skiing culture and fans: “They’ve been great competitions,” Feuz said of Sochi in 2014 and PyeongChang in 2018, “but after Wengen and Kitzbühel, it’s a bit of a culture shock.” The lack of spectators experienced in Korea will be even more pronounced in Beijing, to which no international fans can travel. As far as soaking up Chinese culture, if November’s SkiX and SnowboardX test event is any indication, it will be muted by the reality that all of the Chinese nationals encountered—starting with the flight attendants on Air China—will be wearing hazmat suits and masks.

THE UPSIDES

Building a venue from scratch, and designing it for convenience with a huge budget, does have its advantages. The ski runs are a 10-minute gondola ride from the Olympic village, which skiers will share with bobsled, luge and skeleton athletes. Negligible winter precipitation bodes well for blue skies and eliminates cancelation due to snowstorms.

While new Olympic venues are famous for last-minute construction scrambles and shoddy finish work, the lodging and facilities were close to complete in November, as well as convenient, spacious and comfortable. The food, while unusual, improved with feedback.

One industry veteran of many Olympics came away from the November events with an optimistic approach, asking himself, “What can we learn? How can we adapt? What are some things we need to do next time we come back?”

His key takeaway for anyone packing? “Bring more coffee!”

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

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

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

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

Translated from the French by D. Wright Pryce

Published posthumously, with the kind permission of Patrick Lang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Began at the Hahnenkamm

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

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

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

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

MARC HODLER SEALS THE DEAL

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

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

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

A NEW ERA BEGINS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WITHOUT PORTILLO, IT MIGHT NOT HAVE HAPPENED

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

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

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

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

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

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS by John Fry

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

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

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

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

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

HOW THE NATIONS CUP STARTED

By John Fry

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

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

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

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

“For what?”

“Come up with an idea,” said Lang.

“Right now, I don’t have an idea.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SETTING THE PACE

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

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

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

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

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

SPONSORS COME AND GO

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

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

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

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

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

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

SNAFUS IN THE OFFICE

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

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

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

THE SCHLITZ NASTAR FINALS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Men

1924 Thorleif Haug

1957 Sixten Jernberg

1964 Sixten Jernberg

1980 Nikolay Zimyatov

1992 Bjørn Daehlie and Vegard Ulvang

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

Women

1968 Toini Gustafsson

1972 Galina Kulakova

1976 Raisa Smetanina

1984 Marja-Liisa Hamalainen

2010 Marit Bjørgen

2014 Charlotte Kalla

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

Jumping

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

1932, 1936, 1948 Birger Ruud

1984 Jens Weisflogg

1988 Matti Nykänen 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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