Biography

Bode Miller learned to ski on slopes that his grandparents, Jack and Peg Kenney, cleared after World War II on the family's New Hampshire land. From interviews and journals, the author tells the tale of a small ski area with a big legacy. By Nathaniel Vinton

 Brochures courtesy Jo Kenney

Jack Kenney (above, in an undated photo) started Tamarack Lodge in December 1946 with a rope tow and a single slope. Photo courtesy of the New England Ski Museum

The ruins of the old ski area have been all but absorbed by Kinsman Mountain. All that remains to memorialize those long-ago New Hampshire ski days is the rusty steel guts of an old car engine that had powered a rope tow. Mike Kenney says it’s a Ford Model T, and an automotive historian would probably marvel at the brittle belt still hanging on as the moss and pine needles creep in.

It is an artifact of a ski area that U.S. alpine racer Bode Miller’s grandparents tried to establish on land they bought in the town of Easton almost 70 years ago. The motor is tipped over on its side, split into two main pieces. It rests in a small clearing on the family’s storied property, right by the Franconia town line.

The most decorated male ski racer in U.S. history learned to ski, at age two, just down the trail in the yard behind the family’s Tamarack Tennis Camp. From there, it was three quarters of a mile up a different trail to Turtle Ridge, the off-the-grid cabin his parents built in 1974. (It has recently been renovated and is now home to Miller’s younger sister, Wren, and her family.)

Miller was born in 1977 and spent every winter skiing, sledding or otherwise navigating the icy paths on his family’s rural property. In 1992 he went off to Carrabassett Valley Academy in Maine, and then to global fame. Now he is 37, aiming to give Kitzbühel another shot in 2015. Recovering from November back surgery, he expects to compete in February in the FIS World Alpine Championships in Beaver Creek, Colorado.

When he’s not traveling, Miller now lives in California, but he was back at Tamarack on August 23, 2014, hosting a golf-and-tennis fundraiser for the Turtle Ridge Foundation, his charity supporting adaptive and youth sports programs. In the doubles tournament Miller was paired with his father, Woody. Meanwhile his mother, Jo, agreed to lead me up to see evidence of the ski area her parents had tried to launch.

Jack and Peg Kenney had gotten to work on the endeavor in 1946, shortly after purchasing 450 acres, a farmhouse and the barn. The Kenneys possessed an irrepressible entrepreneurial spirit and were avid skiers. Peg—her maiden name was Taylor—had been a racer with Olympic aspirations. They hoped to draw tourists up to the Franconia area. (Jack's original partner in the venture was a Navy friend, Bob Allard; Kenney bought him out after the first season.)

“If you took this innkeeping business seriously you would be charging into a padded cell in less time than it takes for a cancellation,” Jack wrote in a diary entry dated December 12, 1946. “Your worries encompass every thing from the major item of snow to trivia such as how the pie will turn out. I honestly don’t see how a serious-minded person could last long. Your nerves would snap.”

Just six miles away was the Cannon Mountain tramway, built in 1938. Adjacent to that was the Mittersill ski area, established a few years later by Austrian Baron von Pantz, whose resort would boast of colorful European ski instructors like Sig Buchmayr and Swiss born Paul Valar. But the Kenneys were hoping to draw people to their little inn and ski slope, and Jack’s journal entries are full of pride and romanticism.

“We are ideally suited for this life as we have a sense of humor and we can see how little control we have over the elements and the fortunes,” he writes. “You are whipped mercilessly by so many things: the weather, high prices, cancellations, etc. It’s an ever-changing business and very uncertain.”

The diaries are now in the possession of the eldest of Jack and Peg’s five children, Jo. She was born in 1949 and now lives in her parents’ funky old house in the woods above Tamarack. She says her parents were “doing what they wanted to do” and were “not really concerned about what the upper classes thought."

“He charged a dollar a day, I think,” Jo says of the ski tow. “He writes about it in his diary, which is hysterical. He wrote articles in the Boston Herald for years—funny things. He was really into promoting the area. North Conway at that point had all the light, and Stowe.”

The remains of the rope tow were something I’d heard about while doing research for my new book, The Fall Line (see page 35). The book tells of Miller’s unlikely rise to the top of alpine skiing, but although Miller thrived as an outsider on the World Cup, he inherited a rich skiing tradition.

Jack and Peg Kenney's children—from left to right, Jo, Billy, Davey, Bub and Mike— grew up on the Tamarack property. Mike raced on the U.S. Pro Tour and today is Bode's mentor and primary coach. Photo courtesy Jo Kenny.

“It’s probably the richest ski culture in the country, in this area, where I grew up,” Miller told me at the Tamarack event last August. “Everyone around here knew about racing. It’s a bit like being in Austria. Within my family, my uncles made it to pro, so we always had this thing where it wasn’t like racing was something that just kids did.” 

The Kenneys were avid skiers—Jack a Dartmouth graduate, and Peg an Olympic hopeful. Their kids all became skilled and dedicated skiers. When Bode was growing up, his uncles and other family members could explain to him the different echelons and qualification measures that governed American skiing. (Two of Miller’s uncles, Peter and Mike, both raced on the U.S. Pro Tour; two other uncles, Bill and Davey, were also skilled and dedicated skiers.)

“It was clear there were steps all the way to the top,” Bode recalls.

Helping young Bode get up some of those critical early steps was his grandmother, Peg. When Bode was in his early teens, she loaned him money at the start of each winter for season passes at Cannon Mountain, where he would spend truant days skiing alone, discovering his distinctive turn.

“Two hundred and sixty bucks," Miller recalls of the loans, which he’d pay off fixing the Tamarack courts. “I’d pull tennis court nails on our clay courts, and roll up the lines, and sweep the courts and fix fences and mow lawns. She’d end up paying for the whole thing, but I ended up paying for usually about half of it, but I was usually one season behind.”

In his 2005 memoir Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun, Bode Miller writes about how his grandparents “met on skis” in late 1944 at Sugar Bowl, California, with Peg just out of UC Berkeley and Jack on leave from the Navy, having seen action in the South Pacific. Within two years they were at Tamarack, trying to inaugurate their little ski area.

“I had a fine time laying pine boughs across gullies over roots on the bottom of the ski slope,” Jack Kenney writes on December 1, 1946. “Cut out some of the hill to the left of the tow—I think that is going to be a fast, interesting run.”

Jack Kenney (far left) on the snow-covered tennis courts at nearby Mittersill in 1951, during a fundraiser for the 1952 Winter Olympics ski team. He played with (left to right) U.S. tennis champion Pancho Segura, Chilean tennis player Ricardo Belbieres, and New York society columnist Cholly Knickerbocker. By 1952, his Tamarack ski lodge was struggling and Kenney has started to plan a tennis camp on the property. Photo courtesy of New England Ski Museum

The same entry describes his fears about whether the new rope tow will work. There are mechanical adjustments to make, and he has a feeling it won’t work, but he accepts reservations anyway.

“A party calls long-distance from Boston to reserve 6 in the bunkroom after Christmas,” he writes in the same entry. “Call Joe about 5 cord of slabwood at $7 per cord—he can’t hear me. We all get laughing and I scream at him. Peg comes up to the room pulls over her pants and jumps into bed with me and we love—she asks me if I’m happy. I am and very serene. She is happy but a worrier.”

The Kenneys prepared food at the farmhouse and did what they could to ready the slopes despite early-season fears over inadequate snow. They sent out marketing material—“Excellent Skiing, Outstanding Food, Gay Informality,” their brochure read. And they enlisted friends to help them build a small wooden structure meant to house the rope tow’s engine and offer skiers a little mid-mountain retreat. 

In Jack Kenney’s diaries, mixed in with the food bill totals and worries about snowfall, there is just enough time for reflection, as is the case on January 5, 1947. That day the rope tow finally starts working properly, and Jack records “a sudden surge of satisfaction and joy” over what they are accomplishing. 

“Life can be beautiful! It even is at times,” he writes that day. “Today at about 5 p.m. the first person hoved into view coming up on the enigmatic rope tow. What a thrill that was. We have been moaning, sweating, belaboring and bitching about that damn thing for weeks.” 

This comes under an entry topped with jubilant block letters: SKI TOW RUNS!! GROSS INCOME FOR TWO WEEKS: $1021!! He records his vision of a fully operational ski area, presumably with his ski-racing wife offering personalized lessons. The ski area doesn’t have a name; it’s simply part of Tamarack Lodge.

“Now imagine what will happen if we get the ski tow operating, the warming shelter going and ski lessons continuing,” he writes on January 5, 1947. “We will have five sources of income: the lodge transportation, ski tow, ski lessons, and the warming shelter (sandwiches, hot drinks and other food).”

The ski area was a constant struggle, and Tamarack’s other facilities were under-utilized in the summer, so by 1952 Jack and Peg had envisioned the tennis camps. They had the market to themselves, and within a few years the Tamarack Tennis Camp was the family’s main commercial focus, along with a tennis court building-and-maintenance company that’s still going strong. They shut down the ski area sometime after the late 1950s.

Today Tamarack Tennis Camp is thriving under leadership of Wren and her husband, Chuck Weed—whom she met at the tennis camp when they were 10—along with the rest of the family. In addition to the regular seven-week summer camp season, they offer tennis weekends for adults, host the Brandeis College tennis team for a fall training weekend, and rent the lodge for two weeks in January to the University of New Hampshire ski team, which trains at Cannon. 

After all these years, the place retains a rustic, low-key vibe. It was recently lauded in an article for The New Republic by Michael Lewis, the acclaimed author of Moneyball and Liar’s Poker, who wrote that Jack Kenney “ran his tennis camp less as a factory for future champions than as an antidote to American materialism.” 

Future ski historians will owe a debt to Jo Miller, who rescued many of the trophies, papers and other mementos of her son’s nearly 20-year career in elite, professional ski racing. At her home she keeps scrapbooks full of early press clippings, award certificates and curiosities. She also arranged for Bode to display five of his six Olympic medals and three World Cup trophies at the New England Ski Museum, adjacent to the base of the Cannon Mountain tram.

On a piece of paper from a 2001 training session in New Zealand, a coach has recorded Miller’s times on a full-length GS course as he edges out his teammate Erik Schlopy; another scrapbook contains a 2006 article from an Austrian men’s magazine featuring one of Miller’s ex-girlfriends in her underwear, ice cubes balanced in her cleavage; and there is a U.S. Ski Team worksheet—a five-year-plan that Miller’s coaches made him fill out at age 22; in the final box, he has written a simple goal: “stay the ultimate one!”

Skiing is still a family affair to Bode Miller, and perhaps even more than ever. His primary coach on the U.S. Ski Team staff—if an athlete as intensely independent as Miller can be said to have a coach—is his uncle, Mike Kenney, who is known on the World Cup for climbing tall trees along the tour’s downhill courses to get better footage of his nephew and other team members for the scientific digital video analysis that is part of modern World Cup strategy.

Miller has also made a point of bringing his young children to see him race. When on the World Cup with him they might stay in his luxurious motorhome; the chauffeur typically parks the bus in the television truck compound near the race finish. Both children were also with him at the August charity function.

“The tennis camp was very firmly established by the time I was here,” he says. “The fact that [my grandparents] were ski lodge entrepreneurs was lost on me. The rope tow, I didn’t really know about that until I was older.”

Photo above: Bode Miller, shown here during the 1996 U.S. national championships, learned to ski at age 2 on the trails at Tamarack. Courtesy New England Ski Museum.

It’s true that the skiing culture ran deep in the Easton Valley. Cannon Mountain hosted World Cup races during the tour’s inaugural 1966–67 season. Sel Hannah, one of the founders of the American ski industry, lived nearby; one of his daughters, Joan, won bronze in giant slalom at the 1962 world championships. In 2005, Miller bought the Hannah family’s 630-acre potato farm in Sugar Hill, but he sold it recently after putting considerable improvements into the property. 

The U.S. Ski Team recently signed on to invest in alpine racing infrastructure at Mittersill, which was resurrected in 2009 after lying dormant for decades. More than $3 million will go into snowmaking and trail building as part of an agreement with the Franconia Ski Club, Cannon Mountain and the Holderness School.

The national team wants it to become a center for serious super G and even downhill training, in case there’s another original talent out there in the woods, just waiting for the right opportunity. No one is expecting another racer like Bode Miller to come along—he’s a one-of-a-kind talent. Then again, he doesn’t need replacing yet anyway. He’s still got a few more races left in him—a few more chances to shake off the rust and represent Kinsman Mountain on the world stage. 

Nathaniel Vinton is the author of The Fall Line: How American Ski Racers Conquered a Sport on the Edge. The book is being published in February 2015; for a review, see page 35. 

From Jackson Hole to Alaska, the former Olympic downhill champ now makes a living as a mountain and river guide. By Edith Thys Morgan

Pictured above: Moe leads skiers through the Jackson Hole backcountry as a guide. Courtesy of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort.

At 8 a.m. on any given powder day in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, up to a dozen backcountry guides gather for their morning briefing to go over snow, weather and avalanche conditions. From there, they meet their clients on the deck of Nick Wilson’s Cowboy Café and hop on the early tram for a day of adventure on 4,000 vertical feet of skier heaven.

Among the guides is one especially boyish, perpetually grinning 44-year-old who looks more like a puppy straining at his leash than one of America’s most successful and steel-nerved downhill ski racers. If you want to feel what it’s like to play hard—to play like it’s your job, in fact—then let 1994 Olympic downhill champion Tommy Moe be your guide.

Known as “Moe Vibe” among his former teammates, Moe still exudes his famously mellow demeanor, though it masks a heavy metal heartbeat—the edgy tune that hums within every World Cup downhill racer, the riff that kicks in when making split-second decisions at 80 mph. It surely sparked when, heading into the 1994 Lillehammer Games, Moe was featured in Sports Illustrated as a poster child for the beleaguered U.S. Ski Team. SI referred to the team as “Uncle Sam’s lead-footed snowplow brigade,” and described Moe, participating in his second Olympics, as “no soaring success.” 

Indeed, Moe’s flight to the top was not direct. The Montana native’s early and spectacular promise was accompanied by youthful exuberance and experimentation that got him kicked out of two ski programs. His father collared him to work construction in chilly Dutch Harbor, Alaska, a stint that firmed up the younger Moe’s resolve to focus his efforts on skiing. 

After settling in at Glacier Creek Academy in Alyeska, Alaska, Moe glided through the youth ranks, capturing Junior Olympics titles. In 1989, he also triumphed at the Junior World Championships and U.S. Nationals. That same year, the late coach Dan Bean captured the magnitude of Moe’s potential at a U.S. Ski Team coaches meeting, when he asserted: “If we screw up Tommy Moe, we should all be shot.” 

And yet, by the early 1990s, Moe’s career had stalled. He had speed and looseness, but was missing discipline. With his big-mountain pedigree and laidback attitude, Moe might have been lured into the extreme skiing scene. But instead he chose the path of persistence, buckling down and focusing on refining his lower speed skills with the U.S. technical coach, Thor Kallerud. 

Picture to the left: Moe wearing his medals from the Sun Valley spring series, sometime in the mid-1980s. He rose quickly through the junior racing ranks. Photo courtesy of Megan Gerety.

Everything—skiing, equipment, experience, coaching and teammates— came together in 1994. Despite SI’s dire assessment, AJ Kitt, Kyle Rasmussen and Moe were quietly becoming a force. On the eve of the Olympic downhill, Moe, who was fourth in the final training run, privately decided to win a medal or go down trying. He focused on skiing the hill’s natural rhythm—that so suited his big mountain style—as perfectly and daringly as possible. “To this day when I watch the race, I was the guy who didn’t have that one mistake,” he says.

Not only did Moe win the most coveted and prestigious prize of the Winter Games (only the second American to do so, after Bill Johnson in 1984), but four days later, on his 24th birthday, he captured Super G silver and became the first American male skier to double up on medals in a single Games. Moe had the last laugh with SI, appearing on the cover with the headline, “Golden Boy.” 

Moe admits it was tough to stay motivated after Lillehammer, a challenge further complicated with a season-ending knee injury a year later. He retired at age 28 after the 1998 Nagano Olympics—where he placed 8th in Super G and 12th in downhill—with 12 years on the World Cup circuit and five U.S. National titles.

For better or worse, the trappings of fame did not snare Moe. For a brief time one could get caffeinated with a “Tommy Moecha” in Minnesota’s Mall of America. Within the ski industry, he cashed in on the requisite line of gold-medal endorsement deals, and he raced on Jeep’s King of the Mountain Tour for six years. But Moe, who barely overlapped with Bode Miller in 1998, just missed the catapult to mainstream fame ridden by later U.S. Ski Team stars like Miller, Lindsey Vonn, Ted Ligety and Mikaela Shiffrin. “I could have kept going until 2002 (and the Games in Salt Lake),” he says, “but I had achieved my goals and wanted to move on.”

That included business opportunities that leveraged his passion for outdoor adventure sports like kayaking, fishing and big mountain skiing. Along with partner Mike Overcast, Moe started his entrepreneurial career in 1992 by founding Class V Whitewater, a river guiding business that he parlayed into Chugach Powder Guides in 1997. Soon after, Moe realized he needed a home base in the Lower 48 and signed on as Jackson Hole’s Resort Ambassador in July of 1994, a role that has been a perfect fit for the affable, approachable, leave-your-ego-on-the-tram-dock Moe. 

In 2003, the same year he was inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, Moe married fellow Alaskan, Olympian and downhill racer Megan Gerety. He and Gerety are “both pretty Type A,” he admits. During the winter, Tommy reports for duty at Jackson Hole and travels to ski events while Megan teaches fifth grade full time. Come springtime, Tommy shifts into gear for his Alaska season, based at the Tordrillo Mountain Lodge, which he co-owns. While Megan runs the show at home, Tommy guides 12 guests per week on skiing, fishing and the “Cast and Carve” and “Kings and Corn” fishing/heli-skiing adventures.

All the travel makes the summer downtime at home—with Megan and their two daughters, Taylor (6) and Taryn (4)—all the more precious. “It’s cool because it’s not all about us anymore,” says Moe. “It’s all about them.” In addition to mountain biking, paddleboarding and waterskiing, the family logs time outdoors camping, hiking and fishing. 

Moe relishes mixing work and play in his roles as guide, instructor or coach. “Choppers, trams or gondolas: I love it all,” he says. “Being in the mountains, skiing 100 plus days per year and having the life I enjoy...It’s a dream come true.”  

Many racers believe they need downsized, super-stiff, ultra-narrow boots. The most accomplished alpine ski boot designer of the plastic era, Sven Coomer, believes that’s changing. 

By Jackson Hogen
Photos by Sven Coomer

While there have been several seminal figures in the creation of the modern plastic ski boot, including Bob Lange, Hans Heierling, Mel Dalebout and brothers Chris and Denny Hanson, a case could be made that none has left as large a footprint as the puckish Australian, Sven Coomer. Over the course of a career that began when he competed in the modern pentathlon at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne at the age of 16, the autodidact Coomer studied the foot and its function in a variety of athletic environments. From his first contract with Puma in 1965 to his recent work with Atomic, Coomer has left a trail of innovations, many of which enjoy a considerable market presence today. From his home base in Aspen, Colorado, where he has lived since 1997, the last ten years with wife Mary Dominick, Coomer continues to contribute to various boot development projects. 

Above: The Astral Slalom and Racer (1971) became best-sellers, launching the craft of ski-shop custom fitting.

One of Coomer’s designs, the Nordica Comp-3, was the inspiration for the external tongue originally licensed to Raichle and sold by the Swiss brand as the Flexon series. This three-piece shell design still exists intact in the Full Tilt collection, and its imprint is all over the mainstays in Dalbello’s current line. Coomer’s work in the field of molded athletic orthotics, first marketed under the Superfeet brand, virtually created the custom insole category that he still competes in with his unique Down Unders line. 

The groundbreaking models Coomer helped develop for Nordica in the late 1960s began with the one-piece Olympic, followed by the two-piece Astral Racer and Slalom, also known as the benchmark “banana” boots. The Olympic was the first ski boot with a removable liner, a breakthrough that enabled inner boot customization. Then came the iconic Grand Prix and GT, a suite of successes that put the erstwhile middle-of-the-pack leather boot brand on the path to market dominance in the dawning era of plastics. Modern ski boots don’t just echo these designs; they’re based on them. When Coomer claims, “These boots established the fundamental technology and functional design criteria that remains standard in every ski boot today,” he’s not exaggerating. 

Coomer’s influence isn’t limited to the impact of his legacy. A recent collaboration with Atomic resulted in the patented Hawx series of non-race boots that has become the world’s biggest seller, followed up by a reconceived race boot, the Redster. 

AN OLYMPIC PENTATHLETE LEARNS TO SKI IN SWEDEN

Born in Sydney in 1940 to a Swedish mother and Australian father, Coomer soon became deeply involved in multiple athletic pursuits, including swimming and his particular passion, modern pentathlon. His precocious talents earned him a spot in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, for which he felt well prepared. Disaster struck when Coomer was knocked unconscious and hospitalized after a tree separated him from his mount during the cross-country event. Coomer wasn’t about to miss the next four days of competition, so despite bruises that covered half his body, he slipped out of the hospital before dawn and limped back to team headquarters. He ended up 32nd out of 40 entries, a remarkable achievement considering his condition. 

The International Pentathlon Union Secretary General Willi Grut, the 1948 Olympic gold medalist in modern pentathlon, tried to convince Coomer to compete for Sweden, the world leaders in the sport. After finishing high school, Coomer worked his way to Sweden on a merchant ship so he could continue his specialized training while studying mechanical engineering at Stockholm’s Tekniska Institut with an eye towards a career in product design. Impressive competition results had Coomer on track to compete for his native country for the 1960 Rome Games when Australian authorities informed him that he would have to return home to train. Since competing for Sweden was no longer a viable option and as there wasn’t time to find work on a merchant ship for the six- to eight-week trip back to Australia, Coomer was out of luck. “So I gave up on that idea, for the time being,” says Coomer with just a trace of resignation. 

To help take his protégé’s mind off his disappointment, Grut suggested Coomer come up to his cabin in Åre over spring break and learn to alpine ski. “I was instantly smitten with skiing, the new challenge and the possibility of competing in winter pentathlon (giant slalom, cross country, shooting, fencing and riding). When I returned to Stockholm I was determined to finish school, catch a merchant ship back to Sydney, get a job in a ski area and train to be a serious skier.” 

While he never competed in winter pentathlon, Coomer did become proficient enough to train at the national ski team level, which he did with both French and Swiss team members. He counted among his friends Jean-Claude Killy, François Bonlieu, Emile Allais and Leo Lacroix. He frequently cut first tracks with Junior Bounous in Utah and coached the McKinney kids when he ran the ski school at Mt. Rose, Nevada. 

Back in Stockholm, Coomer submitted his ideas on improved track and field shoe design to an influential sports shop that put him in touch with Puma. At the conclusion of a 1965 ski expedition across the Alps from Innsbruck to Grenoble, Coomer was invited to Puma’s factory for a five-day meeting about applying emerging technologies of performance footwear to artificial track surfaces. Coomer’s interest in product development had borne its first fruits.

Each of the next four winters were spent running ski schools, beginning with the PSIA experimental ski school in Solitude, Utah. This position was followed by three years at Mt. Rose and contiguous Slide Mountain near Lake Tahoe. The seasons culminated each spring in a six-week ski test with SKIING magazine editor Doug Pfeiffer at Mammoth Mountain. “It was the first magazine ski testing program,” Coomer recalls. “We’d spend April and May testing and go retreat to New York to write about the skis and ski technique.” 

LEAP FROM LEATHER TO PLASTIC

In turn, the Nordica Comp-3 led to the Raichle Flexon, a favorite of downhillers, mogul and extreme skiers. This photo shows how the boot’s parts evolved.

In 1968, Norm MacCleod from Beconta, distributor of both Puma and Nordica, came to observe the ski tests. MacCleod was sufficiently impressed with Coomer’s ideas about boot and ski design that he invited Coomer down to San Francisco for an interview, which led to Coomer’s signing on with Nordica the following year. Initially MacCleod would carry or mail Coomer’s detailed designs to Italy until Nordica, eager to move ahead quickly, proposed he move there and oversee developments directly in the factory, instead of by correspondence.

When Coomer began with Nordica, the transition from leather to plastic boots was stalled in its infancy. Many racers preferred the close fit of leather, as the first plastic boots were often shapeless inside. Nordica’s initial effort at a plastic shell Coomer describes as “miserably unwearable, really awful.” The first task was to make the best possible leather boot based on all the custom models he designed from each U.S. Ski Team member’s input and then consolidating all the versions into one model, the Sapporo. The Sapporo—worn by Paquito Ochoa when he won slalom gold at the Games for which the boot was named—would serve as the foundation for the first plastic boot that would be anatomically accurate and would take full advantage of all the new materials had to offer, delivering both comfort and performance without compromising either. 

While assembling a wish list for the ideal plastic boot, Coomer delineated, “173 criteria and details that had to be attended to for every model in every size, so it would function correctly,” he recalls. “The key was how to stabilize the foot and lower leg, fore and aft, for a balanced stance and flex. Until that time boots were very low, just over the ankle high, and scary as hell going fast. As we built up the boots, front and back, we called the extensions ‘spoilers’ because they were so effective at helping retain balance, stability and leverage that they spoiled you.”

In 1973, during his tenure at Nordica, Coomer attended an Athlete’s Overuse Syndrome seminar in San Francisco. There he met Dr. Chris Smith, a lecturer in biomechanics at the California College of Podiatry, and Dennis Brown, owner of Northwest Podiatric Labs. Together they would forge Superfeet, presenting their proprietary ideas to leading ski dealers in 1976. Their custom-molded insoles, vacuum-cast in plaster, found a fast following; however, the 3/4-length orthotics were made of hard plastic or fiberglass and took weeks to get back from the lab. Coomer continued tinkering, looking for a better solution that could be molded in situ using a similar process as the vacuum plaster casting. At a trade show in 1979, Coomer found the plaster substitute he’d been searching for the: Birkenstock cork in sheet form. The on-the-spot cork Skithotic was born. 

Meanwhile, by the late 1970s Coomer’s R&D position at Nordica had become untenable after Mariano Sartor was brought in from Caber to run the rapidly expanding design department. Sartor was a skilled draftsman but not a skier, and he succumbed to the pressures of a marketing department who declared four-buckle boots passé and one- and two-buckle boots the future. “It began the Dark Ages of boot design,” Coomer laments, “and it lasted until the mid-1990s.” Nordica ditched the functional design principles that had guided Coomer’s work. His final project, in 1976, the three-piece Comp-3, was the first plastic boot to feature a supportive, lace-up inner boot. 

Coomer quit Nordica to further advance the three-piece shell concept, molding samples with the intent of interesting a boot manufacturer in licensing the innovative boot design. The partner he recruited to sell the concept eventually shut Coomer out of the deal “when he realized he had all he needed and it ended up licensed to Raichle. So 1978 became the year to move on.”

FOCUSING ON R&D AT FOOTLOOSE

The Koflach Super Comp (1983) introduced the power strap. The DH version, left, used a leather cuff because downhill racers of the period found it gave smoother ankle articulation in absorbing bumps at high speed.

He relocated his family (first wife Kathleen, daughter Robin, now 38, and son Seth, 36) from San Francisco to Mammoth to concentrate on perfecting Superfeet orthotics and shell modification technology. His tiny on-slope testing and R&D facility was “an instant success” leading to the creation of Footloose Sports, a specialty ski shop that continues to be rated among the best in the country. Coomer’s partner, Tony Colasardo, still a hands-on co-owner, concentrated on the retail operation, allowing Coomer to continue to work in the R&D arena. Coomer sold his interest in Footloose to Corty Lawrence, Andrea Mead’s son, in 1995.

Following a successful product overhaul at Koflach, Coomer found an outlet for his Mammoth research into custom-fit concepts in his next consulting relationship, with San Marco and Munari, brands made at the Brixia factory in Montebelluna, Italy. 

It was while working with Munari on a new rear-entry model and subsequently on an overlap boot design that used all 173 of Coomer’s design criteria, that he began perfecting and producing his patented silicone-injection liners with Brixia’s encouragement. When the Silicone Personalization System (SPS) was introduced to Swiss dealers by their local Head distributor, the rebound in San Marco sales was so sensational that Head bought the brand new Brixia boot factory and marketed SPS internationally under the Head brand. 

Coomer continued to produce his silicone liners under his own ZIPFIT brand (for Zero Injection Pressure Fitting), while pursuing a new objective: eliminating all mixing and injecting of volatile chemicals. The latest result of his pursuit of perfection is “a pre-packed dynamic-response fit system that fits by actively molding a granular cork and proprietary clay-like composite according to the skier’s personal dynamic anatomy. The formula cannot catalyze, harden, pack-out or droop, and can be effectively refitted perfectly every day, rather than the familiar progressive deterioration, and it’s durable enough to last a thousand days, or longer than your shells.” 

To assist the daily fitting process, Coomer created the Hot Gear Bag, a clever accessory that heats boots and other ski paraphernalia. The bag warms both shells and liners to an optimum temperature so the skier can slip easily into any boot. It’s been an essential accessory among the World Cup racers for a decade. 

While there isn’t an overlap or three-piece shell made today that doesn’t owe some debt to Coomer’s trailblazing designs, the current Atomic collection has his fingerprints all over it. The Hawx series evolved from concepts developed in partnership with Hans-Martin Heierling and drafted by the Claudio Franco design studio in Montebelluna. The Redster race boot concentrates on stabilizing the rear foot with an ultra-solid spoiler so the skier’s forefoot is allowed to flex and move naturally within the confines of the shell. This liberation of the previously stunted, frozen and crushed forefoot is what allows for the subtle edging and foot steering that initiates the slalom turns of World Cup champions Marcel Hirscher and Mikaela Shiffrin. Coomer suspects that if racers would only fit their boots more accurately, coupled with a dynamic molding inner boot medium between the foot and shell, and without down-sizing into short, narrow, thick-sidewall shells, their results just might improve. 

But then, Coomer, the Cassandra of the ski boot world for the last forty-five years, knows all too well that just because you can prove you’re right, doesn’t mean your advice will be heeded.  

Jackson Hogen is the editor of realskiers.com and co-author of Snowbird Secrets: A Guide to Big Mountain Skiing. His career includes stints as a ski designer, binding and boot product manager, freestyle competitor, ski instructor, marketing director, ski tester for 25 years and boot tester for 20. As a freelancer writer over the past four decades, he has regularly contributed articles to magazines including SKI, Daily Mail Ski, Snow Country and Skiing History.

Are today’s boots really any better? In a November 2014 editorial on RealSkiers.com, author Jackson Hogen observes that alpine ski boots haven’t evolved much in the past 25 years. To read the article, click here.

Former World Cup superstars and siblings Andreas and Hanni Wenzel have found post-racing success in the business world.

By Edith Thys Morgan

Weg vom Computer raus in den Schnee.” That motto, which urges kids to get away from their computers and out in the snow, is what drives Andreas Wenzel. And it has him driving a lot. In addition to his duties as President of the Liechtenstein Ski Federation, Wenzel is Secretary General of the four-year-old European Ski Federation, an organization of 11 European national ski federations united to grow, promote and improve snowsports in Europe. Wenzel leads the charge on SNOWstar, a series of competitions that combine elements of alpine racing, freestyle and skicross and takes place at partner venues throughout Europe. We’re talking while he drives to Bolzano, Italy, for a symposium on tourism and kids. “It’s not boring,” he says of the constant travel throughout the Alps. “The only thing is the traffic!”

As comfortable as he is on the road and getting things done, Wenzel, half of the brother/sister combo that turned tiny Liechtenstein into a skiing powerhouse in the 1970s and ’80s, much prefers being active in the great outdoors. His connection to nature can be traced to his father, Hubert, a passionate mountaineer and world university champion in the alpine/nordic/jumping combined.

Hubert was among the millions of East Germans who fled west in the early 1950s. He left on bicycle with no money, headed for Munich to study forest engineering. There he met and married Hannelore, a Bavarian shot-put athlete. In 1955, Hubert set out to tour the Alps by bicycle, and after an accident in Switzerland walked 50 kilometers with his bike until he found a shop in Liechtenstein that could fix it. While earning the money for the repairs, he learned that his skills in both engineering and avalanche protection were much in demand in the 62-square-mile country comprised mostly of steep terrain. In 1958, the Wenzels moved to Liechtenstein, with one-year-old Hanni and four-month-old Andreas.

Hubert passed his love of the outdoors to his four children—Hanni, Andreas, Petra and Monica—and instructed them to spend every spare moment being active in the mountains. “We were educated to compete,” Andi explains. “That is not always good from a pedagogical side,” he says with laugh that hints at an intensely competitive household. (Younger sister Petra was 4th in GS in the 1982 Worlds.) The emphasis, however, was always on enjoying the mountains. “As a kid I was out in nature full power,” he recalls. “I was a lousy runner around a track but get me into the mountains and watch out!” The siblings’ ski racing talents grew and in 1974, 17-year-old Hanni, racing for West Germany, won the world championship in slalom.  The family was granted citizenship in Liechtenstein and in 1976 Team Liechtenstein (including the three Wenzel siblings, in addition to Paul and Willy Frommelt and Ursula Konzett) integrated for training with the Swiss Ski Team.

Andreas attended Austria’s famed Stams ski academy, competing in his first Olympics in 1976, at age 17.  In those Innsbruck Games, Hanni won Liechtenstein’s first Olympic medal, a bronze in the GS, and two years later Andreas earned his own world title in GS. But it was at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics where Hanni and Andreas stole the show in their iconic white and yellow suits, producing four medals (and the first gold) for Liechtenstein. Hanni won a gold medal in both slalom and giant slalom, and a silver medal in downhill, while Andreas nabbed the silver in GS, bested only by Ingemar Stenmark and one of his signature second-run comebacks. The siblings crowned that season by each winning the overall World Cup title.

Hanni competed another four years, but along with Ingemar Stenmark was banned from the 1984 Olympics for her semi-professional status. She retired after the 1984 season, with 33 World Cup wins and two overall World Cup titles. Andreas retired in 1988 after his fourth Olympics, with 14 World Cup wins in all disciplines but downhill. Upon retiring, Andreas immediately dove into work, as racing director for Atomic. After four years there he switched to sports marketing, and was instrumental in bringing the first European sponsors (like Warsteiner beer) to North American ski races. Ten years later, he shifted gears again, becoming a tourism consultant. Then, in 2006, he was asked to become president of the Liechtenstein Ski Federation, and found himself back in the ski racing game.

The Liechtenstein Federation includes nine Skiclubs that teach kids until they are 10 years old. After that, the best qualify for the U12, U14 and U16 programs. The federation has 40 nordic, alpine and biathlon athletes and 11 trainers, but as ever, cooperates with other small nations to provide the best possible training framework. For example, Tina Weirather (daughter of Hanni and Austrian downhill great Harti Weirather, and a star on the current World Cup) races for Liechtenstein, but attended Stams and is now fully integrated on the Swiss team.

It is Wenzel’s work with ESF that keeps him on the road, and brings all of his athletic and business experience together with his passion for growing the sport. In Europe as in this country, kids are spending more time in front of screens and social media, and less time outdoors. “In Europe, we have seventy million people living close to the mountains. We want to get them in the sport and keep them in the sport while developing skills. And having fun is most important!” The SNOWstar events in particular—ten qualifying events and a European final—are aimed at doing just that in a safe environment for kids aged 10 to 16.

The events do not involve multiple sets of skis or race suits and are not set on an icy track. Rather, they are on less-harsh “Playground Snow” (a permanent infrastructure at the resorts, similar to a terrain park), studded with built-in features that demand athleticism while keeping the events lower in speed and higher on fun. Wenzel, known by fellow competitors for his intensity as well as his likeability, thinks kids should back off on ski racing’s regimented rigidity. “If you have to use a measuring tape to set GS for kids, something is not right,” he says. Instead, the courses are set in harmony with the natural terrain, teaching kids how to react and move. “Every day, conditions are different. It’s not just about making a fast turn, though that is important. It is about judgment.”

Wenzel reflects on his own upbringing, and on his father’s melding of nature and training in a competitive atmosphere, when he looks at what he hopes the SNOWstar events will help cultivate in kids. “Kids need to learn intuition, which is not something you can learn in a book,” he says. Intuition is what you do when you don’t have time to think, when you come around a corner fast and have to react to whatever is in your path. “More intuition, less thinking,” he explains. “You have to move with fluidity. Those who panic later rather than earlier are going to win the race.”

Wenzel’s drive to create more opportunities for kids outside the traditional ski racing pedigree is personal. “You know, the raw diamonds come not so much from the Gstaad’s and St Moritz’s. They come from tiny villages,” he says. And even, perhaps, tiny countries.  

A 19th century Rennaissance Man—and yes, eccentric—this Austrian’s extraordinary achievements were largely responsible for the sport we know today.

If modern skiing owes its development to one extraordinary individual, a singular pioneer, it is Austria’s Mathias Zdarsky. Painter, sculptor, teacher, philosopher and health guru, Zdarsky was also an eccentric inventor who developed the steel binding—the first to hold the foot in a stable position, the basis of all ski bindings today. His step-by-step ski instruction method with the introduction of a stem turn, his founding of a mountain Torlauf (gate race), in 1905, and most of all his insistence that skiing could and should be enjoyed in mountains—as opposed to merely foothills—all attest to his right to be called the “Father of Alpine Skiing.”

Zdarsky was born in the German-speaking area of Moravia in 1856 and settled in 1889 near Lilienfeld, a little over two hours by train west of Vienna. He had an extraordinary, inquiring mind, a trained gymnast’s body, a practical facility with his hands, a capacity for determined work, and a dogmatic certainty that he knew best about most things, certainly about skiing.

He was “a crazy cockerel,” according to Wilhelm Paulcke,(1) one of a number of influential skiers with whom he had a running fight lasting over a quarter of a century. To Austria’s army leadership, on the other hand, Zdarsky was a “private scholar in all areas of current human knowledge, [with] exemplary unselfishness, rare openness and integrity, and cool and brave in danger,” as the 3rd Corps Command evaluation put it to the Austrian War Department headquarters in 1907 after he had taught army units how to ski for three years.(2)

Zdarsky was the youngest of 10 children, attended local schools, and then a teachers’ training course in Brno before taking up positions in Vienna, Elsenreith, and in the Stein prison. He broadened his education in Munich (arts) and Zürich (engineering). He traveled to the Balkans and to North Africa. A number of his oil paintings from his travels are held in the Lilienfeld museum, which is almost entirely devoted to Zdarsky and houses his archive.

Zdarsky has been described as a “talented autodidact,”(3) was given an honorary membership in the Ski Club of Great Britain in 1904,(4) and has been featured in poems and doggerel:

Pfützen, Schlamm auf Schritt und Tritt Doch wir bringen Zdarsky mit! (5)

[Puddles, mud with every stride We’ll bring Zdarsky as our guide!]

He has been labeled “the Jahn of the skisport”(6) (referring to Turnvater Jahn, the most important 19th century German nationalistic gymnastics leader), “the Newton of Alpine skiing,”(7) “the father of Alpine skiing”(8)—take your pick. And he made of Habernreith—the house he designed and built near Lilienfeld—“a skier’s mecca,”(9) as the newspaper Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung described it. Along the way, he constructed a more efficient wheelbarrow, invented a cement mixer, supplied his swimming pool with a thermo-designed heating system, all the while working in self-designed clothes. In moments of repose, he made his tea on a self-invented quick-to-boil cooker that would be used by the military, as were his light rucksack and 6-man tent.(10) We are talking truly of a Renaissance man. Where he got the money for such things as travel and buying the land for his home remains a mystery.

American ski historians—indeed most others interested in skiing’s history—know him primarily as the founder of the world’s first slalom competition, in 1905. Before looking into that event, Zdarsky’s teaching, his writings, the disagreements, some even leading to challenges (both on skis and calls for real duels), his service to the military—all of them in some ways connected—need analysis to give some idea of the wide and deep range of interests and contributions of this extraordinary man.

Zdarsky saw his first pair of skis—Lapp skis—in a traveling show in 1872. Fifty-six years later he could still remember that they were 120 centimeters long, 6 centimeters wide and 4 centimeters thick with a foot platform near the middle and two straps.(11) It seems stretching belief that this 16-year-old would have noted such details, but he was who he was and so it is possible. This first recognition of skiing produced no impact. Fifteen years later, he read a newspaper report of two Norwegian students ascending the Brocken (Germany’s story-laden mountain in the Harz) on skis and after that, occasional articles on Fridtjof Nansen’s intended Greenland crossing. After the news of Nansen’s successful crossing of Greenland’s icecap in the late summer and early fall of 1888, ski developments in Austria began in Graz and Mürzzuschlag in the 1890s. These local skiers followed Norwegian businessmen, engineers, and students working and studying in Austria and Germany, skiing on skis with primitive bindings and, when they could, copying the Norwegian telemark turn while using one pole as they got out and about on mini-tours, climbed the local mountains and organized races.

Snowed in at home during the winter of 1890-91, and with Nansen’s recently translated book Auf Schneeschuhen durch Grönland (Across Greenland on Skis) in hand, Zdarsky ordered a pair of skis from Norway and over the next six years experimented with shorter skis and—so it is said—200 bindings, resulting in the patenting of the Lilienfeld ski and binding in 1896.(12) Since Norwegian skis were the only known quality skis in the 1890s, Zdarsky listed “nine faults” of Norwegian skis and, punching the point home, added “the Lilienfeld ski has none of these faults:” Snow balling up under the feet; sideways slip of the heel off the ski; inhibited lift of the heel; foot injuries resulting from the poor lift of the heel; frequent breaking of the ski; requirement of specially designed boots (or at least special straps); complicated to put on; impossible to ski on steep terrain; poor qualities that make learning to ski difficult.

By this time, Zdarsky had formulated his stem turn and the skiing principles that remained the same throughout his life: to achieve no-fall skiing, the ability to handle all terrain, and the skill to manage all obstacles.(13) In the same year, 1896, Zdarsky’s book, initially titled Lilienfeld Skilauftechnik (Lilienfeld Ski Technique), was published in November by Richter of Hamburg, the same publisher who had had such great success with Nansen’s account of his Greenland crossing. There were eventually 17 editions of Zdarsky’s book, which had the first title change in 1903 to Alpine (Lilienfelder) Skilauftechnik, obviously capitalizing on Zdarsky’s and others’ desire to enhance the “alpine” skiing they were promoting. In 1908 there was a further change—to Alpine (Lilienfelder) Skifahr-Technik. And here we enter the realm of translators’ difficulties. Zdarsky wanted to change Skilaufen (running on skis, even on the flat) to Skifahren (going along on skis downhill); he was much more interested in promoting safe touring skiing than he was in racing. As we shall see in the 1905 slalom, Zdarsky wanted people to ski according to his three principles. Racing was not one of them.

It has long been assumed that Zdarsky’s book was the first instructional book. This is not true. Instruction had been available from the publication of Max Schneider’s Der Tourist from 1892 on. Although this was a monthly newspaper published in Berlin, it had a far wider impact because parts of it were copied in various places, such as the Österreichische Sport-Zeitung.(14) Freiherr von Wangenheim had also come out that year with a booklet and, in 1893 Georg Blab, Fritz Breuer, Theodor Neumayer, O. A. Vorwerg, and Max Schneider all published small instructional books. The real competition came from Henrik Etbin Schollmayer’s 85-page book Auf Schneeschuhen: Ein Handbuch für Forstleute, Jäger und Touristen (On Skis: Handbook for Forestry Personnel, Hunters, and Tourists).(15) Oberleutnant Raimond Udy also produced a book on skiing for the military in 1894.(16) There were, then, at least a half-dozen instruction manuals before Lilienfeld Skilauftechnik appeared.

But Zdarsky’s book was detailed, logical in its insistence on steps in a progression of turns. From an exact and required stance, to moving forward and, most famously, to the stem turn, Zdarsky detailed how to move through any terrain. One chapter he devoted to hills of 50 to 60 degrees steepness—terrain Norwegians would not even consider for skiing. His emphasis on secure skiing in all terrain was made possible by the continual support of a single pole. No wonder critics, especially those for whom speed was essential for enjoyable skiing, would describe Zdarsky’s method as gymnastics-ossified in its insistence on the step-by-step progression. The Englishman Vivian Caulfeild in How To Ski and How Not To objected to the deliberate use of the pole for turning, braking, and stopping. To become a “zigzagging crawler is a very simple matter,” he added.(17) Part of this critique was based on British notions of “dash”—an imperial ideal which implied speed, courage, and a certain flair when doing things—so important in late Victorian and Edwardian times.

In 1897, Wilhelm Paulcke, mentor to many Schwarzwald (Black Forest, Germany) skiers, took Zdarsky to task for his skis, which were only good for slopes steeper than 30 degrees, his single long bamboo pole, and his questioning the value of goggles. Wrote Paulcke, “I don’t want to be squinting for five days.”(18) Zdarsky fired back by giving the advantages of his ski—that he had used a bamboo pole for six years that was “indestructible if one knows how to use it,” implying that Paulcke didn’t. Zdarsky never answered Paulcke’s criticism of skiing with no goggles—all the more surprising because in his youth Zdarsky had had his left eye put out of commission for a couple of years by an explosion. With the immense number of hours on snow, he must have had trouble with snow blindness. The editor of the Österreichische Sport-Zeitung suggested that Paulcke meet Zdarsky and get to understand the Lilienfeld method.(19) To Dr. Baumgartner, Zdarsky was belligerent and complained that he had never witnessed Lilienfeld skiing, even though he continued to criticize. “How devastating!” wrote Zdarsky, “For me?”(20)

These arguments were part of a simmering uneasiness among Zdarsky and Norwegians and their followers. They developed into increasingly abrasive public accusations in journals and newspapers. News of all this soon reached Norway’s skiing leadership, who knew themselves to be the guardians of all things having to do with skiing, and especially so since skiing by 1900 had become the nation’s birthright and not something to be tampered with. So when Zdarsky and his followers started tinkering with Norwegian skis and with the way that Norwegians skied, it was not something to be taken lightly, and it almost spawned a diplomatic incident. One of Zdarsky’s followers actually traveled to Christiania (as Oslo was then called) to calm matters down. Zdarsky, however, had already issued a challenge in 1899 to anybody using Norwegian bindings and technique for a contest on a 35-50-degree hill with many obstacles.(21)

By 1904, the challenge became seriously organized, with 17 stipulations, and permitted competition only from Norwegian or Swedish nationals. A committee of influential skiers was formed to oversee the contest on a hill with a 1,000-meter vertical drop. A rucksack had to be carried with at least six kilos (13 pounds) in it. Zdarsky was determined to force a confrontation. And when Rickmer Rickmers added a 3,000-Kroner wager to any Norwegian beating Zdarsky,(22) the stakes heightened and the Norwegians decided that they had better find out what the Austrian was doing to “their” skiing.

The Norwegians did not accept the challenge because the course would be downhill only and Norwegians considered uphill work an integral part of skiing, but they delegated Lt. Hassa Horn to investigate. The meeting was set for January 6-8, 1905, and a special train was laid on from Vienna to Lilienfeld.

About 60 skiers came to witness the duel between their Meister and their visitor. First, Zdarsky skied down a 400-meter drop at fast speed. The skiers who followed were slower but no one fell, even though some carried rucksacks—all to show that Zdarsky was not interested in speed but in training for touring. After an extremely social evening in the Schwarze Adler in Puchberg (a neighboring village), the weather turned bad but two days later cleared and, with new snow, Zdarsky and Horn skied down a steep slope. Horn sometimes took it straight, sometimes in curving telemark turns. Zdarsky skied with no falls and with elegant long curves. “It was a gripping picture, to observe two masters as they increased their speed and each doing his own technique,” as the event was described in the Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung.(23) Indeed, by the end of the exhibition, that was the conclusion: when skiing over a 20-degree incline it was evident, wrote a knowledgeable eye witness, that Zdarsky was superior, while under 20 degrees the honors went to Horn. What made the difference were Zdarsky’s shorter skis. On the last day, Zdarsky explained to Horn how he taught skiers, and Horn judged his method for teaching beginners to be excellent. They exchanged skis by way of symbolizing the end of the controversy.(24)

Horn had been impressed. In a public letter to Zdarsky’s club, he rationalized that “since your alpine terrain would be disregarded in Norway, your skiing is bound to have a different character than ours.” He considered Zdarsky “with his unusual personality… a skier like no other in Austria,” and went on to say how excellent Zdarsky was in steep terrain. But Horn had shown that he was more efficient in flatter country. He did find major fault with Zdarsky’s use of one long pole.(25) To his own Norwegian Ski Association, Horn gave a report which ended, “It should be the duty of every Norwegian skier to drop the old ideas and so contribute to friendly and better understanding.” (26)

One of the ways Zdarsky wielded so much influence was by his founding of ski clubs. He had started in 1898 with the ski club in Lilienfeld but broadened its base two years later to become the International Skiverein headquartered in Vienna, publishing its own journal, Der Schnee. This weekly journal provided him with an outlet for his thoughts and arguments on the philosophy and psychology of skiing and skiers. As he refused to join the Austrian Ski Association, two centers of skiing and administrative power emerged in the first years of 20th century Austria. In 1906, the Austrian Ski Association listed 14 clubs with a total of 870 members, whereas Zdarsky’s International Skiverein had 539 members alone. By 1908, the Austrian Ski Association’s membership of 25 clubs stood at 2,438 members, and Zdarsky had 1,005.(27) Though smaller, it was Zdarsky’s association that was successful in arranging for skis to be carried on Vienna’s trams. It also got reduced fares for its members on the railroad to Lilienfeld and had its own training ground in the suburbs of Vienna. It was lighted at night, and the nearby Villa Elsa set aside a room for members to change their clothes.(28) Not only that, but Zdarsky was invited to teach in Vienna, Murau (Austria), Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany) and Brasov (the eastern region of Austria-Hungrary). At Mariazell, Austria, in 1909 he had an international clientele including Austrian, Belgian, Brazilian, German, Polish, and Czech skiers.(29) If we look at his February 1907 visit to Kronstadt, today’s Brasov in Rumania, we get an idea of his teaching program.(30) The evening he arrived, he lectured to an audience of 50, including several military officers. The next day, 40 were on the hill with another 30 watching. The local newspaper was thrilled, proclaiming it is “a new era—the ski era has begun with us.” After Zdarsky had departed, the paper reported that people had not only learned how to ski because the instruction method had been easy to follow, but that ski touring possibilities had opened up.

These courses were given for no payment. This was not unusual. Other well-known skiers who did not ask for payment for instruction were Rickmer Rickmers and Georg Bilgeri.(31) It has been estimated that Zdarsky taught nearly 20,000 people how to ski.(32) “Although he taught a bad style,” wrote Arnold Lunn in his book Ski-ing, “he persuaded thousands to take up skiing.”(33)

Some of those thousands were military men—officers as well as enlisted men. Zdarsky gave his first course to the Austrian army in 1903 and continued until 1911, then again during World War I until 1916, when he was caught in an avalanche, which he survived with 80 dislocations, fractures, and broken bones.(34) His contributions inspired the Emperor Franz Josef to present him with a gold service medal.(35) Many officers took the courses, some of whom became influential themselves, especially Lt. Hermann Czant, Theodor von Lerch, and Hauptmann Rudolf Wahl, with whom Zdarsky wrote a military manual.

Not only did army skiers use Zdarsky’s Lilienfeld skis but also his bindings. The regulations that were issued and printed in 1897 were influenced by Zdarsky’s methods.(36) By 1907 the Lilienfeld binding was standard army issue.

Zdarsky’s courses were more tests of endurance than any particular military maneuvering. And that was basically a problem about which no one ever came to a final conclusion: Just what were troops on skis supposed to do? In the peace before the war, military expertise on skis was equated with marathon marches, particularly by the Austrians, Germans, and French. There was occasional criticism, by far the biggest coming from an officer who built up a ski detachment of the 14th Corps stationed in Innsbruck, Georg Bilgeri.

Bilgeri recognized that Zdarsky’s technique was an innovation for alpine skiing. But he objected to the use of the single pole because it provided a “support technique,” whereas he developed skiers with a “balance technique”(37) made possible by using two poles. Bilgeri “improved” Zdarsky’s binding, then wrote a book, Der Alpine Skilauf, published in 1910. There was no love lost between the two.

Matters came to a head when Zdarsky claimed that Bilgeri had copied his binding, then manufactured it as his own in his military workshop, and called it the “Army Binding.” Bilgeri had already received 3,000 orders, and another 8,000 were ordered two weeks later.(39) Bilgeri wrote in his book that it was the first work on alpine skiing—which was not true. And Zdarsky critiqued Bilgeri’s technique with a feistiness guaranteed to bring on a quarrel. “In an age of Siamese twins (referring to the two bindings) there is an abnormality to be found. There is in the Austro-Hungarian army a four-legged officer which I couldn’t have believed possible (Bilgeri had referred to the hind leg in explaining a turn). So Bilgeri must ski with four skis and, what a surprise, there are only two poles, not more.”(40) Bilgeri was honor-bound to challenge.(41) Both were persuaded to back down, and the military brass posted Bilgeri to Komorn in Hungary, well out of the Lilienfeld orbit.

Still, by 1912 it has been estimated that 75 percent of Austrian ski troops were skiing on Bilgeri bindings (they became official army issue in 1913) and with two poles.(42) Both Zdarsky and his followers taught ski troops during World War I and so did Bilgeri and his protégés, besides others, like Hannes Schneider, who were waiting in the wings.

Not nearly so divisive was the beginning of modern slalom. A post-1945 polemic has developed over the claim as to who started modern slalom. On one side are the supporters of Mathias Zdarsky and his March 19, 1905 Torlauf (gate race); on the other side are Arnold Lunn’s followers, who consider his slaloms from 1922 the real beginnings. An Austrian and an Englishmen were both laying claim to slalom—a Norwegian invention and word. But the key, in fact, is not the word slalom, it is modern slalom, i.e. alpine slalom.

Norwegians had a variety of laam—tracks. There was Kneikelaam (run with bumps), Ufselaam (run off a cliff), Hoplaam (run with a jump), Svinglaam (run with turns), and a daredevil run combining all the obstacles, the Urvyrdslaam or Ville lamir (wild run).(43) The Slalaam was a descent around natural obstacles, to prove that the all-around skier was capable of twisting and turning. This event appeared on a race program in Norway in 1879.(44) The race had not been a success, but was reintroduced in 1906 to counter the emphasis that young skiers had begun to give to jumping. This was, reported the 1906 Ski Club of Great Britain Year Book, “a forest race, down hill all the way, the course winding among trees and rocks, and all curves being taken at top speed.” In spite of the emphasis on speed, the competitors’ style while negotiating the obstacles placed at difficult sections of the course was taken into account by judges.(45)

When Norway’s skiing influence spread to Europe, races were devised specifically to include obstacles. In Germany, slalom was first introduced in the Harz in 1906. Before then, races were often called obstacle races (Hindernislaufen), sometimes skill races (Kunstlaufen), sometimes both, indicating clearly the skill required to avoid natural or man-made obstacles. In other races, it was stipulated that poles were not to be used hobby-horse style for braking.(46) Each of these varied races received some support, but it remained debatable which of these experiments was the true test of a good skier. The British experimented with “Bending” races where competitors skied around the outside of 12 poles. No points were given for style. The Black Forest races run between 1902 and 1906 provide an example of the experimental nature of early turning races. In 1902, a Kunstlauf was run. The next year it was called a Kunst-oder Hindernislauf. In 1904 there was a Stilgemässes Laufen (style-point race), which required a run down a steep slope with turns and swings. In 1906, for the same Stilgemässes Laufen, specific swings were required and speed was not a consideration. Poles were not allowed.(47)

The Norwegians, Zdarsky, and Lunn believed, in different ways, that a slalom would test a skier’s capability to avoid obstacles. For the Norwegians, they were obstacles that might be met on a tour over field and fell. For Zdarsky, a slalom would prove the ability of a skier to avoid obstacles on all types of terrain, with speed being no consideration. For Lunn, slalom came from his mountaineering background. In descending from a peak, the skier would run “downhill”—hence “downmountain races”—until he reached the woods. There the skier would have to thread his way through the trees.

Slalom was introduced as a practice for “tree running.” The Lunn race came to be divided into two parts, the first on hard snow, the winner then getting first run on the second course on soft snow. Ten-second penalties were added to those falling down deliberately at the flags. But, as noted earlier, the British equated “dash” with excellence—and speed was a factor. So into the discussion came questions of suitability of terrain, equipment, style of skiing, rules, professionalism, and honor. All this caused such a rumpus that challenges were thrown down in 1905 and again in 1993.(48)

The facts are these: Zdarsky mounted a Torlauf, an 85-gate run dropping almost 500 meters on the Muckenkogel outside Lilienfeld. He wanted it designated as an alpines Wertungsfahren —a judged alpine run—but his club members were adamantly against that and insisted on its being a race, a Wettlaufen. Zdarsky managed to get the event title changed to Ski-Wettfahren,(49) i.e. to replace the laufen with fahren indicating that the running (laufen) was replaced by skiing along (fahren). Zdarsky designed the course as a test for his club members, who were “tourists,” not racers. Hence it was to be a Prüfungsfahren, a testing run more for technique than for speed. Eight rules governed the event. The first had to do with climbing the Muckenkogel “in the usual tourist tempo.” Most notable was Rule 8: “Each fall will count. A fall is judged when sitting or lying on the snow or when the knee rests on the snow.”(50)

Twenty-four competitors between the ages of 17 and 52, including one woman, climbed the Muckenkogel, and down they came watched by 14 gate keepers.(51) Everyone fell—one competitor 24 times—and the least falls counted was one.

Following the event, there was virtually no publicity. The director of the Zdarsky archive, Franz Klaus (now deceased), told me it was simply because Wallner was not a Zdarsky acolyte. He did not use the master’s bindings and was the only competitor to carry two poles.

In 1987, Friedl Wolfgang wrote that “so difficult was the course that no one ran it without a fall, the winner counted six falls but still came down in 12.34 minutes; the best single-poler was Franz Kauba in 16.35 minutes.”(52) Horst Tiwald in his book Spuren von Mathias Zdarsky (Mathias Zdarsky’s Tracks) hardly mentions the 1905 Torlauf at all.(53) This effort to, so to say, disembrace the winner rests more with those who have a stake in the “firsts” syndrome, than it does with Zdarsky, although he had written in 1900 that a race was “the last proof of the school, how the individual has done” and felt that if he didn’t race then the competition is merely a “bit of circus stuff.”(54) Indeed, a year later, Zdarsky had been both competitor and judge in a race whose course had been changed at the last minute because of bad weather. The course was designated by Zdarsky’s own tracks. There was little that was satisfactory about the race and it led to acrimonious accusations between Zdarsky, who claimed to be the winner, and a young Josef Wallner. But it made no pretense to be a slalom.(55) I have found reports of only two other “slaloms” after the 1905 “first.”

Almost exactly a year later, another Skiwettfahren was announced as a Prüfungsfahren(56) with 35 gates for 51 competitors that included six who had run the 1905 slalom, plus eight women. The rules called for stopping after each of three stem turns. From a standing position on a steep slope, the skier had to ski “in the direction of flowing water”—the fall line—and stop with a “quarter circle turn” (whatever that was), then had to accomplish several snaky swings on the way down. Those who don’t pass, Zdarsky admonished the group severely, “ought to be more attentive during training.” Zdarsky made a pre-run of 5 minutes 50 seconds. During the descent, he purposefully stopped and turned around. Later he stopped and blew his nose. These were the sort of things that anyone on a tour might do, and his time of 5 minutes 50 seconds was defined as the standard. The winner would have to beat that time. Not one of the no-fall participants reached the time requirement, so there was no winner. End of slalom No. 2. But not quite. There were objections, a few complaining that the track was too cut up. So Zdarsky returned to the top and ran down faultlessly in 2 minutes 30 seconds.(57)

The last of the Zdarsky slaloms was held for 44 competitors, including 10 women, in 1909.(58) There were 15 no-falls over the 32-gate, 300-meter-vertical course. The standard time was 16 minutes 6 seconds. Wilhelm Wagner, a 1905 veteran, won with 10.57.

Nobody appears to have paid much attention to this. And that, in itself, is interesting. Skisport—skiing for pleasure, recreation, health, or whatever non-utilitarian reason inspired its devotees—was part of the industrial revolution’s quest for speed. Spiel und Gefahr, speed and danger, these were the desires of the true man, trumpeted Friedrich Nietzsche. Speed, in the words of another pioneer, was der Schrei der Zeit—the cry of the times—and even something as static as a trunk was sold as a Vitesse (speed) model.

But Zdarsky clung to his system. On his 80th birthday in 1936 (he died in 1940), he gave a radio talk in which he described how he had stoutly defended his system for 40 years, one that did not advocate speed for its own sake, but with the use of the single pole insured safety on steep terrain as on undulating meadow. But he had lost the battle.(59) He refused to acknowledge that speed on skis, a two-pole technique accompanied by a fast stem leading to a stem christiania was the future. The trouble was that for all his curiosity and inventiveness, his inexhaustible fitness and proficiency, Zdarsky had become a prisoner of his own system.

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Notes

1. Wilhelm Paulcke cited by Theodor Hüttenegger in letter to Otto Lutter, Mürzzuschlag, 18 April 1950. HMS copy in Wintersportmuseum, Mürzzuschlag, File: Pioniere Section L.
2. Letter, k. u. k. 3. Korpskommando, Gurk, 21 September 1907 to k. u. k. Reichskriegsministerium, Wien. HMS in Zdarsky Archive, Lilienfeld, File: Wahl.
3. Felix Schmal, Skisport in Österreich. Wien: Friedrich Beck, 1911, 31.
4. Announced in Jahresbericht des Alpen-Skivereins 1904, 11. The Ski Club of Great Britain’s Year Book first appeared in 1905.
5. “Übungsfahren in Hohenberg am 25. und 26. Dezember 1910,” Der Schnee (31 December 1910): 4. Another example in Norsk Idrætsblad (5 April 1905): 124.
6. Frank Gerlach, “50 Jahre alpine Skisportentwicklung…1935-85,” 1. TMS Deutsche Sporthochschule Köln, Seminararbeit 1986-87.
7. W. R. Rickmers, cited in Wolfe Kitterle, 75 Jahre Torlauf. Wien: Kitterle, 1979, 25.
8. Arnold Lunn, cited in Ibid.
9. Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung (1 February 1903): 112. Hereafter AS-Z.
10. The Bezirksheimatmuseum and Zdarsky Archive in Lilienfeld have a number of his inventions on view and documentation for others.
11. Mathias Zdarsky, “Es war einmal,” Der Schnee (10 November 1925): 10-12.
12. Registered in 1896, Patent 31.366 was granted in 1899. Karl Engel of Lilienfeld held Zdarsky’s patents and his inventions. Hüttenegger, “Duell-Forderung wegen eine Skibindung,” Ski + Tennis/Windsurf (January 1988): 36.
13. As he enumerated in various articles. See, for examples, AS-Z (25 December 1898): 1518; Der Schnee (19 March 1906): 1 and (10 November 1925): 12.
14. See also Ekkehart Ulmrich, “Max Schneider: Genialer Vordenker und Wegbereiter des Skisports—oder kommerzieller Scharlatan?” FdSnow 6, 1 (1995): 33-45.
15. Wilhelm Freiherr von Wangenheim, Die Norwegische Schneeschuh. Hamburg: Aktien-Geselschaft, 1892. Georg Blab, Anleitung zur Erlernung des Schneeschuhlaufens. München: 1895. Fritz Breuer, Anleitung zum Schneeschuhlaufen. Todtnau: Skiclub Todtnau, 1892. Max Schneider, Katechismus des Wintersports. Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1894. O. A. Vorwerg, Das Schneeschuhlaufen. Warmbrunn: Selbstverlag, 1893. See also Der Wanderer im Riesengebirge and Mitteilungen des Deutschen und Österreichischen Alpen-Vereins. Theodor Neumayer, Praktische Anleitung zur Erlernung des Schneeschuh (Ski-) Laufens für Touristen, Jäger, Forstleute und Militärs. Hamburg: 1893. Henrik Etbin Schollmayer, Auf Schneeschuhen. Ein Handbuch für Forstleute, Jäger und Touristen. Klagenfurt: Joh. Leon, sen., 1893.
16. Raimond Udy, Kurze praktische Anleitung über den Gebrauch, die Konservierung und Erzeugung des Schneeschuhs für Militärzwecke. Laibach: Udy, 1894.
17. Vivian Caulfeild, How to Ski and How Not To. 3rd edition. New York: Scribner’s, 1912, 15-16.
18. Paulcke, “Über Ausrüstung bei Skitouren im Hochgebirge,” Österreichische Alpen-Zeitung (27 May 1897): 147.
19. Zdarsky, “Über Ausrüstung bei Skitouren,” Österreichische Alpen-Zeitung (22 July 1897): 185. Editor, Österreichische Alpen-Zeitung (20 January 1898): 123.
20. AS-Z (18 March 1900): 233.
21. Ibid. (5 February 1899): 138.
22. Ibid. (13 November 1904): 1426.
23. J. M., “Die Puchberger Tage,” Ibid. (15 January 1905): 37.
24. E. C. Richardson also reached this conclusion in a letter to Ibid. (29 January 1905): 89. See also his article, “Ende des Lilienfelder Zwists,” in Ski (Swiss) (13 January 1905): 11-12, and “The End of the Lilienfeld Strife,” Alpiner Winter-Sport II, 11 (27 January 1905): 153-154.
25. Letter, Hassa Horn to Alpen-Skiverein, Christiania, 31 January 1905 in AS-Z (12 February 1905): 142.
26. Heinz Polednik, Glück im Schnee. Innsbruck: Amalthea, 1991, 36.
27. Erich Bazalcka, Skigeschichte Niederösterreichs. Waidhofen/Ybbs: Landesskiverband Niederösterreich, 1977, 30.
28. Deutsche Alpenzeitung II, 19 (First January issue 1903): 192-193.
29. Mitteilungen des Deutschen und Österreichischen Alpenvereins (31 May 1897): 122; AS-Z (15 February 1903): 162; Der Schnee (28 November 1908): 2, (23 January 1909): 1-3, (31 December 19009): 2.
30. For what follows, see Siebenbürgisch-Deutsches Tagblatt (20 February 1907), Kronstädter Zeitung (15, 16, 25 February 1907), cited in Fritz Gött, Der Kronstädter Skiverein…1905-1930. Kronstadt: Kronstädter Skiverein, 1930, 58-60.
31. The first professional ski instructor in Austria was probably Reinhard Spielmann (Semmering), but the economic ski school found its style with Hannes Schneider after the Great War.
32. Polednik, Glück im Schnee, 38.
33. Lunn, Ski-ing. London: Eveleigh Nash, 1913, 11.
34. See the two doctors’ reports in Erwin Mehl (Ed.), Zdarsky Festschrift zum 80. Geburtstag des Begründers der alpinen Skifahrweise 25 Februar 1936. Wien, Leipzig: Verlag für Jügend und Volk, 1936, 22-27.
35. Jens Kruse, “Die Bedeutung von Mathias Zdarsky für die Entwicklung des modernen alpinen Skisports,” Deutsche Sporthochschule Köln, Diplomarbeit, 1991, 6. TMS.
36. Anleitung für den Gebrauch der Schneeschuhe und Schneereifen. Wien: K.u.k. Hof- und Stadtsdruckerei, 1897.
37. Georg Bilgeri, “Erfahrungen mit Ski im Hochgebirge,” Die Alpen III (1928): 2.
38. Bilgeri, Der Alpine Skilauf. München: Deutsche Alpenzeitung, 1910.
39. Gudrun Kirnbauer, “Georg Bilgeri (1873-1934): Persönlichkeit, Berufsoffizier, Skipionier.” PhD dissertation, Institut für Sportwissenschaften, Univ. Wien: 1997, 88-89. TMS. This dissertation is now a book, Gudrun Kirnbauer and Friedrich Fetz, Skipionier Georg Bilgeri. Feldkirch: Neugebauer, 2001, but was unavailable to me at the time of writing.
40. Cited in Kirnbauer, “Bilgeri,” 89.
41. Wiener Mittagszeitung (14 January 1910) cited in Lutz Maurer, “Duell in den Bergen,” in Bruno Moravetz (Ed.), Das grosse Buch vom Ski. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1981, 40. Zdarsky was not new to challenges. In 1899 and later there were two in 1910 against Gomperz and Wördl, Der Schnee (18 May 1912): 1 and Der Winter (10 February 1912): 246.
42. “Stand des militärischen Skilaufes in der österreichisch-ubgarischen Armee,” Der Winter (17 October 1912): 30.
43. Names of races varied from district to district in Norway and Sweden. Einar Stoltenberg, cited in Olav Bø, Skiing Throughout History. Translated by W. Edmond Richmond. Oslo: Norske Samlaget, 1993, 53-54. Artur Zettersten, HMS, 29-31 in Svenska Skidmuseet, Umeå, Sweden. John Weinstock, “Sondre Norheim: Folk Hero to Immigrant,” Norwegian-American Studies XXIX (1983): 347-348.
44. Faedrelandet No. 20 (1879), cited by Jakob Vaage, Skienes Verden. Oslo: Hjemmenes, 1979, 132.
45. “Holmenkollen Races,” Ski Club of Great Britain Year Book (1906): 31.
46. AS-Z (19 March 1911): 305 and (2 February 1913): 114. Willi Romberg, Mit Ski und Rodel. Taschenbuch für Wintersportlustige. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Leiner, 1910 (?), 97-98, Letter, Commander J. H. W. Shirley, Oxshott, 15 January 1956 to editor, Ski Club of Great Britain Year Book (1956): 103.
47. F. Klute, “Kunst- oder Hindernislauf?” Der Winter (28 April 1911): 342-343. See also Ibid., (2 June 1911): 357.
48. For Zdarsky’s challenge to the Norwegians, see Alpiner-Winter Sport II, 11 (27 January 1905): 153-154. In 1993, at a meeting of sport museum directors held at the Olympic Museum, Lausanne, 3 September, the Director of the Swiss Sports Museum, Dr. Max Triet, was challenged over his interpretation of the beginning of slalom by Franz Klaus, the Director of the Zdarsky Archive. Following the incident, there was a flurry of correspondence in various newsletters.
49. Letter, Mathias Zdarsky to Erwin Mehl, Marktl im Traisentale, 3 February 1932. Zdarsky Archive, Lilienfeld. HMS.
50. Wettfahr-Urkunde, reprinted 2000, 5.
51. Ibid., 12. For Wallner’s account of the race, see Josef Wallner manuscript (10 November 1950), 3-4. TMS Wintersportmuseum, Mürzzuschlag.
52. Friedl Wolfgang, Mathias Zdarsky: Der Mann und sein Werk. Lilienfeld: Bezirksheimatmuseum, Zdarsky Archive, 1987, 2nd ed. 2003, 57.
53. Horst Tiwald, Auf den Spuren von Mathias Zdarsky. Hamburg: Institut für bewegungswissenschaftliche Anthropologie, 2004. For a damning critique of the book, see Open letter, Ekkehart Ulmrich to the Zdarsky Association, Planegg, 1 July 1993, and letter, Ulmrich to Hans Heidinger, Planegg, 11 March 1996. TMSs copies.
54. Zdarsky, “Nicht primitives Wettlaufen,” AS-Z (4 February 1900): 108.
55. Letters Mathias Zdarsky to the Austrian Ski Association, Habernreith, 5 March 1901, Emanuel Bratmann to editor of AS-Z, Wien, 7 March 1901, Josef Wallner to President of the Austrian Ski Association, Sonnwendstein, 5 March 1901; and V.S. [Viktor Silberer, editor] in AS-Z (17 March 1901): 229-230.
56. Zdarsky, “Prüfungsfahren am 25. März 1906,” Der Schnee (30 March 1906): 6.
57. Letter, Zdarsky to Mehl, 3 February 1932. HMS in Zdarsky Archive.
58. Zdarsky, “Wettfahren in Lilienfeld am 14. März 1909,” AS-Z (27 March 1909): 2-3
59. Radio talk, “Das Naturgesetz der gegenseitigen Hilfeleistung,” published in a pamphlet 150th Anniversary of Zdarsky’s Birth. “Lost the battle” is quoted in Letter, Otto Lutter to Hüttenegger, Graz, 24 March 1950. HMS Wintersportmuseum, Mürzzuschlag, File: Briefe Pioniere Section L. HMS.

He created the first mass-produced fiberglass cross country ski, and the biggest ski factory in Colorado.

By Seth Masia

Today, John Lovett leads a company that makes scientific instruments used to monitor the earth’s atmosphere. But his career began in high school, when he designed a pair of cross-country skis.

Lovett was a student at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School, a private boarding school where kids prep for college while engaged in the great outdoors. Roger Paris, the school’s French teacher, was also a six-time world champion kayaker, and his real vocation was to teach whitewater sports. He taught his students to build their own boats, with fiberglass.

In 1966, at 15, Lovett used the school’s kayak workshop to build a pair of cross-country skis, laminating a maple core with fiberglass. He now thinks this may have been the first pair of glass XC skis in the world. He made 15 more pairs and sold them to his classmates at $10 a pair. He experimented with the core thickness to get the flex just right, working to duplicate the spring and kick of a good wooden Norwegian ski.

“I was skiing in the backcountry a lot, and our 55-millimeter wooden cross-country skis would often break,” he says. “I just wanted something that wouldn’t break.” The design he settled on was 55 millimeters at the waist, with little or no sidecut, and a maple or birch veneer laminated to the base to take pine tar and wax.

Lovett graduated from CRMS in 1969 and moved to Boulder to attend the University of Colorado. But what he really wanted was a job making skis at the Lange/Dynamic factory in Broomfield. He talked to Wells Lange and Ian Ferguson, and wound up with a job in the ski-repair department working with Ken Harrell. 

When Harrell moved to A&T to work with Dynastar, Lovett went along. He continued to build glass cross-country skis in his spare time. Lange engineer Lew Greenberg joined the Lovett Ski Co. as a partner in 1971, but they couldn’t agree on production issues.

A&T wanted to distribute the ski. They loaned Lovett $54,000 to start and operate the business. He borrowed more money from his grandmother, and bought Greenberg out. Then he built a factory on Central Avenue on the east side of Boulder. By 1976, Lovett was selling 70,000 pairs a year of foam-core Lovett cross-country skis, private-label skis, and alpine skis—more than Head made at its factory in North Boulder. Lovett was 25 years old.

Lovett had invented a cheaper way to make a torsion-box ski. Instead of using an expensive milled cavity mold, as Dynamic, Lange, Head and K2 did, he figured out that anodized aluminum angle, riveted to an aluminum sheet, would hold the materials accurately in the InterMontana presses. For a machinist, he hired a smart Kansas farmboy named Lyle Felbush who could build anything. Lovett could whip out a new mold set in a few days, for about $200.

By 1973, Lovett was selling the first steel-edged XC ski with a polyethylene base—in effect, the first of the “norpine” skis on which the modern telemark movement would emerge. The cross-country market was new and growing, but sales didn’t match the production capacity. So he used the base-and-edge capability to build an alpine ski for kids, which A&T sold as the Hummer. He took orders for private-label skis from Gart Bros., then for other retailers. With his inexpensive tooling, he could charge a modest fee for design and engineering and then crank out a few thousand pairs of skis under a customer’s brand.

In 1974, Bob Burns lost his job as a sales rep at K2. In the fall, he drove down from Sun Valley in his Jaguar and asked Lovett to build him an alpine ski to sell. Lovett worked around the clock with his assistant, Laura Clevett. They took an old 207-centimeter Dynamic and made the sidecut deeper, then made a mold from tooling resin. They designed the construction  around a Dynastar-style omega foam core, making it torsionally stiff with a soft flex pattern for bump skiing. “We made two pair and they looked like hell,” Lovett recalls. “We molded the first pair in a cross-country press, so it had double camber—a lousy line for an alpine ski. But Burns went to Vail to show them off and they worked just great.”

A ski company was born, as a partnership between Lovett and Burns and half a dozen investors in Sun Valley, Vail and Aspen. Lovett designed and built the skis and Burns sold them. Burns told his friends he was making the skis in his garage in Sun Valley, and Lovett kept air-freighting two or three pairs at a time to Friedman Field from Stapleton Airport.

The new skis still had no paint, nor even a name. In Sun Valley, people called it “Burnsy’s ski.” Burns claimed the ski used a woven sagebrush core. Eventually, after a disagreement  over the graphics, they settled on big squares of primary colors and called it The Ski.

Lovett brought in his brother Kevin to set up a manufacturing facility in Ogden, Utah after the first winter. Mike Brunetto joined up to help manage the factory. Burns was a genius marketer and sales boomed. Burns insisted that the skis were made in Sun Valley, and kept the real source of the design secret.

The relationship didn’t last. In 1977 Lovett sold his half of the company to Burns, and Brunetto took over The Ski factory in Ogden.

In 1977, Lovett and Ken Harrell made about 100 pairs of Lovett alpine skis, but that energy was blunted when A&T couldn’t keep pace financially with the growth of production. The factory needed more capacity, and the distributor couldn’t swing it. In 1978, Lovett approached Al McDonough of Eastern Mountain Sports, the biggest U.S. retailer of cross-country skis. Within two weeks, EMS agreed to buy the factory.

Lovett walked away from the ski industry. He worked with Robert Redford for a couple of years. He took over the Frank Shorter line of running gear and staged a turnaround. During the 1980s, he did product development consulting for a number of companies. In 1987, he took over management of Allied Marine in Miami, Florida, and turned it into the world’s largest dealership of Hatteras yachts. In 1992, he put together a partnership to pioneer computerized high-frequency stock trading. After 1997, he settled in Edwards, Colorado for a few years, working on some “new urbanism” real estate developments.

In 2007, Lovett returned to Boulder as CEO of a company he’d invested in. Droplet Measurement Technologies makes high-precision instruments for atmospheric studies. The instruments are used by NASA, NOAA and other leading research organizations worldwide, for pollution studies, climate and rainfall research, weather modification studies, and aircraft icing certification.

And he skis a lot. “Those early years in the ski industry were the best time,” Lovett says now.  “Maybe everyone feels this way about the beginning of a career, but that era brought the most interesting challenges and the chance to work with the most stimulating people.  It was a golden time.”