Biography

Remembering Joe Fischer, Jean-Pierre Chatellard, Pierre Dumas, Maxine Bounous and Mack Miller.

See https://www.skiinghistory.org/lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lighter Side of Ski Movies

Hall of Famer Sverre Engen influenced many aspects of the sport. Perhaps none as enduring as lightening the load for ski movie production. 

By Mike Korologos

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when ski movie-making was in its infancy, major outdoor filmmakers used “Hollywood methods” of production. Ski-movie shoots were built on the foundation of cumbersome 35-mm cameras affixed atop bulky tripods, with these setups hand-carried from ski lifts to scenic locations by camera crews that did not ski. Often these daylong efforts resulted in 10 to 15 seconds of usable footage.

Pioneering filmmaker Sverre Engen helped turned that laborious process on its head, forever changing how action sports films were made, according to his son, Scott Engen. “Dad may not have been the first to make ski movies, but he sure helped revolutionize the way they were produced,” Scott says.

Sverre honed his film-making skills in the early 1930s and early 1940s while hiking, hunting and working for the Utah Fish and Game Department as he produced and shot informational and educational movies as part of his job.

He also produced, while assigned to the 10th Mountain Division at Camp Hale, Colorado, morale-boosting broadcasts for the Free Norwegian expatriate members in the U.S. and Canada. “In those jobs, Dad came to fully appreciate the virtues of moving fast and traveling light when it came to carrying equipment in the mountains in the winter,” Scott says.

Unlike most ski-movie filmmakers at the time, Sverre was an accomplished skier, which greatly helped him with his movie projects. Traveling light and being nimble with his on-snow production methods provided cost- and time-saving efficiencies, which allowed him to travel into the wilderness to film spectacular scenic footage. Those scenic shots became the signature look of the dozen or so 90-minute ski movies he would later produce.

Born in Norway in 1911, Sverre learned to ski at 2 and moved to the United States at 18, soon settling in Utah. He was among the last of a colorful generation of Norwegian immigrants who were deeply involved in many aspects of the sport. Sverre gained fame as a jumping champion, resort operator, ski instructor, pioneer in the study of avalanche control and maker of ski movies. He served as Alta’s ski school director and as the cofounder and first manager of the new Rustler Lodge at Alta. The U.S. Forest Service named him as Alta’s first snow ranger in 1947 and he coached the University of Utah Ski Team to its first national collegiate championship that same year. He also found time to help build ski jumps at Ecker Hill, Becker Hill and Landes Hill, all in Utah.

Engen was inspired to make his own movies while appearing in several of Fox Movietone’s Ski Aces vignettes. These short films, shown on movie screens across the country as lead-ins to the day’s feature film, starred Sverre and his brothers Alf and Corey skiing down gorgeous powdery mountainsides or in zany ski scenes.

Sverre’s penchant for traveling light found him embracing the latest equipment that came on the civilian market at the end of World War II. This included the classic Bell and Howell 70-D series 16 mm camera. Sverre would have seen this camera used by John Jay when filming for the 10th Mountain Division. Driven by a hand-wound, clockwork spring motor, it didn’t require batteries, which annoyingly would fail in the wet or cold of the mountains or merely peter out during a shoot.

The camera’s downside, explains Scott, was the time and total darkness required to change rolls of film in the mountains. It had to be done only by feel and often by cold and numb fingers. He said his dad stashed a heavy, black canvas lightproof film-changing bag with arm sleeves in his rucksack. In a pinch, he would use his ski parka, folding over the neck and waist hems to improvise a film-changing bag, using the sleeves for access.

“Never wanting to miss a great action scene, Dad sometimes carried three fully loaded D-70 cameras,” Scott said. “Later he used a compact Bell and Howell 16 mm camera that used 50-foot long film magazines that could be instantly installed in the camera. The magazines were about the size of a small paperback book and designed for the gun cameras used in WWII fighter planes.” Sverre now had his “ideal film-making package,” Scott said. “He could ski anywhere with several small, lightweight, spring-driven cameras, each featuring instant magazine loading.”

He also was a natural promoter, helping to build brand awareness decades before that was a concept. The three Engen brothers barnstormed the country in the 1930s and 1940s, staging ski-jumping shows before tens of thousands of spectators. He touted that fame in his promotional posters and media interviews. And Sverre also had an influential friend: Lowell Thomas, the famous radio commentator, who skied with him several times a year at Alta.

In his book, Skiing a Way of Life, Saga of the Engen Brothers, Sverre describes golden advice from Thomas. “He suggested I talk more about the action. He said, ‘you know, Sverre, a good commentary is almost as important as the film itself . . . speak louder so people can hear and understand you.’ I worried about my Norwegian accent, but he assured me that it was okay and might add a little flavor.” Often when Sverre appeared on stage for his screenings, especially in New York or Los Angeles, Thomas either would introduce him personally or via recorded messages.

In addition to being a main character in Ski Aces (1944) and Margie of the Wasatch, Sverre’s feature length movies included Champs at Play, Dancing Skis (1956), The Snow Ranger, Skiing, Their Way of Life (1957), Skiing America, Ski Fever (1958), Ski Time USA (1959), Skiing Unlimited and Ski Spectacular (1962). He also produced numerous Fox Movietone episodes and short ski promotional vignettes.

Alta purchased most of Sverre’s original reels in the 1990s, says Alta general manager Michael Maughan. The film rolls have been digitized and stored for posterity.

Mike Korologos’ ski articles have appeared in newspapers and periodicals worldwide for more than 60 years. He was skiing editor for The Salt Lake Tribune for 25 years and a correspondent for SKIING Magazine for 30 years. He served as press chief for the organizing committees for the 2002 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, his hometown.

photo courtesy Scott Engen

Arnold Lunn and Sandra Heath

With the passing of John Fry earlier this year, Sandra Heath was motivated to reach out to Skiing History to convey how John always appreciated, and supported, the telling of a good tale. Heath, who modeled for Bogner in the 1950s and 1960s, writes: “John Fry encouraged me to tell this story. In the winter of 1961, when I was being filmed in the Alps, the Fox-Movietone crew and I had the good fortune of visiting the Bellevue Hotel in Mürren, Switzerland. I was introduced to Sir Arnold Lunn, who asked me to join him watching the dangerous climbing activity on the Eiger. He was enchanting: a poet, philosopher and inspirational genius to the ski world. Some 30 years later, in England, I had a drink at the home of Elisabeth Hussey, with her sister Philippa. Elisabeth was Sir Arnold’s secretary and confidante. She sprang from her chair to retrieve something and said ‘This photo is such a mystery. Do you happen to know who this gal is?’ I was flabbergasted—it was me!”

ISHA VP Jeff Blumenfeld Wins Prestigious Exploration Award

Jeff Blumenfeld, ISHA vice president and a self-described “groupie for adventures and explorers,” was recently named the winner of the prestigious 2020 international Leif Erikson Exploration History Award.

Blumenfeld, the editor and publisher of the Boulder, Colorado-based Expedition News website, was recognized for his ongoing work to promote and preserve exploration history. Blumenfeld says that “receiving the award and recognition from the exploration community is quite rewarding. I am privileged to tell their stories.” But what keeps him on task is a bigger mission.

“Exploration is critically important,” he says. “It’s through exploration and field research that we’ll answer many of the questions, many of the mysteries of this planet and hopefully make the world a better place for our children.”

In addition to his work on his website, Blumenfeld is active in helping new explorers gain international exposure, peer recognition and, critically, funding for their research and expeditions.

“If I can foster their efforts, I’m totally rewarded by that,” he says.

The Leif Erikson Exploration awards, which include the History Award and the Young Explorer Award, were established by the Exploration Museum in 2015, and are presented for achievements in exploration and for media coverage and documentation of exploration history.

The museum, located in Húsavík, Iceland, 30 miles from the Arctic Circle, is dedicated to the history of human exploration, from early adventurers through space exploration. Blumenfeld received the award in August in a Zoom ceremony, as part of the annual Húsavík Explorers Festival.

Blumenfeld is an active member of the Explorers Club, and is president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association. He has written several books to promote travel and exploration, including Get Sponsored: A Funding Guide for Explorers, Adventurers and Would-Be World Travelers and Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism. 

SKI ART

Ewald Thiel (1855-before 1939)

For such a prolific social painter and illustrator, it’s surprising so little is known about German artist Ewald Thiel; we don’t even know when his death occurred. We do know he was born in Kamanten, in East Prussia (now Klimowka in Kaliningrad, Russia) on August 12, 1855. He studied at the Prussian Art Academy in Berlin and in 1878 at the Royal Academy of Art in Munich. He settled in the Halensee region of Berlin.

Thiel became an illustrator of many Berlin scenes, and his work appeared in popular weeklies. He illustrated books and created wood engravings; he drew scenes of lakes and drainage works, the lighting of bridges, exposition openings, and dancers, lawyers, workers, and politicians. Perhaps his most famous sketch (turned into a color portrait) was the drawing of Otto von Bismarck addressing the Reichstag on February 6, 1888 when he proclaimed: “Wir Deutsche fürchten Gott, aber sonst nichts auf der Welt!” (We Germans fear God, but nothing else in the world!).

He drew skiing scenes, too, including a hunter on skis, a skiing postman, and skiers on the Feldberg. He based the scene pictured here on a sketch by Ernst Hosang of the crowd enjoying the Spreewald, Berlin’s nature preserve. In 1866, a railway from the capital reached Lübbenau, a village at the center of the 200-square-mile area of heathland and pine woods crisscrossed by canals.

An enterprising teacher, Paul Fahlisch, had begun promoting tourism here in 1882. The Spreewald soon became the bourgeois’ place to enjoy summer and winter. Many of the skiers in the scene are locals; the women are wearing the traditional headgear of the Sorb community, Slavic immigrants who settled here in the 6th century. Thiel’s careful depiction of the skier with scarf tying down his cap and protecting his ears, one with a pipe, another carrying a sack, and a third putting on a ski, all attest to a well-grounded knowledge of the skiing world of 1899. The picture was published in Das Buch für Alle, a magazine that appealed to the middle class. — E. John B. Allen

Why's it called that?

Sneg, Schnee, Neige: Why do we have different words for snow?

Five or six thousand years ago, near the beginning of the bronze age, a tribe in what is now Ukraine domesticated horses and learned to ride. They quickly spread their culture, and language, in all directions.

No direct record of their language survives, but scholars call it Proto-Indo-European or PIE. By comparing words in Sanskrit, ancient Greek and Latin and modern languages, linguists have come up with a list of about 200 root words from PIE—white was albus, the root of our word Alps.

The PIE word for snow was sneygh. Cultures close to the PIE homeland kept that word: Slavic languages use some variant of sneg, and the tribes north of Central Asia’s Altai mountains, where bronze-age skiing survives to this day, say snig.

In Northern Europe, the word evolved to schnee (German), sneeuw (Dutch), snow (Friesian and English), snø, snö and snjorr (Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic). In the Mediterranean, proto-Latin (Italic) turned sneygh into snix. Then the s dropped, becoming nix (Classical Latin), neige (French) and nieve or neve (Italian and Spanish). —Seth Masia

SNAPSHOTS IN TIME

1936 RACING ON KENYA’S GLACIERS
British ex-pats held a ski meet on the Lewis glacier on 17,057-foot Mount Kenya, in central Kenya about 90 miles northeast of Nairobi. The sole female contestant—the dashing Nancye Kennaway—won the women’s division and Bill Delap, who started organized skiing on the glacier starting in 1933, won the men’s downhill. The true ski pioneers of the region, however, were German geographer Hans Meyer and Austrian mountaineer Ludwig Purtscheller, who in 1889 became the first people to reach the 16,893-foot summit of Kibo — the highest of Kilimanjaro’s three cones, 200 miles to the south. —E. John B. Allen (Historical Dictionary of Skiing)

1944 CLOSED ON SUNDAYS
For the first several years after its opening in 1944, Timp Haven in Utah’s Provo Canyon was the only ski area in the country that closed on Sundays, due to the religious beliefs of its owner. Paul “Speed” Stewart, a sheep rancher, ran the resort with his brother Ray for more than 20 years. “We just don’t believe in working on Sunday,” Speed’s wife Hilda told the Deseret News in 1965. By that time, his busy resort offered skiing, skating and tubing — but Speed never did learn to ski. “Don’t have the time,” he said. Actor Robert Redford and other investors bought the resort in 1968 and renamed it Sundance. —Mike Korologos

1967 SHOVEL-RIDING GNOMES
While skiing down for our last run, we stopped in the lee of a big cedar tree to look at the view of endless Laurentian hills and frozen lakes stretching out below us. Suddenly, as we all stood there leaning on our ski poles, six little men who looked like tassel-capped gnomes came laughing by us—hell-bent and sliding straight down the mountain—sitting on big, wide snow shovels. Clutching the handle up between their legs, they were having the ride of their lives, speeding with merry abandon over the bumps, down the chutes and through the trees. Their shouts and laughter echoed up the slopes as they went at crazy speeds down the fall line. “Who are those crazy little men?” said Johnny. “Zee trail packers, Monsieur,” said Pierre. We shoved off and chased the “gnomes” to the base of the mountain, swinging through slalom glades, losing them, finding them and laughing all the way. We were in love with the day, the mountain, and the French-Canadian people.  —Frankie and Johnny O’Rear,
“Chateau Bon Vivant: The Hilariously True Misadventures of Two Vastly Unequipped Innkeepers Who Run a Ski Lodge in Winter in Old Quebec”

1978 STICK TO THE TRAILS
Don’t go blithely whipping off the trails at Vail, Colorado, this season. Under a new get-tough policy, the U.S. Forest Service is planning to prosecute people who ignore ski-area boundary and trail-closing markers. The penalties: six months in jail and a $500 fine. —SKI (October 1978)

PARKING THE MIND AT KEYSTONE
First the instructor asked us to think of a word that described our skiing. I chose “wobbly.” Mark, a Los Angeles advertising man, chose “strain.” Judy said “tense.” We each acted out our bad quality, exaggerating and clowning. We skied down a gentle intermediate run, clenching our teeth and holding our arms out like scarecrows. “Look at them,” said a voice on a chairlift. “Oh, they’re just doing Inner Skiing,” said its seatmate. —Abby Rand on the Inner Skier Week at Keystone, based on the best-
selling book Inner Skier (SKI, November 1978)

1989 UNITED NATIONS IN THE ALPINE LIFTLINES
Our State Department should analyze national deportment in liftlines across the Alps as an aid to understanding the character of Europeans. The Germans are the most aggressive. The French step all over everyone’s skis. An Englishman slammed into the line and knocked over my daughter. The Swedes make a wedge of six skiers and slowly surge through the line. The polite Japanese make block reservations on the cable cars. As for the Americans, they’re so afraid of making the wrong impression that they get squeezed to the back—the wimps of the European liftlines. —Peter Miller (Snow Country, August 1989)

From Olympic racing to elite coaching, this once-and-future family has had a powerful impact on the sport. 

Above: John Caldwell at home in Putney, Vermont, where he first started competing as a high-school student in the late 1940s. By 1951 (right), he was training with the U.S. nordic team for the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo.

The Caldwells are America’s first family of cross-country skiers. As elite athletes, coaches, ski technicians, organizational founders, retailers and advisors, the family and the sport have formed a multi-generational bond that goes back 70 years. In U.S. skiing, only the Cochrans come close.

On a breezy June day in Peru, Vermont, three generations of Caldwells—grandfather John, son Sverre, granddaughter Sophie and her husband, Simi Hamilton—gathered on the porch of Sverre’s home, with its sweeping view south to Stratton Mountain. They pieced together a family history that begins with John’s journey from the Putney School to Dartmouth College to the 1952 Olympics, stretches through Sverre’s seminal coaching gig at Stratton Mountain School, and strides into the present with Sophie and Simi’s leadership on the U.S. World Cup team.

The family legacy has humble roots in late-1940s Vermont. Although a gifted downhill skier, John was a cross-country neophyte as a high-school athlete at Putney. In his first nordic race, he borrowed his sister’s clunky alpine skis (because they were smaller and lighter than his) and “basically ran around the course on skis,” he recalls. He finished in the top 15. Yet by the time John reached Dartmouth, his skills—and equipment—had improved sufficiently to enable him to compete as a four-event skier, in cross-country, jumping, slalom and downhill. He was named to the 1952 Olympic nordic combined team.

Grand as it might have been to go to the Games, he didn’t exactly receive the gilded Olympic treatment. Cross-country was little more than a blip on American skiing’s radar screen. “Not many ski clubs were promoting cross-country skiing,” John says, and the team essentially had no budget. Preparation for the Games in Oslo was an on-the-fly affair. Relegated to the margins, John and his teammates self-funded an impromptu camp in Sun Valley, where they didn’t always maintain an intensive focus on training. Enticed one day by fresh powder, they were spotted by a photographer who was so impressed by their downhill talents that he took publicity shots for the resort’s marketing campaign.

Not surprisingly, John’s Olympic performance in Oslo was less than stellar. “I never felt so unprepared for an athletic event in my life,” he says. He remembers making 11 jumps from the legendary Holmenkollen and falling six times. One inelegant but successful jump enabled him to qualify for the 18-kilometer cross-country event, in which he was 73rd among 75 finishers. More than 24 minutes behind the Norwegian winner, he managed to beat just one Australian skier.

That ignoble performance motivated John to embark on a long campaign to upgrade the stature of—and support for—cross-country skiing in America. In 1953, he launched a three-decade career of teaching and coaching at Putney while he and his wife, Hep, started a family (or, as Sophie teases her grandfather, “popping out kids”). Tim, Sverre, Peter and Jennifer formed the next generation to carry the family name forward. Meanwhile, John continued to burnish his own legacy.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was back on the national-team scene, coaching several Olympic and world championship teams, becoming the nordic representative on the U.S. Ski Team board, and writing a book, The Cross-Country Ski Book, the only one of its kind in the U.S. at that time. (The book’s success “kept me out of the poorhouse,” John says.) He was also founder of the New England Nordic Ski Association, whose prestigious annual award now bears his name.

Despite these efforts, acceptance of the sport was slow in coming. “Nobody paid attention to cross-country,” John says, and he remembers another USST board member telling him: “If you weren’t such a nice guy, we wouldn’t even have a cross-country program.” For the 1966 World Championship team, it took a $1,000 gift from a friend to pay for top-quality equipment for team members.

That was the world Sverre and older brother Tim entered in the late 1960s and early 1970s as they rose through the nordic ranks. Tim carried the family banner into elite racing, competing in the first of four Olympics as an 18-year-old in 1972. (Peter was also a successful XC racer, building an impressive collegiate record, while Jennifer would win the prestigious American Birkebeiner race in 1983.) During Tim’s 12-year Olympic run, between 1972 and 1984, respect for cross country finally began to take root. “A lot of things changed,” Tim says, and by 1984, “we were treated like kings compared with our predecessors.”

That was all relative, of course. By alpine standards, the American cross-country program was still a bare-bones operation. Team coaches “wore many hats,” says Tim—waxing skis, making travel arrangements, cooking meals, devising fitness programs. “In 1972, you never heard the term ‘wax tech.’ And even in 1984, we were doing a lot of waxing ourselves.” That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “There was something to be gained by getting a feel for your skis by waxing them.”

And in the absence of official support, says John, U.S. skiers might have had a few advantages over well-financed Scandinavian and Russian programs. Freed from sponsor obligations, for example, U.S. skiers could use any wax brands and combinations that they wanted. “We knew more about waxing than anyone else,” John says of the 1960s and 1970s. “We tried waxing innovations that might have given us an edge.”

Health issues—pneumonia and back problems—slowed Sverre’s athletic development. He stayed connected to the sport by dabbling in coaching as a Dartmouth student in the 1970s. But he found that coaching and athletic development hadn’t advanced much since John’s Olympic struggles in 1952.

When Sverre took over the nordic program at Stratton Mountain School in the late 1970s, he was hired not because of his great expertise but simply because there wasn’t much competition. “There just weren’t that many experienced coaches,” he says. After all, there were no technical manuals for guidance (except perhaps for The Cross-Country Ski Book) and no great American mentors. The concept of the ski academy was essentially birthed with Burke Mountain Academy, founded in 1970, followed by Stratton Mountain School in 1972 and Green Mountain Valley School in 1973. But the academies’ focus was almost entirely on developing alpine athletes. Like John flying blind in preparing for the 1952 Olympics, Sverre had no template to guide him.

Left to his own devices, Sverre managed to turn the SMS nordic program into the best secondary-school program in the country. In a 40-year span beginning in the late 1970s, 16 Olympians have had SMS roots, and Sverre produced so many national-team members that the best number he can put on it is “30ish.” Among those elite skiers are Sophie and Simi, as well as Sophie’s cousin (and Tim’s son) Patrick and recent Olympic gold medalist Jessie Diggins.

As a third-generation standard-bearer for the Caldwell legacy, Sophie claims she felt no pressure to live up to the family name. (“I took the pressure off because I wasn’t a very good athlete,” jokes Sverre.) But there were decided advantages to being a Caldwell: Sophie could tap into a deep reservoir of wisdom and experience.

Thanks in part to John and Sverre, the national team has advanced by light years since the early 1950s. Both Sophie and Simi have been most successful as skate skiers in sprinting events. Sprinting wasn’t added to the roster of Olympic sports until 2002, and skating technique was just beginning to evolve in the early 1980s, when Tim was nearing the end of his competitive career. What Sophie and Simi are doing today was unimaginable in John’s time … or even in Tim’s. Sophie is a two-time Olympian who finished third in the 2017–2018 overall World Cup sprint standings; Simi, who grew up in Aspen, is a three-time Olympian who finished ninth in the overall sprint standings the following year.

Sophie and Simi are not alone in sustaining the family legacy. Sverre’s son Austin has followed his father into the collegiate coaching ranks. Patrick is now retired from the national team, but cousin Zach, proprietor of Caldwell Sports in Putney, is considered one of the best—if not the best—cross-country ski tech in the country. And when Sophie and Simi talk abstractly about having a family in the future, perhaps a fourth generation of Caldwells is preparing, prenatally, to carry the banner farther into the future.

They are, indeed, a once-and-future force of nature.  

From Skiing History, Sept/Oct 2020

Farewell to Ski Pioneers

Laurent Boix-Vives, Carl Ettlinger, William McCollom, Richard and Carol Fallon

See skiinghistory.org/lives

Above: Dartmouth coach Dodge in the finish area at the Birds of Prey World Cup giant slalom event at Beaver Creek, Colorado in 2017. Edith Thys Morgan photo.

A former World Cup and pro racer, Dartmouth’s men’s alpine coach has led the return to relevance of U.S. college racing. 

Although few ski racers have been able to take to the slopes this summer, the racing community has been hotly debating the relationship between NCAA skiing and U.S. Ski and Snowboard in athlete development. It’s a long-running argument. At its heart is the question of how elite racers can—or cannot—use collegiate competition in their path to the World Cup.
For more than 30 years, Dartmouth College alpine coach Peter Dodge has been leading that conversation.

Every December, at the Birds of Prey World Cup giant slalom in Beaver Creek, Colorado, the finish area is awash in a sea of green parkas, emblazoned with the iconic Dartmouth ski team snowflake. Dodge is always there, surrounded by student athletes cheering on fellow and former Dartmouth classmates. This past year, they were rooting for Tommy Ford, the eventual winner, and also for 2018 graduate Brian McLaughlin and current student George Steffey, competing in his first-ever World Cup event.

Now entering his 14th year on the U.S. Ski Team, Ford has attended Dartmouth as many national team athletes have—by patching terms together opportunistically while rehabbing from injuries and during off-season breaks. Like Steffey, Ford never raced for Dartmouth on the NCAA circuit. By contrast, McLaughlin, the 2018 NCAA giant slalom champion, is the latest in a trend of promising American skiers who attended college full-time while racing on the NCAA circuit. He emerged with the skills, maturity and ranking to make the jump to the World Cup.

One man who’s been instrumental in creating an environment where such success can happen—especially for American athletes—is Dodge, who’s coached the Dartmouth men’s alpine team since 1990. Looking at his own path in ski racing helps to explain his motivation.

RURAL VERMONT ROOTS

Dodge and his older brother Dave grew up in St. Johnsbury, in the heart of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. As he remembers it, “every little town had a rope tow.”  Their father, Dave “Duffy” Dodge, an interstate highway builder who had raced for the University of Vermont, taught the boys how to ski under the lights on the rope tows of the Lyndon Outing Club. “Skiing” also included cross-country touring and jumping. On weekdays after school the boys would climb the hill behind the Murphy family’s hotel. They hauled a few saplings along and used them as slalom gates.  On weekends, they’d go to the “big mountain” at Burke.

Racing in that corner of northern Vermont was a down-to-earth affair. On the way to a competition in tonier Stowe, the younger Dodge remembers mentioning to his Dad that the Stowe kids were “a bit stuck up.” Duffy gave his son some no-nonsense advice: “Beat them and they’ll be your friends.” Dodge did just that, and fondly remembers a mass snowball fight that same afternoon with his new buddies. Soon Dodge’s skiing skills would take him well beyond the Kingdom.

Dodge worked his way up the skiing ranks, attending regional camps and national competitions while attending public high school at St. Johnsbury Academy. Meanwhile, the Murphys helped to entice Warren Witherell to come to Vermont, where he started Burke Mountain Academy in 1970. At Burke, coaches Witherell and Chris Jones — as well as Eastern Regional coach George Ostler — helped Dodge to progress. By the time he graduated from high school in 1973, he was on the National Development Team.

HITTING THE ROAD

After one gap year, Dodge started Dartmouth in the fall of 1974. He took the winter off, won the 1975 Can-Am title, and spent the next year on the U.S. Ski Team before being demoted to the C Team. After a lackluster season racing in Europe, Dodge was dropped from the team and returned to Dartmouth in the fall of 1976. Following his fall term, he returned to form, winning the early season races in December 1976. Dodge was then offered and declined a spot on the D Team, with far less accomplished athletes.

That was when he had his first epiphany. “I was sitting in the parking lot of my brother’s fraternity during Christmas break, and it was about 60 degrees. I remember thinking ‘I know I can ski better than this.’” He decided right then to go to Europe on his own.

Dodge recruited Bill Doble as his ski tech and Swiss native Konrad “Butch” Rickenbach — then a student at Burke Mountain Academy — as his coach. Finally, he talked his parents into buying a Peugeot for European delivery so they could get around. After a month together, and strong results, the trio broke up and Dodge joined a Europa Cup tour (funded by the Europa Cup) through Czechoslovakia and Poland. The entire tour, with racers from 15 nations, literally piled into a Russian airplane in Zurich, and then traveled around by bus, with ski bags in the aisle. “It was super fun,” recalls Dodge. His results earned him a spot on the U.S. B Team, and he competed in World Cup races the following season.

Despite finishing 1979 with two top-15 World Cup finishes in Stratton and Waterville Valley, when coach Bill Marolt tracked him down by phone at his brother’s condo in Burlington that spring, it was to kick him off the team. That was when he had his second epiphany. “It was the same story as before. I put down the phone—click—and said, ‘I just turned pro!’” Dodge recalls with a laugh.

That experience helps Dodge relate to the athletes who come to Dartmouth with unfinished business. “After two stints on the U.S. Ski Team, I knew I could ski better. I just wanted to go out and ski the way I knew how to ski.” As with so many American and international skiing stars in that era, he found the World Pro Tour to be liberating.

“The beauty of the pro tour was there were no politics: You show up and go fast,” he says. Dodge found immediate success, winning Rookie of the Year in 1980. After nine years, he retired in 1989 and went to work for his longtime supporter CB Vaughan at CB Sports. Just as he was looking to return to college to finish his degree, the Dartmouth coaching job came up. Dodge took the position over from Mark Ford, who’d been on that same Europa Cup bus tour that launched his international success. Ford’s son is the aforementioned Tommy, currently America’s top giant slalom skier.

COLLEGE RACING’S COMEBACK

At Dartmouth, Dodge inherited a big piece of skiing history and built on the tradition. He has presided over an era that saw NCAA racing move from a step-down program for elite junior racers, to a highly competitive arena where top athletes toggle between the World Cup and the carnival circuit, and often continue their athletic careers after graduation. In many respects, it has returned college racing to its roots and relevance.

“Ski racing in the U.S. was originally born out of college outing clubs,” explains Dodge. Chief among them was the Dartmouth Outing Club, which organized the first Winter Carnival in 1911. Until Bob Beattie organized a U.S. Ski Team in the 1960s, Olympic teams were chosen from the college rosters.  As the U.S. Ski Team grew, college racing became less relevant for development, though some athletes—like Dave Currier, Dodge and Tiger Shaw—were able to work Dartmouth’s flexible D-Plan around their competition schedules.

Shortly after Dodge took over, college coaches in the West, including Richard Rokos at Colorado and George Brooks at the University of New Mexico, took the lead from the World University Games and held some FIS-sanctioned University (FIS UNI) races. Dodge, who was president of the Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association (EISA), saw the opportunity in that, and eventually Dartmouth hosted the first official EISA FIS UNI race in 1995. “That changed things,” he explains.  In a push to make the tour better, FIS UNI races were phased in and become the norm.

As FIS-level racing legitimized the circuit, and the level of competition rose accordingly, NCAA skiers—from the U.S. and other countries— started moving to their national teams after college. In Dodge’s tenure as coach, skiers who advanced to their national teams, after competing for and graduating from Dartmouth, include: Bill Gaylord (GBR), Patrick Biggs (CAN), Martin Anguita (CHI), Brad Wall (AUS), Tanguy Nef (SUI) and Americans Andy Martin, Roger Brown, Paul McDonald, David Chodounsky, Ace Tarberry, and McLaughlin. Nef, who will graduate with a computer science degree next spring, scored two top 10 World Cup slalom results last season.

By the time Chodounsky, a last-minute recruit, started at Dartmouth in 2004, the team was “stacked,” he recalls.  (Dartmouth men won the NCAA slalom title for five years straight, from 2002 to 2006.) “I was not the top guy, but I knew I was going to a good team,” he says. It was also a tight-knit, hard-working and fun-loving team. Dartmouth’s all-American squad won the NCAA championships in 2007. “Peter never pressured us to finish,” he adds. “He told us you have to go for it if you want to win.” He’d also remind his athletes: “Someone’s got to win today. It might as well be you!”

By Chodounsky’s senior year, he was invited to compete on the Europa Cup with the U.S. Ski Team. As is his policy, Dodge fully encouraged the opportunity for higher-level competition, even though it meant missing two carnivals. Chodounsky graduated in four years with a double major in engineering and earth science and went on to become the top American slalom skier, spending nine years on the U.S. Ski Team and competing in two Olympics.  

THE DARTMOUTH EXPERIENCE

Chodounsky’s success not only made him the poster child for the Dartmouth Experience, but also triggered a shift in perception. College racing, for some athletes, can not only be a path for elite development, but also the preferred path: Four years in a stable, social, intellectually stimulating team structure can be an ideal environment for discovering true potential. “Dartmouth is all about excellence in academics, conduct, standards… having a good experience for athletes,” says Dodge. “Winning is fun, but it’s not all it’s about. We’re preparing them for life.”

That starts by creating a supportive team atmosphere, which is not a mere consequence of a team sport. “We really work on it,” says Dodge, who encourages athletes to help coach each other. “When you coach someone else, you improve your own skiing,” he explains. Dodge, who bristles at the concept of hazing, encourages incoming athletes to be leaders from the start. “I tell them there is no seniority or hierarchy here.  Learn from the seniors, but I don’t expect you to be the last one in line. If you go fast, you’ll start.”

The appealing combo of high-level training and personal development—highlighted most recently by Chodounsky and McLaughlin—has brought Dartmouth an embarrassment of riches, particularly in American ski talent. Again this season, the team will include athletes with multiple years of USST experience. Many have aspirations to continue racing through and after college. In all, Dodge has 12 athletes vying for six spots in each carnival.

Dodge points out that the high level of competition is not unique to Dartmouth, and not unique to men. “Nationally, there’s a lot of college talent. We’re head-to-head with other top teams.”

Athletes like Leif Kristian Nestvold-Haugen, Trevor Philp and Erik Read (all racing for the University of Denver), Jonathan Nordbotten (University of Vermont) and David Ketterer (University of Colorado) have established NCAA legitimacy on the men’s side. And “five past or current NCAA women are scoring on the World Cup,” Dodge says. These include Canadians Laurence St. Germain, Amelia Smart, Ali Nullmeyer and Roni Remme, as well as U.S. racer Paula Moltzan. Meanwhile, U.S. Ski Team members Katie Hensien and Keely Cashman, both World Junior medalists, are competing on the NCAA circuit this season for Denver and Utah, respectively.

If the U.S. has been slower than other nations (especially Norway and Canada) to capitalize on collegiate programs as a development resource, Dodge continues to advocate for ways in which skiers can work towards the national team. “The key is not centralizing,” he says — not defaulting to a system of making selections and choosing stars. That said, coordinating national development with colleges, regions and clubs—so they can all support each other— is particularly important for NCAA college teams, which are not allowed to train together out of season. Dodge has participated in summer projects that bring NCAA athletes from several schools together under the U.S. Ski Team umbrella, and is optimistic about its potential for future collaboration.

Meanwhile, as the NCAA moves to develop rules that allow student-athletes to receive compensation for their “name, image and likeness,” Dodge sees that college skiers—many of whom must buy their own equipment—will see some real benefit. “If ski companies could get some promotional value from college skiers, it would provide incentive for them to provide better and/or less expensive equipment … or even some compensation.”

Along his way, Dodge wondered if he should have tried something else or moved somewhere else— or maybe just gone after a big paycheck as a private coach. But he also realizes that having the opportunity and freedom to build and run a program the way he wants is a good gig. From his base in the Dartmouth Outing Club, his influence on American skiing has been far-reaching and profound. It’s also been rewarding.

“I get to work with great kids and great families, and it keeps you young,” he says. He’s close to his son Jensen, who will play hockey this year for the Morrisville State College Mustangs, and lives next to his dad, Duffy, who quit skiing at age 90. He gets to see plenty of friends who went to New York and made their millions. “When they say they want to move back to Hanover, I say, ‘I’ve got you beat!”  

Edith Thys Morgan spent eight years as a member of the U.S. Ski Team, competed in two Olympics (1988, 1992) and three FIS Alpine World Championships (1987, 1989 and 1991), and was ranked among the top ten downhill and Super G skiers in the world. She retired from racing in 1993. She’s now a writer, blogger, frequent Skiing History contributor, and ski-racing mom. She lives in Hanover, New Hampshire with her family. Learn more at racerex.com. An earlier version of this article first appeared on skiracing.com.

Corkey Fowler, Howard Peterson, Bob Lazier, Herman Dupre, Bob Tucker, Dick and Carol Fallon, Gary Speckmann

See https://www.skiinghistory.org/lives

"If not for the mountains my religion would be much too arid," confessed the celebrated convert, apologist and controversialist.

(Photo above: Lunn in May 1925, when with Walter Amstutz he made the first successful ski ascent of the Eiger. Photo courtesy New England Ski Museum)

The paths to faith are many, and they can be eccentric. Such was the conversion of Arnold Lunn in 1933. A British mountaineer and ski pioneer, Lunn was already famous then for his invention of the slalom race.

Mountaineers from time to time experience a spiritual, even profound religious feeling when they gaze upon the beauty of snow-capped peaks and the shadowed valleys below. Lunn profoundly shared that poignant experience. “The mountains were my door to the supernatural,” he wrote. “Their visible beauty was the initial impulse which led me to devote so much time in the years which followed to the most important of all problems, the real nature of man.”

Arnold was the eldest son of Sir Henry Lunn, Methodist lay preacher and author as well as visionary entrepreneur. In 1892, Henry organized a conference of ecclesiastics at Grindelwald, focused on re-uniting the splintered Protestant churches. It was an effort with little chance of success, but it led him to become a premier travel agent.

“The result of the Grindelwald Conference,” recalled Arnold, “was not—alas—the reunion of Christendom, but the foundation of a travel agency, later known as Sir Henry Lunn Ltd.” Lunn Travel ran tours to such Swiss resorts as Adelboden, Klosters and Grindelwald’s neighbors, Mürren and Wengen. Ten-year-old Arnold donned his first pair of skis when he accompanied his father’s earliest organized sports party to Chamonix in 1898.

The young man’s initial step toward supernatural awareness occurred in Switzerland when he was 19 years old, and a student at Oxford. During the previous year, by his own description, he had become “an agnostic, if not an atheist by belief.” Then it struck him. “I was resting on an Alpine pass after a climb (and) a sunset of supreme beauty,” he recalled. “Suddenly I knew beyond immediate need of proof that a beauty which was not of this world was revealed in the visible loveliness of the mountains. From that moment I discarded materialism for ever.”

Energetic Iconoclast

Following his Oxford studies, Arnold Lunn took up a writing career, and between 1907 and 1968 produced more than 50 books—nearly a title annually. In addition to 15 books on skiing and mountaineering and six travel guides, he wrote 30 serious books ranging across religion, philosophy, politics and autobiography. The alpine wonderment that propelled him from skeptical agnostic to fervent believer is scattered through his work.

Lunn’s enthusiasm for skiing was boundless. He originated the timed slalom race in 1922 at Mürren, Switzerland. In 1927, he and Austria’s most famous skier, Hannes Schneider, invented the Arlberg-Kandahar competition, having a combined result in downhill and slalom that exists to this day. For years, he edited the British Ski Year Book, one of the more literate sports periodicals ever published. So encompassing and detailed was Lunn’s writing and organizational work in skiing that it’s difficult to imagine he had time for anything else.

Lunn was influenced by the 19th century writers, poets and artists who articulated the beauty of the high mountains. In 1816, the young Byron, high on the Kleine Scheidegg in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, positively swooned at what he beheld: “Clouds rose from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices like the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring tide…the
glaciers like a frozen hurricane.”

The august Victorian author, critic and artist John Ruskin had “a genius for expressing his passionate love of mountain scenery,” wrote Lunn. It found expression not only in Ruskin’s prose but also in his painting. And Lunn was not alone in observing how the revival of Gothic architecture aroused Victorian England’s appreciation of the Gothic landscape of soaring Alpine peaks.

Lunn once described his experience on a ledge high above Zermatt, as he watched “the first wayward hints of colour creeping back into the rich gloom of the valley. And then, just as the sun leapt above the distant bar of the Oberland, a Church peeled out … a joyous carillon … re-echoed until the whole long valley … overflowed with spontaneous melody.”

Leap of Logic

Despite his spiritual arousal in 1907 at the age of 19, Lunn for the next 26 years was consistently disappointed by Protestantism, and decidedly unsympathetic to the arguments for conversion to the Roman Church. England was witnessing an extraordinary number of conversions—as late as the 1930s, some 12,000 a year. The Church welcomed literary celebrities, who came to include Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Malcolm Muggeridge. The Anglican Church was in decline. Should not one become a Catholic?

It was a popular discussion topic, and furnished a ready market for book publishers, and an opportunity for a professional writer like Lunn. His Roman Converts openly criticized Cardinal John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, and leaders of the Oxford Movement who had become converts. Lunn was daunted neither by Newman’s fame nor by the illustrious Cardinal’s arguments, which he compared to misguided mountaineering. “For all their brilliance, (they) are too often like the tracks of an Alpine party wandering around a mist-covered glacier. Perhaps this does not matter,” remarked Lunn acerbically, “for all roads lead to Rome, even those which go around in a circle.”

So persuasive was his writing that in 1932 his London publisher commissioned a book, Difficulties, co-authored by Lunn and Monsignor Ronald Knox, himself a convert. In each chapter, Lunn furnished examples—such as the Inquisition and the treatment of Galileo—for why people should not join the Roman Church, while Knox sought to destroy Lunn’s line of reasoning.

Yet less than a year after the publication of Difficulties, a remarkable thing happened: Lunn himself became a convert. He was received into the Roman Catholic faith in July 1933 by none other than Knox, and recounted the story of his conversion in a new book, Now I See, published in November of the same year.

His conversion, Lunn confessed, was not a leap of faith. Rather, it was a decision founded on research and reason. He likened the scientific logic that he employed in studying snow surfaces and avalanche conditions to the historical analysis he used in proving Christ’s resurrection: “The mental process in both cases seemed much the same.”

It may have seemed the same to him, but not to critics, as witnessed by this letter from a friend: “My Dear Lunn: It was very kind of you to send me your book. I have often observed (that) when a writer goes over to Rome his work falls to pieces…I would have given all your pages on the infallibility of the Pope…for one paragraph on the argument which induced you to believe that bread and wine can be turned into the actual flesh and blood of a man who died nineteen hundred years ago.”

None of this deterred Lunn. He was a brilliant debater, controversialist, and a tack-sharp logician. His style of arguing was the same—whether exposing the underlying illogic of the fatuous Norwegian opposition to downhill and slalom, or of the claims to benignity by a Church that had tortured people in Inquisition. Lunn often fueled his arguments from his experiences in skiing. Two weeks before his death in 1974, at the age of 86, he wrote:

“A country ceases to belong to Christendom when the architects of public opinion begin to preach what they practise…I have seen the process at work in my own sport, ski-ing…Olympic shamateurism began with the highly paid Nazi ‘amateurs’ at the 1936 Olympics…What was of ultimate significance about Hitler and Stalin was not that they were anti-democratic but that they were anti-God and, therefore, anti-truth.”

Lunn was ahead of his time in attacking the failure of intellectuals to identify Stalinist communism as a form of totalitarianism. His mistrust of the Soviets later came into play when he fought the International Olympic Committee over the amateur status of athletes. IOC President Avery Brundage wanted to bar alpine ski racers from the Olympics for their acceptance of money from sponsors. Lunn argued that state-employed Eastern bloc athletes competing in the Olympics were just as professional as the western “shamateurs” taking payments under the table from businesses. In Lunn’s mind, the Soviets were as ruthless in the telling of lies to defend their version of ski competition as they were in their closing of Christian churches.
Inspirited by the Mountains

Lunn’s Christian faith—erected as it was on an infrastructure of syllogistic reasoning—left him feeling deprived. He envied the mystic or the simple peasant who had a direct phone line to God. “I envy the mystical just as the tone-deaf envy the musical,” he remarked.

“It has always been a distress to me that I have so few religious feelings. I have far too little feeling of being in contact with God when I say my prayers or even when I receive communion.”

But a commitment to religion as firm as Lunn’s is not brought about without an emotional component. “I should probably still be an agnostic,” he wrote to a priest friend in 1969, “if I had not felt an urgent need to explain the sense of worship which mountains arouse in me, and if it were not for the mountains, my religion would be much too arid, a synthesis of intellectual conclusions rather than a personal relationship with my creator … There are moments in the mountains when the words of the Sanctus rise unbidden to my lips.”

Lunn believed that writing about the mountains surpassed the literature of any other sport. It is impossible to describe snow and peaks “without unconsciously betraying your attitude to the invisible and mystical … Mountain literature is unique in sport, unique for its immense range of interests, physical and metaphysical.”

Lunn, who died in 1974, was knighted by the Queen in 1952 for his contributions to skiing and Anglo-Swiss relations. The honor should have cited his contributions to the literature of religion as well.

Lunn’s voluminous correspondence can be found today in the Special Collections of the Georgetown University Library in Washington, D.C. This article is based on a paper presented by the late John Fry at the 2009 International Ski History Congress at Mammoth Lakes, California and excerpted in Commonweal (June 1, 2009). To read John’s obituary, see the March-April 2020 issue or skiinghistory.org/lives.

Marie Marvingt achieved fame as an aviator, but she was also a pioneering skier and inventor of an early aluminum ski. 

She’s famous in France, but nearly unheard of in North America. Marie Marvingt (1875–1963) was an athletic phenomenon who forged a path for women into mountaineering, martial arts, skiing, cycling, aviation and military service. Combining her careers as a surgical nurse and military aviator, she invented the concept and technology of the air ambulance, and promoted air-evac services around the world.

(Photo top of page: Marie Marvingt at Chamonix in January 1913. The pants were a practical but daring fashion statement.)

With few exceptions, women of her era who succeeded in alpinism and aviation had the support of their wealthy families or husbands. In fact, Marie never married and had to work for her adventures. Marie’s father, Felix Marvingt, was postmaster of Aurillac, a decidedly middle-class occupation. After 1879 when, at age 52, Felix fled his stifling career as a bureaucrat, the family lived on his pension. A champion swimmer in his youth, Felix was 48 years old at Marie’s birth, and encouraged her to excel in sports—first swimming, then cycling, canoeing, mountaineering and gymnastics. From the age of five, she followed Felix on his swims in the Moselle and on trekking holidays in the Alps. At 15, she trained with the Alphonse Rancy Circus, learning to do acrobatics on horseback. With a preternatural sense of balance, she quickly became a leading equestrienne. Equitation put her in touch with cavalry officers, who dominated the sport. For the rest of her life Marie maintained a close relationship with officers of the French Army.

Marie’s mother, Elisabeth, died in 1889. At age 14, Marie lost any maternal influence Elisabeth may have exerted. Though she dressed fashionably and flirted easily, Marie increasingly devoted herself to sports. While attending the equivalent of high school in Metz in Lorraine, then a part of Germany, she learned archery, riflery, fencing, boxing, tennis, golf, track and field. (And, of course, German.) While studying medicine at the University of Nancy, she earned a reputation as a fierce competitor in all sports, winning against women in swimming and track, and against men in target-shooting. More passionate about sports than about medicine, she settled for a nursing license and supplemented that income as a sports and adventure writer. She sold articles, under the pseudonym Myriel, to dozens of newspapers. Returning to the Alps, she was the first woman to summit many of the high peaks around Chamonix.

Many women rode bicycles, but few entered races. Marie won the Nancy-Bordeaux race (600 miles) in 1904, Nancy-Milan (350 miles) in 1905 and Nancy-Toulouse (560 miles) in 1906.

That year, at age 31, she took up skiing in a serious way. Skiing in France and Italy was largely a military endeavor, as armies focused on frontier defense in the rising tensions with Germany and Austria. Marie set up the first civilian ski school in France, and at the second military ski meet, at Chamonix in 1908, she ran in the first organized cross-country race for women, a three-kilometer sprint. While the army races were covered widely in the French press, reporters paid not much attention to the women’s race. Coached by the Swedish expert Harald Durban-Hansen, Marie and her peers used two poles at a time when the French Army team was still paddling away with a single pole (see “End of the Single Pole,” Skiing History, March-April 2019). She apparently won the race, though no official records survive. Perhaps there were none to begin with. Durban-Hansen also taught her ski-jumping.

In 1909 Marie repeated the win, at the Gérardmer meet. This time, all the women racers showed up in culottes rather than skirts, greatly improving their performance and setting ski fashion forever. The threepeat came at Ballon d’Alsace in 1910. Meanwhile, she won events in skating, luge and bobsleigh.

During the summer of 1908, Marie made bicycling history. At age 33, she tried to enter the Tour de France and was refused—the race would be for men only. That year the race covered 2,800 miles over 14 stages. An average of 200 miles a day on dirt roads with single-speed bikes was punishing even for the strongest cyclists, so organizers allowed a day of rest after each stage. Marie simply cycled each stage on the rest days. She finished handily, while 76 of the 114 male starters dropped out.

In the summers during her ski-racing career, Marie took up aviation. She first piloted a balloon in 1907, and during an October 1909 storm piloted the first east-to-west crossing of the North Sea from Europe to England, nearly drowning herself and her passenger. That year she soloed in an Antoinette, a fiendishly tricky monoplane designed before the standard stick-and-rudder control system was devised.

Like skiing, French aviation was heavily promoted by the French Army. Among Marie’s student-pilot friends was the cavalry and artillery officer Paul-Maurice Écheman. Écheman was also an accomplished skier and skater. The two became constant companions on the flying fields and in the mountains. While Marie set some of the first aviation records for women, Écheman was promoted to captain and put in charge of one of the first French Army airfields. In 1910, Marie had the idea of combining her surgical and piloting skills to create an air ambulance service. With Écheman’s encouragement, she presented the idea to the Army. It was too early, and the War Department wasn’t interested. Écheman died in a solo crash in 1911.

Now 35, Marie continued to set aviation records, which were featured in newspapers around the world. The fame enabled her to earn money flying in exhibitions. In winters, she continued to compete in winter sports. Increasingly she devoted time to developing the medical air-evacuation concept. She organized conferences to promote the idea and raised enough money to order a specially designed Deperdussin monoplane to carry a pilot plus two stretcher patients or a patient and doctor. The company went bankrupt before the plane was delivered; its designer, Louis Béchereau, went on to create the SPAD fighter series of World War I.

When war broke out, Marie went straight to work as a surgical nurse. The Army wouldn’t let her fly military missions, but she became a part-time civilian flight instructor training new Army pilots. After all, she was one of the world’s most experienced aviators, with a sterling reputation. She had completed more than 900 flights without ever seriously damaging an airplane, while more than 15 percent of pilots licensed in 1910 were killed before the war—and that doesn’t include the student pilots who died before being licensed (77 percent of French pilots died during the war). In March, 1915, one of her surgical patients was an injured pilot, and she learned there was no replacement for him in his bombing squadron. She talked her way into the cockpit and flew two bombing missions over a German airfield. She was thus the world’s first female combat pilot. The army turned a blind eye. Officially, she was a nurse. Unofficially, she flew missions as a “scout”—that is, solo reconnaissance in a fighter plane. Then, with the collusion of an infantry lieutenant (and some help from her friend Marshall Foch), she put on a private’s uniform and served in the trenches. After six weeks she was wounded lightly and sent to infirmary. That was the end of her infantry career, but Foch assigned her to the Italian alpine troops fighting Austria in the Dolomites, officially as a combat nurse. It was the perfect job. As a skier and alpinist, for six months she engineered the evacuation of wounded soldiers from the mountain peaks and passes, and skied in food and medical supplies. After that, she spent most of 1916 at the Italian front, ostensibly as a war correspondent. There are big gaps in what is known about her travels, and friends assumed she was working for military intelligence. What with flying, fighting, nursing and spying, at the end of the war Marie earned both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor.

After the war, Marie campaigned tirelessly for her medical air-evacuation program, and this, oddly enough, led to the invention of an aluminum ski.

Travelling with French and Italian forces in the Sahara, as both a medical officer and war correspondent, in 1923 she designed aluminum skis for an experimental medevac airplane to land on sand. That led her to think about skis for herself. Back in France in 1927, she found a metal shop in Nancy that could forge skis from solid aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. She had two pairs made, one pair for sand in the desert. She tested the other pair on snow in Chamonix. The sand skis were certainly better than walking up dunes in sandals, but the snow skis failed, compared to ash and hickory. Undamped, they were nearly uncontrollable on firm snow, and as they didn’t absorb wax, could glide in soft snow only in a very narrow temperature range. Nonetheless, her skis represented a start, and French aluminum foundries near the Alps began looking for a way to combine wood-ski performance with aluminum durability—a problem eventually solved in 1947, in the United States.

Marie had many more adventures, including leading early motorized expeditions across the Sahara, first in a modified Fiat truck and later in Citroën six-wheelers. By the early ‘30s her flying ambulance concept was on a roll, and she held many international conferences to promote the concept. She established the Captain Écheman Award for the best-equipped medical aircraft, and launched the first training course for medevac nurses. During World War II she returned to the Red Cross, and was honored after the war for unspecified actions on behalf of the French Resistance.

Into her 80s, Marie was widely honored by the aviation community and French government, but she descended into genteel poverty and died in a hospice, penniless, in 1963, at age 88. 

Seth Masia is the president of ISHA. Sources for this article include Une histoire du ski by Franck Cochoy; Marie Marvingt: Fiancée of Danger, by Marcel Cordier and Rosalie Maggio; “Bride of Danger,” in The Strand Magazine, September 1913; The Culture and Sport of Skiing, by E. John B. Allen; and Before Amelia: Women Pilots in the Early Days of Aviation, by Eileen F. Lebow.