SKI RACING- How it all started-by Serge Lang

Spring 1986

At the end of the nineteenth century, many sport were being rediscovered and modernized. This explosion of interest in leisure gave birth to alpine skiing, a sport that seemed made to match the new age. It was swift and daring. And once it was established among the snowy peaks of Switzerland and Austria, the idea of slalom and downhill racing could not be far behind.
Norwegian ethnologist Fridtjof Nansen’s account of his 1888 crossing of Greenland’s ice fields on Skis – written as he chafed at his bit as curator of the Bergen Museum – was the seminal work. But while it was being read by bugging skiers in the Alps, racing of a kind already existed in Scandinavia and the American West. Skiing of the cross-country Nordic kind had existed for centuries. Soldiers, trappers and merchants used coarse,
Home-hewn boards for exclusively utilitarian purpose, simply to get about in the snow. But they made legendary heroes out of men like Mykkyel Hemmeveit who leapt 23 meters – early 70 feet – off an improvised ski jump at Huseby near Oslo in 1879. Ski jumping too is Nordic in origin.
In California, Swedes and Norwegians drawn to the Sierra Nevada by the discovery of gold, organized downhill races with wild mass starts. Cash prizes were awarded from the substantial betting pools. But though a number of such races are recorded, they were not the origin of a lasting sporting trend. When the gold miners left for new strikes in other territories, ski racing vanished with them. Skiing was only to be reborn in California seventy years later with the beginning of modern-day winter tourism on the West Coast of America.
It was the inception of skiing in the Alps that led to modern ski racing. And that in turn sprang from a new interest in mountaineering. As early as the eighteenth century certain city-bred gentlemen were gripped with the craze of conquering the Alpine peaks. While the more daring were scaling Mont-Blanc and the Matterhorn peaks, other tamer nature lovers flocked to the high Alpine valleys for the bracing air, mountains walks and the breathtaking scenery. This led to the rapid development of boarding and lodging facilities. And soon there were not just hotels, but cable cars and cog railways, which brought the towering peaks within effortless reach. Mass tourism in the Alps had begun.
It was the railway –built long before the arrival of the first skier – that helped popularized the sport. The most active pockets of winter tourism often developed along the routes of the European expresses, which crossed the Alps from West to East. St.Anton and Kitzbühel are two examples. But local railways to smaller health resorts with sanatorium –like Chamonix, Davos and St.Moritz – also played a decisive role. Almost all the facilities were already in place when the ski craze began to grow to such dimensions that Alpine hotelkeepers opened their establishments in winter.
This process, which took place over a period of forty years, did not happen evenly across the countries themselves. The presence of a large number of British tourists in the Bernese Oberland after the first World War helped a handful of villages – among them Wengen and Mürren – to become bastions of skiing. In Gräubunden, Arosa quickly made a name for itself. But while in 1928, when the Winter Olympics were held there, St.Moritz advertised a dozen winter sports – among them tobogganing, bobsledding and skating – there was no mention of skiing.

The advent of Alpine ski racing took place thanks to a young Englishman whose father owned the Lunn Travel agency in London. For year, Lunn senior had shepherded thousands of tourists around some of the Alp’s most spectacular scenery. The English, who by this time had discovered Interlaken, had a romantic attachment to picking edelweiss and were irresistibly drawn to the “Mer de Glace” in Chamonix.
Born in 1888, it was as a young boy that Arnold Lunn first visited the Alps. By the time he was an adolescent, he was spending most of his time between Chamonix, Crans and Montana in Valais, Adelboden and Mürren in the Bernese Oberland. In love with the Alps and the snow, Arnold Lunn somehow managed the convey his passion to thousands of his countrymen. And it is thanks to him that Alpine ski racing, as we know it today finally took root.
In 1905, Kitzbühel had already organized its first downhill ski race. The event was so successful that the following year special trains had to be laid on to bring spectators from Innsbruck and Bavaria. In 1922 Lunn invented the slalom – Skiing’s first properly codified events –. It derived from the gymkhanas he organized for tourists in need of exercise and amusement. In 1924 he organized the first combined event, a downhill and slalom. Then he fought hard within the International Ski Federation (FIS) – founded that same year in Oslo – to endorse Alpine ski races, a battle he did not win until 1930.
But it was the meeting of – by then– Sir Arnold Lunn and another giant of ski lore, Hannes Schneider of St. Anton, which gave birth to the first of the great classics – the Arlberg-Kandahar– . This event was to become the real starting point of international Alpine ski racing.
The name of the race itself reflects the collaboration between the two men. Schneider contributed the Arlberg after the mountain range he turned into a Mecca of skiing. It was there, from his ski school in St. Anton, that the mysteries and techniques of skiing were first taught to graded classes, each grade addressing a different stage of the skier’s development.
Lunn added the Kandahar in honor of Lord Roberts of Kandahar, the hero of the British raj who distinguished himself in a battle during the relief of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan in 1879. In 1911, Roberts donated a magnificent trophy for the race organized by Lunn, on 19 January that year, from the Glacier de la Plaine Morte to the hotels and chalets of Crans-Montana. And it was called the Roberts of Kandahar challenge.
Thus was born, in the Arlberg, one of the most majestic skiing terrains, the Arlberg-Kandahar race.
Inaugurated in St. Anton, the Arlberg-Kandahar was to be alternately run there in Mürren, where Lunn had made one of his homes. In 1938 it was once again St. Anton’s turn to host the race. But, a few days before the events, Nazi Germany Annexed Austria and the Gestapo arrested Hannes Schneider who they considered to be hostile to Hitler’s regime. In retaliation, Lunn cancelled the race. But he kept up negotiations with the Germans over the next year’s event long enough fir Schneider to flee with his family to the United States. There Schneider created a new ski school modeled on the Arlberg school he’d been forced to abandon in Austria.
Once Schneider was safe, Lunn refused to let the race return to German-occupied St. Anton. Instead of offered friends from Chamonix, in France – including the young world downhill champion James Couttet – the chance to include their town on the Arlberg-Kandahar circuit. After the Second World War, Sestriere and Garmisch-Partenkirchen were also included on the circuit, but the original Lunn-Schneider formula was to remain as that era’s ski racing model.

Ranking in the Arlberg-Kandahar – and the other events conceived along the same lines: the Lauberhorn, the Grand Prix of the Paris Ski Club in Megève and Alpine skiing’s debut at the Garmisch Winter Olympic – were exclusively based on combined downhill-slalom performance. So when Birger Rudd the multitalented Norwegian (he won an Olympic ski jump gold medal in addition to the Alpine World Championship) won the 1936 Olympic downhill on the Kreuzeck course, he did not win a medal. Individual downhill awards were first presented in the 1948 St. Moritz Winter Olympic – where France’s Henry Oreiller capped his career with a gold medal – irrespective of the slalom results the next day.
The apparent even-handedness between downhill and slalom in those days was misleading. Downhill still held the whip hand. Ranking in the downhill event determined which competitors would go on the slalom event on the second day of these two-days competitions. To qualify for the slalom – and thus have a chance to win any prize at all – a competitor have to finish among the top forty in the downhill. Further, the slalom’s starting
order – which is often crucial – was determined by the downhill rankings. The first five in the downhill tackled the slalom in reverse order, the second five, and so on, in eight seeds of five.
The abandonment of this original Lunn-Schneider formulation, where competitors had to qualify for the slalom with a respectable downhill performance, has led to the modern-day sport’s emphasis on specialists. Under the old rules every competitor had to perform well in both downhill and slalom.
Just before the Second World War, at a time when sports in general seemed to be in their Golden Age and Alpine skiing was burgeoning, ski racing reached its first historic summit with the 1938 World Championship in Engelberg, Switzerland. The Event was a rite of passage for a sport only codified a decade before.
Until then, the annual duels of the era’s best skiers – including professional ski teachers who were thus barred from the Olympics – were demurely called the FIS races, though there had been a World Ski Games in the Mont-Blanc valley in 1924. But by 1937 when the races were held in Chamonix, the full passion of international competition was to enter the games.
It was the first time the championships had been organized by France. And the French coach, Paul Gignoux, entrusted the preparation of his team to the most prestigious champions of the time, Toni Seelos of Austria and Rudi Rominger of Switzerland. Both were true professional world champions several times over.
Seelos from Seefeld, whose artistry in the slalom produced the parallel turn, drilled his secrets into the French squad while Rominger from Gräubunden – the most elegant stylist of his generation – had them glued to his wake as he plunged down progressively steeper and more daring slopes. With such fine coaching, the French, led by Emile Allais who won three gold medals in the slalom, the downhill and the combined, dominated the “Mundial” of Chamonix, leaving only crumbs for the foreign skiers including Rudi Rominger himself!
Switzerland – sometimes in concert with Austria, Germany and Italy – had dominated the FIS meets since they were first held in Mürren in 1931. But now France had taken its place as a real contender in Alpine skiing, a fact which the French were to trumpet far and wide, much to the annoyance of their German-speaking neighbors who regarded the French as nothing more than poachers on their private reserve.

Insult was added to injury with the publication of the book, “The French Method” by Emile Allais, Paul Gignoux and G. Blanchon, secretary general of the French Ski Federation. The méthode française was based on the style of their world champion.
At the same time the French were developing their own tourist infrastructure, ski schools and techniques
and announcing to the world that if people wanted to learn to ski they had better come to France to do it.
For months the bitter and argumentative Swiss contested the validity of the French method in the press.
The timing was perfect. With the Engelberg World Championships coming up, acrimonious debate in the Swiss papers was a promoter’s dream. The slalom race – where the French technique was to be particularly evident – was to be run on the final Sunday of the meet. It attracted more than 20,000 spectators.
In the end, the sports itself was the best judge. James Couttet of Chamonix was crowned downhill champion at the age of seventeen, Rominger took the slalom title and Emile Allais took the combined crown home to Megève.
The outbreak of war in the summer of 1939 cut skiing in half and brutally ended the brilliant careers of the current champions. The Lauberhorn races were run uninterrupted each winter in Wengen, Switzerland, but their international character was sometimes only guaranteed by a handful of Frenchmen from Chamonix or Megève. Shortly before the end of the war some of Italy’s best skiers – including Zeno Colo – also raced. Many had crossed the border into Switzerland in 1943 and had been interned. But their political status did not technically allow them to participate in civilian events, so they raced under pseudonyms like “Donner” (Thunder) and “Blitz” (Lightening).
The German twice organized an International Week in Garmisch. Skiers from the neutral countries and the Axis powers, including Japan, took part in races there in 1940 and 1941. And after occupying Norway, the home of International Ski Federation in Oslo, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy even organized World Championship in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Italian Alps.
This was to be a last moment of triumph for the German champion Christl Cranz and a last taste of the exhilaration of skiing for her brother Caro, a champion of great charm and brio. He was to die a few months later on the Russian front.
Though the medals were awarded amid great pomp and ceremony by the son of the Italian King, they are no longer listed in any official records. Freed at the end of the war, the International Ski Federation simply erased those World Championships from their books.

Once the war was over ski racing took off again with zest. In Wengen, Ernst Gertsch – who’d won the slalom segment of the first Lauberhorn Cup he’d helped create in 1930 – worked tirelessly to make the event the most important of that era. And in France and Switzerland, International weeks galvanized skiers long starved of big-time competition.
In 1948, the Winter Olympics were hosted by St. Moritz for the second time – the first had been in 1928 –. Henry Oreiller became the first hero of the post-war games by taking both the downhill and the combined title. For a good number of the pre-war champions, the long lay off during the war had hastened their retirement, as was the case with Rudi Rominger and Emile Allais. Some had paid for the war with their lives. The Austrian and German teams, especially, boasted many new faces. But many of the pre-war champions – such as James Couttet, Zeno Colo, Karl Molitor, Ralph Olinger and Edi Reinalter who won the gold medal in the slalom – were still on form. Indeed, Colo – who had already had a glorious past – went on to win in the 1950 World Championship downhill at Aspen, Colorado, and the 1952 Oslo Olympic downhill.
But new blood was pumping into the sports. Switzerland’s Georges Schneider, loose-limbed and easy going in life, superbly stylish on skis, became the world slalom champion at Aspen. Blond Norwegian Stein Eriksen won the giant slalom – an event initiated in 1946 at the suggestion of Paul Gignoux – at the Oslo Olympics.
The charismatic Eriksen soon became the post-war ski king. François Bonlieu, who came from the north of France, and learn to ski by aping others, came second to Eriksen in the giant slalom at Are’s 1954 World Championships. Ten years later, at Innsbruck, Bonlieu became Olympic gold medallist in the same event.
This was a period of great progress, with Christian Pravda at the core of an Austrian team built along simple and modern lines by Fred Roessner, a geography and physical education teacher. Under his tutelage, the Austrians dominated international skiing for six winters. So powerful was the “Wunderteam” that even after Roessner abandoned it to its own destiny after the 1956 Winter Olympics at Cortina d’Ampezzo, it kept on winning. One of the greatest epochs had begun, with Austrians Christian Pravda, Anderl Molterer, Fritz Huber, Ernst Hinterseer, Tony Sailer and Karl Schranz on one side. On the other were the American Buddy Werner, the Swiss Willy Forrer and Roger Staub, the Japanese Chibaru Igaya, the French Charles Bozon, Adrien Duvillard, François Bonlieu, Jean Vuarnet and James Couttet who had been in Competition since 1937.
It is thanks to this extraordinarily high level of competition that Tony Sailer’s three gold medals in Cortina Winter Olympics had such an unprecedented reception – at a time when television was still playing only a marginal role in image making. Even in countries where snow only existed in picture books, skiing – and Sailer – gripped the public imagination.
Germany’s Ludwig Leitner, Austria’s Karl Schranz and France’s Guy Périllat then began to take their place among the ranks of the champions. Like their predecessors, these heroes still raced, more often than not, simply for glory. Some enterprising Athletes sometimes managed to cadge a few thousand Swiss francs from the ski manufacturers whose equipment they used. But most were happy enough to keep a few pairs of skis at the end of the season, which they resold at half-price to tourists in their hometown resort.
For some, financial security only came later, once their career was already over. A handful of champions learned to market their names and their technical know-how. Stein Eriksen, Jean Vuarnet, Anderl Molterer, Pepi Stiegler, Willy Forrer, Ernst Hinterseer, Toni Sailer, Karl Schranz and Jean-Claude Killy were among
Them – with Killy and Schranz being lucky enough to cash in on the beginning of the World Cup circuit.
It was to be the advent of television coverage that made the Lauberhorn in Wengen, the Grand Prix of Megève, Kitzbühel’s Hahnenkamm, the Arlberg-Kandahar, the women’s race in Grindelwald and, of course, Innsbruck’s first Winter Olympics in 1964 powerful media events – first on a national scale, then internationally thanks to the Eurovision network– . Soon the broadcasts spread to Eastern European countries, then to such unlikely place like Algeria and Morocco.
By 1966 television had turned skiing into an international spectator sport – and everything was set to usher in the World Cup – .

by Serge Lang - spring 1986