Competition

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

By John Fry

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

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

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

At the time, however, it wasn’t an idea especially appealing to the Professional Ski Instructors of America. PSIA’s Official American Ski Technique (later renamed American Teaching Method or ATM) didn’t much resemble what good skiers were doing. They were making stepped turns, using split rotation, and carving on fiberglass skis. Many beginners were learning on short skis with the new Graduated Length Method (GLM). Progressive instructors were looking ahead, but the American Ski Technique was still living in its Austrian past.

Even the name “American” looked outdated. Nationalistic differences in technique were rapidly dying. I set up a cover photo, in which three skiers—Austrian gold medalist Pepi Stiegler, French pro champion Adrien Duvillard, and Canada’s Ernie McCulloch—were seen together in a slalom flush. All three made roughly the same turn. It didn’t look much like the final form of PSIA’s American Ski Technique. 

My thinking was heavily influenced too when in 1967 I arranged for Georges Joubert’s and Jean Vuarnet’s bestselling Comment Se Perfectionner à Ski to be published in English as How to Ski the New French Way. The principal way for skiers to advance their technique, the authors believed, was to mimic the actions of champion racers.

SKI’s racing editor Tom Corcoran wrote a column condemning the gulf between racing and what recreational skiers were being taught. He lauded an innovation at Sun Valley. The resort had cordoned off a special slope, not too steep, dedicated to timing recreational skiers as they made runs through easy open gates. It was the equivalent in golf of a Par-3 course. Mont Tremblant Ski School director Ernie McCulloch also made pupils learn how to turn through gates. 

Resorts like Sun Valley and Tremblant staged standard races for guests. Entrants who ran the course within a set time limit received a shoulder patch, and possibly a gold, silver or a bronze pin. The prestigious standard races were not necessarily easy—they could be long and challenging. You could compare yourself to others who’d been in the race, but not directly to someone who wasn’t in it. Your rating was only good for the day of the competition. By contrast, a consistent 10-handicap golfer knows that on any day, on any course, he’s likely to play 10 strokes better than a 20-handicapper.  

THE SCORELESS SPORT

In October of 1967 I wrote to complain that skiing was virtually a Scoreless Sport, the title I used for my editor’s column in SKI Magazine. I spent much of the subsequent winter asking race officials and instructors how the equivalent of golf’s handicap could be created for skiers. 

One weekend at Mt. Snow in Vermont the ski school director, a French Canadian, told me about France’s Ecole de Ski Nationale Chamois program. For certification, an instructor had to perform well enough in the Ecole’s annual Challenge, a classic slalom course with hairpins and flushes, to earn a silver medal—that is, be less than 25 percent behind the time recorded by the fastest instructor. Back at his home area, the certified instructor could set the pace for local participants in a Chamois race—a single run slalom. Gold, silver and bronze were awarded according to the percentage the skier’s time lagged behind the pacesetter’s.

It didn’t take long for the dim bulb in my cerebrum to light up: Use time percentages, not raw times, to rate skier performance. And do it, not with a difficult slalom, but rather by offering a simple open-gate setting on intermediate terrain, anticipated by Corcoran. (In 1972, France’s National Ski School—after three or four years of experimentation—introduced the Flèche, a separate, easier test than Chamois—an open-gated giant slalom similar to a NASTAR course.) 

Here was an unwitting, unconscious, unintended collaboration between a French program, little known in North America, and an American program that would blossom into something much bigger, imitated in other countries, enabling tens of thousands of recreational skiers to measure their ability, and glimpse into what it might feel like to be racing in the Olympics. 

RACE RATINGS VALID ANYWHERE, ANY TIME

In France a skier participating in Chamois was rated against the local pacesetter’s time, which was not corrected to account for the percentage by which the instructor had lagged behind the fastest time when he’d competed against other instructors. Adjusting the local pacesetter’s time so there’d be a national standard was a vision I had for NASTAR.  (Twenty years later, in 1987–88, France adopted the NASTAR principle of speeding up the local pacesetter’s time to create a single standard for a Chamois rating.)   

In my mind, the fastest time should be that of a top racer on the U.S. Ski Team. It would work as follows, I imagined. If pacesetter Klaus at Mount Snow was originally three percent slower than the nation’s fastest racer, and a Mount Snow guest was 20 percent slower than Klaus, then he or she would be about 23 percent slower than America’s fastest skier would have been if he’d skied the Mt. Snow course that day. Presto! The skier would have a 23 handicap. The sport of skiing could enjoy the equivalent of golf’s par! A skier would know that on any slope anywhere, through a couple of dozen gates, on a surface that could be sticky or icy, it didn’t matter, the rating would be valid. If he or she had a 23 NASTAR handicap, he was seven percentage points better than someone with a 30 rating.

The possibilities seemed limitless. You could make the results of races around the country equivalent to one another. You could take two equally rated skiers and put them in an exciting head-to-head race. Or you could handicap two unequal racers, delay the start of the better skier, and maximize their chances of reaching the finish line at the same time, making it appear to be an exciting race. On a 300-foot-vertical Michigan hill, you could have a competitive experience equivalent to one at a Rocky Mountain resort. 

What I had in mind was a national standard race. I gave it the acronym NASTAR.

The NASTAR idea needed an infusion of money to become a reality, and so SKI Magazine flew me to Chicago to meet with a potential sponsor, the now-defunct Schlitz brewery. I explained the concept to them. The Schlitz guys liked it. 

“The program’s called NASTAR,” I explained. 

“No, no. It’s got to be the Schlitz Open,” the ad agency guy shot back. 

Returning home, I told my wife, who is German, that the meeting had gone well, but that we were stuck on the name. 

“What is it?” she asked. 

“The Schlitz Open,” I replied. She shrieked with laughter.

“What are you laughing about?”

“Schlitz is our word for the fly on a man’s pants!” 

The next day, I phoned the advertising agency in Chicago and told them the news. Within hours, I received a return call informing me that Schlitz had agreed to the name NASTAR. 

JIMMIE HEUGA

In December 1968, with Tom Corcoran’s indispensable help, the pacesetting trials took place at his new Waterville Valley resort in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. For the first time, an idea that had existed only on paper became a physical reality. 

Jimmie Heuga clocked the fastest times, earning the title of national pacesetter. Charlie Gibson, a tall, spare, laconic mathematics whiz from IBM, who would later become president of the U.S. Ski Association, developed statistical tables, by which local ski areas could compute the handicap ratings of recreational skiers. Gloria Chadwick, a perpetually cheerful, obsessively organized New Englander, quit her job running the U.S. Ski Association in order to manage NASTAR.

In the winter months of 1969, NASTAR’s first season, 2,500 recreational skiers competed at eight areas across the country—from Mt. Snow in Vermont to Alpental in Washington, and at Vail, where the charismatic Swiss champion Roger Staub had become ski school director. 

The standard for winning gold, silver and bronze pins was different for men and women. Two winters later, the standards for medal winning began to take age into account as well. Response was upbeat. The well-known New York Times ski columnist Mike Strauss said that “NASTAR is the best thing to happen to skiing since the introduction of the rope tow.” 

SANDBAGGING ON SKIS?

At the end of the first season, Schlitz flew 39 successful NASTAR medalists to a final race at Heavenly Valley, California. They raced head-to-head, starting with times adjusted by their handicaps. It didn’t occur to me that competitors might contrive to inflate their handicaps—the practice known as sandbagging in golf. The Minneapolis Star’s ski columnist Ralph Thornton wrote a column suggesting the possibility that some racers had sandbagged, cheating Midwest skiers of victory. 

Well, I thought, if the race was worth cheating at, NASTAR is clearly a success. 

How to enhance NASTAR’s popularity? One possibility was to incorporate the program into ski schools, as an objective way for instructors to measure the progress of students. I proposed the idea to the Professional Ski Instructors of America. 

Many people, I argued, are able to ski proficiently, even elegantly, when they’re able to choose anywhere to make a turn. The instructor observes, applauds the student’s form, and advances him to a higher class. But what about making a must-do turn, at high speed, to avoid a tree? What about being forced to enter a gate at the right point in a race? It’s far more difficult to turn at a given spot. The skier must master skills like gliding, skidding, drifting, pivoting, rebounding, absorption and stepping, as well as carving, in order to get specifically from Point A to Point B. Instructors could use NASTAR to monitor people’s advancing skill. The skier’s handicap would become the measure of his progress in taking lessons. 

Deficient in powers of persuasion and lacking in political skill, I failed to convince anyone at PSIA, except notably Willy Schaeffler, that the organization, already famously resistant to innovation, should get behind NASTAR. 

My other hope was to interest the U.S. Ski Team. By linking the national handicap to the speed of the country’s fastest skiers, NASTAR could serve as a grassroots system to identify young talent for future national teams.

MEETING IN A MANHATTAN STEAM ROOM

How to persuade the U.S. Ski Team to supply pacesetters? It wouldn’t be easy. Alpine director Bob Beattie preferred to exert control over programs involving the Team. I thought I might have a better chance of gaining Beattie’s support if I could enlist the persuasive Corcoran to talk to him. 

One day, when I determined that both Corcoran and the itinerant Beattie would be in New York City, I arranged for us to meet at the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South. When Corcoran and I arrived in the club’s lobby, we learned that Beattie was in the steam room. We were told to meet him there. 

Upstairs in the locker room, we stripped. Groping our way into the hot mist of the steam room, we found the perspiring coach. Inside the foggy chamber, Corcoran attempted to convince Beattie of the benefits of a union with NASTAR. It would make the Ski Team visible on the slopes and in the magazine. By tying the times of the best U.S. racers to NASTAR ratings, the Ski Team would enter into the daily awareness of recreational skiers. And a fraction of the recreational skier’s entry fee would be donated to the always sagging Ski Team treasury.

Emerging from the heat of the steam room, his face reddened to the color of a scalded beet’s interior, Beattie appeared to me to be unconvinced. What I didn’t know was that the coach himself was concocting in his mind his own five-year, multi-million-dollar plan. Called the Buddy Werner League, it aimed—like Little League baseball—at tapping into 250,000 young athletes, through a program named after the late U.S. racing star. 

BEATTIE REIGNS FOR 30 YEARS 

Although the trip to the steam room had been a failure, Beattie’s view of NASTAR changed a year later. Retired from the Ski Team, the former coach was seeking entrepreneurial opportunities. His search coincided with SKI’s search for a way to keep track of thousands of entries at a rapidly rising number of ski areas wanting to join in hosting the popular new races. 

Off-site computers and software didn’t exist at the time. To pay for the labor-intensive organization, a way had to be found, not only to make ski areas pay, but to extract money from sponsors like Pepsi and Bonne Belle as well as Schlitz. 

Under license from SKI, Beattie took over the operation of the program that he had once spurned. He was the ideal guy to run it. In NASTAR’s second season, the number of participating ski areas grew to thirty-nine. Sponsorships proliferated. Resorts took in money from guests willing to pay to race. Offshoot programs were created—like Pepsi Junior NASTAR and Hi-Star for interscholastic competition.

Fifteen winters later, prodded and promoted by the former Ski Team coach, who was now also pro racing impresario and TV commentator, NASTAR grew to 135 areas, attracting a quarter of a million recreational racers each winter. In Canada Molson’s Beer launched a copycat Molstar program. NASTAR clones sprouted in Scandinavia, Switzerland and Australia.

In conversations in lift lines and in base lodges, I heard the thrilled voices of intermediate skiers who’d raced for the first time in their lives. Excitedly they compared their handicap ratings. Friends, who’d never before skied competitively, told me of butterflies in their stomach as they stood in the NASTAR starting gate. Children boasted about winning a bronze pin. At a NASTAR finals, where recreational racers from 5 to 85 years of age competed, I saw a helmeted 10-year-old boy and his grandfather hugging one another as they rejoiced over their results. 

NASTAR was conceived in the 1960s—the age of Killy, Kidd, Greene and other alpine racing stars. Putting their faces on SKI Magazine’s covers added tens of thousands to newsstand sales. For me, here was material proof of where the interest of readers belonged.  In their desire to learn from racing I was a believer. 

John Fry is the author of The Story of Modern Skiing, a history of the revolution in technique, teaching, competition, equipment and resorts that took place after World War II. In 1969 through most of the 1970s, he was editorial director of GOLF Magazine, as well as of SKI. He is indebted to veteran ski moniteurs Gerard Bouvier and J-F Lanvers for obtaining fresh historical information about France’s Chamois and Flèche programs.

At the Nagano Olympics, he was stripped of snowboarding’s first gold medal. The next day, he had the medal back. Today, Ross Rebagliati is a successful marijuana entrepreneur in British Columbia. By Michel Beaudry

I wouldn’t change a thing,” says Canadian snowboard legend Ross Rebagliati. Owner of one of the most notorious gold medals in Winter Games history, the happily married father of three insists he long ago made peace with his past. “Sure, it hurt when it happened,” he admits. “It totally changed my life. But it also provided new opportunities for me and my family.”

Today the 46-year-old is a successful medical marijuana entrepreneur in British Columbia’s bucolic Okanagan Valley (use of marijuana for medicinal purposes has been legal in Canada since 2001, and the country plans to legalize the drug for recreational use in the summer of 2018). His dispensary is called Ross’ Gold. It’s a play on words, but also a reflection of where he wants to take his company. “My Olympic story makes up a big part of our storefront,” he explains. “Every day I bring my medal out and put it on display. I guess you could say I’m on a bit of a mission: I want our products, our brand, to set the gold standard in the business.”

And yet “it was a deeply traumatic experience,” concedes the former Whistler resident of his Olympic trials. “Especially since it didn’t need to happen. I’d never felt the full weight of negative media before. It was overwhelming.”

Anyone who followed the Winter Games that year can’t help but remember Ross’ story. It was February 1998, and snowboarding was poised to join the Olympic family in Nagano, Japan. The giant slalom had been scheduled for the first day and the field was stacked. “They’d watered down the course the night before,” remembers Ross. “And the hill was perfect—firm enough to set a good edge, but soft enough to hold your line.”

Race day dawned sunny and clear. But the first run did not go entirely to plan for the young Canadian. “I made two or three big mistakes that nearly stopped me in my tracks,” he confesses. “But to my surprise I was still among the top eight, barely a tenth [of a second] from first place.” 

Throwing caution to the wind, Ross charged the second run like a man possessed. “By the time I reached the breakover and the steep part of the course, I was flying,” he says. “I remember barely being able to change my edge before hitting the next gate.” 

His aggression paid off. In one of the most exciting giant slalom finishes in Olympic history, Rebagliati bagged the gold by the slimmest of margins. Says Ross: “I remember watching the Winter Games as a kid and daydreaming about standing on the top step of the podium…and it was happening for real. I had to pinch myself.”

His euphoria would be short-lived. During a routine drug test, a trace of THC, the active component in cannabis, was detected in Rebagliati’s post-race urine sample. It was a miniscule amount (less than 18 nanograms per millitre) but it was enough to convince the IOC brass to set the disqualification process in motion.

“I didn’t have a clue,” insists Ross. “We’d been warned by our coaches about the drug-testing protocol and I’d stayed away from weed for months.” Still, he hadn’t quite cut himself off from the culture. “All my Whistler friends indulged, but they respected my decision. I still hung out with them. I just didn’t toke with them.”

Picture the scene: “It’s the next morning and I’m hanging out with a few teammates in my room,” he begins. “Our race is done. Our Olympic contest is over. We’re all looking forward to becoming Games tourists now.” 

Suddenly two coaches appear at Rebagliati’s door. “Sit down, Ross,” says one. 

“I knew immediately it was about my drug test,” he says. “I was sure it had something to do with weed.”

The next few hours passed in a blur. First he was driven from the relative calm of Shiga Kogen Resort to IOC headquarters in Nagano and the already-alerted press. It was the first big Olympic story and the media was in a feeding frenzy. “The whole Canadian Mission Team staff was there,” he remembers. “They formed a circle around me and tried to get me inside. People were screaming questions at me. Accusing me of all sorts of things. I felt like I had betrayed my country. I was in shock, emotional, ashamed.” 

But worse was yet to come. While his case was being argued in the IOC court of arbitration, Ross was arrested by the Japanese police and charged with importing an illegal substance. “It was surreal,” says Ross. As he sat in his Nagano cell, the devastated snowboarder played back the events of the last 24 hours. How could this have happened? 

And then everything changed. In what can only be described as a scene from the theatre of the absurd, it was revealed during another round of court hearings that THC wasn’t on the IOC’s banned list after all. “So the lawyers told me: ‘You’re good to go’,” says Ross. “The next day I boarded a flight to LA for an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. I mean, talk about a turnaround. Still, I was really angry. I’d spent time in jail, me, the gold medal winner. And all for nothing.”  

After the Nagano Games, the IOC did place THC on the banned drug list. The legal limit was set at 30ng/ml. The level in Ross’ urine in the 1998 sample was half that amount.

Meanwhile, the fallout from his wrongful disqualification continued to haunt his life. 

 “My homecoming was marked by a big party in the Whistler town center,” he says. “The place was packed. I should have been on cloud nine.” And yet the 26-year-old couldn’t fully enjoy the celebration. “I was still feeling guilty…like my Olympic performance was tarnished somehow.”

That nagging sense of unease increasingly shut him off from his friends and family. Ross says he didn’t leave his Whistler condo for weeks. “I was afraid to answer the door even for the pizza delivery guy,” he remembers. “The media had branded me as the ‘stoner snowboarder who won the gold.’ But that wasn’t me.” 

Rebagliati eventually overcame his demons and got back on his snowboard…only to find that his status had changed. “My legacy was badly damaged by the Internet,” he says. “I lost sponsors, lost supporters. After 9-11, I was even put on the U.S. no-fly list and told I wasn’t welcome in America anymore. It had major consequences. Suddenly I couldn’t compete at events like the X-Games. My snowboarding career was done.”   

So Ross moved on with his life. He’d made some good moves early in Whistler’s booming real estate market and was now reaping the financial benefits from those investments. He got married, had a child, and in 2006 moved east to Kelowna in BC’s Okanagan Valley. It looked like the still-boyish champion had turned things around for himself. 

But there were more bumps in the road. His marriage broke apart. Some business deals soured. Things just weren’t working out. So he returned to Whistler in 2010 and started questioning himself all over again. What could he do, he wondered, to finally bring closure to his still-troubled Olympic saga? And then it came to him.

Snowboarding’s first Olympic gold medalist launched his medical marijuana dispensary, Ross’ Gold, with partner Patrick Smyth in January 2013. The media picked up on it immediately. Over the next few months, he and his company were profiled in USA Today, the Huffington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the Toronto Star. By 2015, his branded glassware and products could be found in nearly a hundred stores across Canada. And when the Liberals promised to legalize pot during that year’s federal election, Ross was quick to jump on their bandwagon. 

“We opened our first storefront in Kelowna in December 2016,” he says. “And now we’re looking to acquire, or pair up with, a local vineyard.”

“I probably wouldn’t be in the marijuana business today if I hadn’t lived the experience I did in Nagano,” he adds. “But I certainly wasn’t forced down this road.” 

Married again, back in Kelowna and now the father of three children—Ryan, 8, Rosie, 5, and Rocco, 2—Ross feels like he’s finally found his place. “I want to feel good about being an Olympic champion. And with Ross’ Gold I can do that. I see it on my customers’ faces every day: my story does make a difference to their lives. And that makes me truly happy. As I said before, I wouldn’t change a thing.”  

Jake Hoeschler of the US Ski Team and University of Colorado, interviewed by ISHA's Seth Masia, on StoryCorps. Recorded by Kat Haber.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Men

1924 Thorleif Haug

1957 Sixten Jernberg

1964 Sixten Jernberg

1980 Nikolay Zimyatov

1992 Bjørn Daehlie and Vegard Ulvang

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

Women

1968 Toini Gustafsson

1972 Galina Kulakova

1976 Raisa Smetanina

1984 Marja-Liisa Hamalainen

2010 Marit Bjørgen

2014 Charlotte Kalla

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

Jumping

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

1932, 1936, 1948 Birger Ruud

1984 Jens Weisflogg

1988 Matti Nykänen 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if you thought that you’d straddled a slalom gate pole, and the gatekeeper missed seeing it? And you earned a good result for you and your team?

            It happened this past February during the New York State Slalom Championships at Bristol Mountain in the Adirondacks. John Emerson, 15, a sophomore at John Jay High School in Westchester County, 30 miles north of Manhattan, was among the youngest in a 64-boy field. Starting 53rd in the first run, he blistered the course, registering the ninth fastest time.

            Against racers with single-digit bib numbers in the second run, he wound up in sixth place, enough for a medal in the NY State Championships.

            Yet something about the run didn’t seem right to Emerson. After the race, he watched the video his father had taken. In super-slow motion, on a large computer monitor, he clearly saw that he’d straddled one of the gates.

            “In real-time it was only a fraction of a second and impossible to see, but in slow motion the video was clear,” wrote Ken Kostick in the Bedford Record Review.

            And so, less than a half hour before the medal ceremonies for the top finishers in the slalom events, Emerson made a startling announcement. He would not accept the fifth-place result, nor the honor that went with it.

            New York State Public High School Athletics Association chief Robert Zayas said at the awards ceremony that he’d never witnessed an act of sportsmanship as great as Emerson’s. Athletes, coaches and parents gave the young man a standing ovation.

            “In a sport with more than 1,300 active high school racers,” said John Jay ski coach Chris Reinke, “John demonstrated the highest level of sportsmanship.”

            “There is no podium for what this individual did,” said John Jay coach Tom Adamec. “It was an act that was selfless, honest, compelled by integrity and, most of all, loyalty to oneself.”

            Chris’ older brother is also a promising racer. Says their father Tony Emerson, “Ski racing involves hard work, danger, speed, brutal weather, how to deal with losing, and more. There’s no better sport to teach kids lessons in adversity.”  --Seth Masia

Special report: A six-year effort, led by FIS Alpine Rules chief Michael Huber, has yielded the first comprehensive digital collection of the changing rules that have governed ski racing over 80 years.

Alpine ski racing has a precise birth date. On February 26, 1930, in Oslo, Norway, the Congress of the International Ski Federation (FIS) officially accepted alpine ski racing—downhill and slalom—as a separate discipline. The FIS had previously recognized only the disciplines of competitive nordic skiing—cross-country and jumping. 

Delegates to the 1930 Congress also adopted the first official rules for alpine racing. But what precisely were they? And where could they be found? Had no one kept a copy? 

For Michael Huber of Kitzbühel, Austria, chairman of the FIS Subcommittee on Alpine Rules and president of the famous Kitzbühel Ski Club (K.S.C.), the challenge was irresistible: to find the book. Huber would spend six years searching for it. And not only seeking the alpine competitions rules book of 1930, but also all official published FIS alpine rules of the past. Huber’s goals were:

• To make the alpine racing rules as they existed over an 85-year span available digitally for people around the world. 
• To gain insight into the very early history of competitive alpine skiing. 
• To understand why specific rules were written as they were, when and how they were changed, and to better identify what was the core of the sport that remained unchanged. 

Huber asked officials, experts, organizations and museums for help. First, the International Skiing History Association (ISHA), through its magazine Skiing History and its Website skiinghistory.org, under the lead of John Fry, sent out an international call, asking people to submit copies of old Alpine Rules books. Well-known ski historian E. John B. Allen of New Hampshire soon reported that the New England Ski Museum in Franconia had a number of books from the 1930s into the 1980s, most in English, some in German. The New England Museum’s staff copied countless pages and sent them to Europe for processing. 

“The Book is Found!”
Still, the most sought-after book, the original rules book of 1930, was missing. 

Then it happened: Last year, Ivan Wagner, the editor of the Schneehase, the official publication of the Swiss Academic Ski Club (SAS), sent a note to Huber. “I think we’ve got it. It’s found!” After much searching, Schneehase’s former editor, Raoul Imseng, had discovered, in Issue No. 4 printed in 1931, the full and official German wording of the International Competition Rules for Slalom and Downhill Races, established at the XI International Ski Congress in Oslo and Finse (Norway), 1930. 

Next step was to translate the German version into English. The long-serving member of the Subcommittee on Alpine Rules, the British native Martin John Leach, who has lived for many years in Switzerland, was ready to do the job. 

Flag Colors, Team Races

What is the content of the Alpine Rules of 1930? The 14 pages are divided into ten chapters. The first chapter deals with the organization and officials needed to run an alpine competition, like “the Setter” and the “Flag-keepers.” The second chapter deals with “Flags” for Downhill—originally red, blue and yellow. 

Another section deals with the different types of start, like simultaneous start, individual start, team and slalom start. Surprisingly, the alpine combined is not of primary interest. (Surprising because the combined was the primary focus of the pre-existing famous Arlberg Kandahar of Hannes Schneider and Arnold Lunn.) Rather the rules focus on “Team Races in Downhill and Slalom.”

It didn’t take long for the original rules to undergo change. Only two years later, the alpine FIS Rules of 1932 defined the flag colors for slalom as two; penalized a competitor five seconds for making a false start; required racers to be more than 18 years of age; and prohibited a competitor from making more than one start unless handicapped by the presence on the course of a spectator or a dog.

The results go live online

The former chairman of the Subcommittee on Alpine Rules and predecessor president of the K.S.C., Christian Poley, added missing books of past years. So the digital archive now includes about 60 different Alpine Rules books from 1930–2016 in English, German and French. 

To create digital access to all of the rules, the copied material had to be scanned and laid out—work done by the staff of the Kitzbühel Ski Club under Barbara Thaler. In a final step, Sarah Lewis, FIS Secretary General, provided a special place on the FIS website for digital storage, so the public worldwide can access more than eight decades of alpine ski racing rules. “Thanks to all who made this project a success,” says Huber.

To access the FIS Alpine Rules book digital archive, go to: http://www.fis-ski.com/inside-fis/document-library/alpine-skiing/#deepli....

INTERVIEW by Yves Perret

In an exclusive interview, Jean-Claude Killy recalls the first season of the World Cup, 50 years ago, when he won 12 of the 17 races, all of the downhills, and finished on the podium in 86% of the races he entered, a record never surpassed.

The winter of 1967 remains one of the most memorable in alpine ski competition history. Not only did it introduce the new World Cup—skiing’s first use of a season-long series of competitions to determine the world’s best—it also resulted in an astonishing, never-to-be-repeated record. Jean-Claude Killy won 12 out of the 17 slalom, giant slalom and downhill races on the calendar. He finished on the podium in 86 percent of the 29 races he entered. 

In an exclusive interview with sports editor Yves Perret in the last issue of Skiing History (January-February 2017), Killy told about the origins of the World Cup, his motivations, and his early victories in the historic first season of the World Cup, which this year is celebrating its 5oth anniversary. Part Two is the conclusion. 

Killy had just won both the downhill and slalom at Wengen, Switzerland. Now came a high point of the season—the classic Hahnenkamm competition at Kitzbühel, Austria. . .

Kitzbühel was a special moment. What was it like for you?

Competing at Kitzbühel is the most exciting thing imaginable for a ski racer. You’re in Austria, where skiing is the national sport. We were challenging the guys who embody skiing itself, cheered on by an immense crowd of spectators. I was respected, but my relationship with the Austrian public could be complicated. To relieve myself from the pressure of fans surrounding our living quarters, I sometimes would even send Jean-Pierre Augert, who looked a lot like me, to go into the crowd and sign autographs. 

Winning in Kitzbühel is every skier’s dream. That year I won the downhill, the slalom, and the combined, and I became the first—and still the only—skier to achieve the double-double win in Wengen and Kitzbühel, or triple win including the combined. Nowadays we don’t realize what that represented, but winning the combined was important even if it didn’t count for World Cup points and was a mathematical point combination.

In the Hahnenkamm downhill, the world’s most difficult and dangerous, I came in ahead of the German Franz Vogler by 1.37 seconds, and I beat the course record held by Austria’s Karl Schranz. 

The Kitzbühel slalom is magnificent—staggeringly varied, with sidehills and rhythm changes. The atmosphere can be hostile for rivals of the Austrian team. You have to stay in a bubble, keep concentrated, be removed from the noise and the pressure, focusing on your own run. I was the fastest in both runs of the slalom. I beat by more than two seconds the Swede Bengt-Erik Grahn, who was one of the best slalom specialists of the era. 

I’ll never forget the atmosphere that weekend. The local ski instructors carried me across on their shoulders to the podium to receive my awards. This would have been unthinkable a couple of years earlier. “Superman on Skis!” headlined the Austrian daily Kronen Zeitung the next day.

After that victorious weekend, Austria’s greatest racer, Toni Sailer wrote, “Killy is practicing a different kind of skiing, a kind of skiing that is a step above that of the best skiers. His wins are those of an all-around athlete who has reached maturity.” By then I had scored 151 out of the maximum of 175 achievable points at that stage in the season. Austria’s Heini Messner, who was in second, had 75 points.

The winning streak continued with the downhill in Megève…

The Emile Allais course was very demanding, with the Bornet face being the most difficult and dangerous section of all of the international downhill races I’d competed in. I beat the Swiss Hans Peter Rohr by two seconds. . . my best downhill ever. I was amazed by the lead. It was my eighth consecutive win. We were in the last days of January, and the 1967 World Cup downhill title was already mine.

Périllat came out ahead in the slalom. He apologized for having beaten me. He had especially wanted to beat Austria’s Karl Schranz, our perpetual rival. I was sick and I fell in the first run, but I finished second anyway, and I won the combined.

I didn’t compete in the World Cup slalom at Madonna di Campiglio, Italy. I took two weeks off. I was imitating Toni Sailer in a way. Before his triple gold medal win at the 1956 Olympics, Toni took several days off from skiing. “That’s what you should do,” he advised.

After resting, I made a comeback at Chamrousse in the February pre-Olympic races, where I won the downhill, as I would the following year in the real Olympics, when I again followed Toni’s strategy of taking a week off. 

Throughout my career, I took inspiration from other top racers in order to optimize my skiing. I watched the way Adrien Duvillard carved his turns. I even copied the weightlifting exercises that I saw Soviet high jumper Valery Brummel do on TV. In 1952 at Val d’Isère when I was a boy, I watched in amazement when Italian champion Zeno Colò started so violently that the starter, who had put his hand on his shoulder, was carried down the hill.  

In the weeks that followed, I continued winning. The season was about confronting each race, one day at a time.  At Sestrières, Italy I won the Kandahar downhill. I liked the course and the beautiful section coming into the forest. We pulled off an all-French podium in the downhill: Killy, Orcel, Périllat. I also went away with a win in the combined. 

The season ended in the USA in March. What was your experience there?

I was on a cloud. I had no doubts, no worries, no anxiety. Going to the States was something we’d been looking forward to. I was close friends with the American racers Billy Kidd and Jimmie Heuga, the son of a French Basque shepherd who had immigrated to the United States. Both were magnificent skiers. I'd met Jimmie in the summer of 1964, my first visit to the U.S. Then in 1965 and 1966 I'd competed in races organized by Bob Beattie. Nothing compared to my U.S. arrival in March 1967, though. A press conference was held when we stopped in New York. We met the governor of Massachusetts. Sports Illustrated, which featured me on its cover three times in my career, ran headlines like “Lafayette, They Are Back.” TIME Magazine hailed me “King Killy.” 

For me, though, the most important thing was to stay on track for the rest of the season, and finish the job.

The Franconia event was very important…

Huge crowds—thousands more spectators than had ever appeared at a U.S. alpine ski event—thronged the slopes of Cannon Mountain, New Hampshire. I won the downhill. I made the last difficult turn above the finish faster than anyone, and it was later named Killy’s Corner. I also won the GS, the slalom and the combined. I had won decisively in all three alpine disciplines, exactly like the gold medal hat trick I performed 11 months later in the Olympics at Chamrousse.

By then I was sure to win the World Cup. It was a special moment of satisfaction, though the season wasn’t yet over.

There were two more events, Vail and Jackson Hole. How did you approach them?

Winning the Nations Cup became the objective that pushed us as a team, not to give an inch. Plus, our own Marielle Goitschel had the chance to win the women’s overall World Cup, which would have been a double triumph for France. It’s always a great moment when you win as a team.

There were four races in Vail: one slalom, one downhill and two one-run giant slaloms. I won all of them. The last race, on Sunday, counting for World Cup points, was held in a terrible snowstorm. 

At Vail, four or five of us shared the same room in the home of our host, Suzie Meyer. It was a fun time. From Vail, I traveled with Louis Jauffret and our friend Bernard Cahier, a famous motor racing journalist, to California, where racing car designer Carol Shelby was waiting for us in his workshop near LA airport. We flew in Carol’s personal plane to Riverside, where we drove all day long on the circuit. 

After a night in Las Vegas, we went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for the World Cup Finals. Here two more races—a giant slalom and a slalom—would be held. I was tired; I’d had a sinus infection the previous days. In order to save energy and have a little fun, I inspected the giant slalom course in a sled! I won the race. It was amazing! Including Europe, I had just won nine races in a row—three  downhills, two slaloms, and four giant slaloms. 

In the last race, the slalom at Jackson Hole, I DQ’d. But I had already earned the maximum World Cup points, 75, in each discipline, ending the season with the maximum possible 225 World Cup points. The Evian mineral water company, first sponsor of the World Cup, paid for my father to come to Jackson Hole, bringing with him the crystal trophy. The official presentation was held later in Evian, France.  

The trophy presentation took place in Jackson Hole’s Cowboy Bar. It was preceded by a reception, with free margaritas and pisco sours for all. It was wild night. I remember that the sheriff came to make order in the streets and—I don’t know how—Marielle (Goitschel) dropped him to the floor. He finally understood who we were, and everything turned out okay.  

The season was over, or almost. There were still a couple of races in Switzerland when I got home. I won a GS at Verbier, and Mauduit beat me in Thyon. But it was on the American tour that the bulk of the job was finished.

Who were your main rivals during that magic winter?

The winter of 1967 was notable for an incredible density of talent. No fewer than 14 skiers from seven different nations placed second in the races that I won. In the overall World Cup, I scored almost twice as many points as the runner-up, Austrian Heini Messner. He was a classic skier—a reserved man but consistent and hard to beat. He was followed in the standings by my teammates—Périllat, Lacroix and Mauduit—and my great buddy Jimmie Heuga. Four times during the season I’d found myself on top of the podium with Jimmie.  

It was an era when an amateur spirit was still felt in the sport. There was a real affinity among us skiers from all different countries. Once on the course, we were rivals, but it didn’t alter our relationships. People talked about a rivalry with Karl Schranz, but the battle took place on skis. The rest of the time we got along really well. With all the skiers of that era, there are plenty of shared memories, moments of laughter, and anecdotes.

This incredible season generated a remarkable level of media coverage and fame. How did you handle it?

Media attention quickly came from beyond the few newspapers and magazines that typically cover international alpine skiing. After my win at Wengen, the media following us were no longer the usual ones like Paris Match and the French television show, Cinq Colonnes à la Une. The popular mass tabloids were onto us. They wanted to know everything about us. . . not just our lives as athletes. By the end of the 1967 season, the tour was a media frenzy.

Guy Périllat warned me in January, at the Tennein Kitzbühel, where we traditionally celebrated our success. He said, “Watch out, don’t get caught up in what happens around you. It brought me down after my 1961 season [Ed. note: In that season Périllat won all the downhills, followed by a dry spell that lasted several seasons.] But I know that won’t happen to you because you know how to keep things in perspective.”

With my experience of 1967, I learned how to deal with the constant presence of special correspondents from the French and international press. I had to be able to open the doors, then close them. That was also what I did the following Olympic season in Grenoble. A 30-minute press conference every day and that was it.

The American tour proved hugely rewarding for me. I had offers from sports agents. I was offered $200,000 to join the professional circuit and manage a ski school in the States. A lot was expected of me, but I had to stay focused on the Olympics the following year.

When did you become aware of the exceptional nature of the 1967 season?

I never really grasped it entirely. I didn’t realize what I’d achieved. Of course, there were the numbers: winner of 19 races out of 29, including 12 World Cups out of 17, and seven of the season’s combineds for a total of 26 first-place finishes. But I never said to myself, “Wow, that’s fantastic!” It’s taken me 50 years to realize how remarkable it was.

In Grenoble in 1968, by comparison, things were actually relatively simple. There were three races within a set period of time, at a date identified well in advance, with an objective that was fairly clear. The 1967 season was a more complicated, elaborate construction. Comparing them is like comparing a sprint and a marathon. 

In the summer of 1967, I quickly moved on to something new. I had an overwhelming passion for motor sports. I won The Targa Florio with Bernard Cahier and drove 1000 KM of Monza, the 24 hours of Le Mans, and the 1000 KM Nurbürgring behind the wheel of a Porsche or an Alpine. It was good to experience other sensations, and new challenges. Now, 50 years later, I’ve had the pleasure of revisiting this incredible season at the request of Skiing History. Thank you!

Yves Perret, who heads a sports media agency in Grenoble, is former sports editor of the Dauphiné Libéré newspaper, and was editor-in-chief of Ski Chrono.

By Michel Beaudry

Nancy Greene of Canada came from behind to win the 1967 inaugural World Cup overall title by the slimmest of margins in a thrilling final race.

Nancy Greene Raine is a force of nature. A two-time overall FIS World Cup champion (1967-1968) and an Olympic gold and silver medalist at the 1968 Winter Games, Greene Raine was raised in the ski-mad town of Rossland, British Columbia. Her contributions to the sport are legion. Along with husband Al Raine, she was an early promoter of Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains in BC before being drawn east to Sun Peaks in the mid-1990s, where the couple has played an integral role in making it one of the country’s most successful year-round mountain resorts. Her namesake program—the Nancy Greene Ski League—has been the gateway to racing for young Canadians for nearly 50 years. In January 2009, she was appointed as a Conservative member of Canada’s Senate.

In this exclusive interview, conducted in November 2016, Greene Raine, 73, looks back at the 1967 World Cup season, which she won by the slimmest of margins after mounting a late-season comeback.

Only one race left. And the young ski racer they call Tiger knows exactly how high the stakes are. Considered by many to be out of the running for the inaugural World Cup after failing to score any points for nearly two months, 23-year-old Nancy Greene of Canada has mounted an impressive comeback these last few weeks. It started with a third in Franconia, followed by a big-time win in Vail; then came Jackson Hole and a crushing victory in yesterday’s giant slalom. Suddenly her main rival is within reach again. But France’s Marielle Goitschel is still the overwhelming favorite. The only way Tiger can be crowned 1967 overall champion is by winning the slalom today. It’s all or nothing.

Still, Greene is coming into Sunday’s race with a big head of steam. “By this point in the season,” she explains, “I know that if I ski well I can beat anyone. So I’m going for victories, not for fourth-place finishes.” Her giant slalom result on Rendezvous Mountain the day before underscored that attitude: She dominated the one-run race by 1.72 seconds. She’s now only one win away from the title. She knows she can do this.

But the two-run slalom offers its own challenges. “The first run is always a bit of a gamble,” she says. “You want to go flat out and take risks, but you also want to make it to the second run.” Clearly, the same thing is running through the minds of her opponents. For when Sunday’s first run is completed and the times tallied, barely a tenth of a second separates Greene from Goitschel and French teammate Florence Steurer. The ski gods obviously want a dramatic finish to the season.

Who is this Canadian woman who dares to challenge the French skiing juggernaut of the late 1960s? And how the heck has she managed to hoist herself atop the World Cup standings?

Disappointment in portillo

Although Nancy Greene’s story really begins in the remote mountain town of Rossland, British Columbia, one need only revisit the 1966 World Alpine Skiing Championships in Portillo, Chile to get a glimpse of her exceptional drive to succeed.

“I went down to South America with very big goals,” she begins. “I fully expected to be on the podium there.” Makes sense. As a sixteen-year old newcomer to the Canadian Team, Greene had witnessed her mentor and roommate, Anne Heggtveit, win gold at the 1960 Olympics in Squaw Valley. And it had inspired the teenager tremendously. Now, six years later, the experienced racer thought she too could bring skiing glory to her country. But could she really do it? “I was too nervous in the slalom and didn’t perform very well,” she says. “But the downhill was coming up and I knew I was skiing fast.”

Alas, the downhill proved even more disastrous. “I remember my coach quietly telling me in the start gate: ‘Win it! Win it for me, Nancy.’” She sighs. “I guess that got me a little too excited. Near the bottom of the course there was this big roll over a road tunnel. In training, I’d always wind-checked before hitting it. But on race day I decided to take it straight.” Bad decision. “I crashed and somersaulted right into a retaining wall made of ice. I knew I had a good run going. I could even see the finish line…So frustrating.” 

Her best event, the giant slalom, was next. But badly bruised from her downhill fall (and skiing with an undiagnosed fractured tailbone), Greene finished just out of the medals in fourth place. 

Meanwhile, the French team, Les Bleus, had dominated the championships: Two out of every three medals had gone to them. As for Marielle Goitschel, she had won everything but the slalom…and only teammate Annie Famose had skied faster in that race. 

But Tiger didn’t come away from Chile entirely empty-handed. Says Greene Raine: “Rossignol had just come out with a new fiberglass ski they wanted me to try, called the Strato. So I tested a pair in La Parva before the World Championships. And I loved skiing on them. But I decided that I shouldn’t switch skis before such a big event, and I hid them under a huge stack of ski bags so I wouldn’t be tempted.”

Nancy returned home with her new skis and an even greater determination to win. “My coach, a former racer called Verne Anderson, also lived in Rossland,” she says. “And together we trained with a veteran who’d been a fitness trainer in the military. He knew nothing about skiing. But he knew everything about weight training.”

Greene had another secret weapon. The Canadian Team was now based out of Notre Dame University in nearby Nelson, BC. “It was so practical to have a place where everyone could live and work and study together,” she says. Smiles. “Besides, training with the men’s squad meant there was always somebody to chase.”

Things were also progressing well on-snow. And the more she skied on her new Rossignol skis, the more Nancy realized how much they suited her style. “They were 207cm giant slalom skis, and they really set me up for the season. In those days the thinking was that fiberglass skis were great on hard snow but you needed metal skis to go fast on softer snow.” She stops. Laughs. “Well, I trusted those Stratos so much that when I left for the first European races of the 1967 season, I left my metal skis at home.” 

It was a radical decision—and a risky one, given the dramatically different way ski races were being organized that year. “We really didn’t know much about this new circuit called ‘The FIS World Cup’ when we got to Europe in January,” she says. “I’m not even sure the Canadian Ski Association fully understood what was going on. We were all a bit surprised by the changes.”

And yet from the moment she came charging out of the gate that year, Tiger made her presence felt. Two World Cup races in Oberstaufen, Germany (a slalom and a giant slalom) and a gap of 1.24 seconds between her and the next finisher in the GS. At the second World Cup stop, in fabled Grindelwald, Switzerland, Greene won twice more, this time adding downhill points to her mounting World Cup lead. Five races, four victories. The Europeans were in shock.

Greene continued to ski well, if not quite at the same scintillating pace. In Schruns, Austria she was third in the slalom and fourth in downhill. Though they were closing the gap, the French women were still behind in the race for the overall crown.

But the members of the Canadian Team had race obligations back in North America and were scheduled to return home. Would Greene be forced to accompany them? “It wasn’t common practice to leave athletes behind to compete on their own in those days,” explains Greene Raine. “But at the last minute, our coaches decided that my teammate Karen Dokka and I would remain in Europe for one more event.”

They didn’t have it particularly easy. “We were responsible for everything,” she says. “We even had to prep and wax our own skis. Still, it was a lot of fun. It felt very liberating to be left alone like that.” But the lack of team support began to show and she failed to earn any points at the next two races in St-Gervais, France. Still, when she left for home in February, many on the circuit were convinced Tiger was making the biggest mistake of her career. By missing the last European stops, they argued, she was leaving the door wide open for her rivals to score points.            

The World Cup points formula was complex that year: only the top three results in each discipline would count toward an athlete’s total in the race for the overall title. “But my dad, the engineer, had crunched all the numbers,” she says. “He was confident that there were still enough races in the spring for me to make up the point deficit.”

And so was Nancy. “I knew that I had to start strong in those first March races in New Hampshire. And if I could do that, well…” Although it was less than the victory she needed, Tiger managed to scratch her way onto the giant slalom podium in Franconia. But it was during the slalom the next day that she had her big revelation.

“The Canadian Team had been working with plastic boots since the previous spring,” she remembers. “One of our coaches, Dave Jacobs, had struck a close relationship with Bob Lange and so the Canadian men had been testing his boots for some time. Well, my feet were so small that it took Lange a long while to make a boot my size. But by March of ’67 they were done, and I received my first pair just before the slalom in Franconia.” A pause. “I remember skiing with them that afternoon. I couldn’t feel a thing. ‘I can’t ski with those,’ I thought. ‘Way too stiff.’”

But the skies cleared that night and Nancy watched the day’s mushy March snow freeze into a hard, firm surface. “I was still struggling with my decision: go with my soft leather boots or try the stiff plastic ones. But then I realized: ‘It’s going to be boilerplate tomorrow. What better time to use the new boots?’”

It wasn’t love at first try. “I was all over the place on my first run… skiing really raggedy. But I got the hang of those boots by the second run and skied really well. Unfortunately I didn’t finish—I caught a tip near the bottom of the course. Still, I knew what I could achieve in those boots with a little practice.”

She never looked back. By the giant slalom in Vail, Greene was in full form again, winning the run by more than half a second. Only the World Cup finals remained. “My dad was still tabulating the points,” says Greene Raine. “’All you have to do,’ he said, ‘is win the last two races and the title is yours.’”

Last Stop, Jackson Hole

For some athletes the pressure would be unbearable. But Tiger thrives on it. Like a laser-guided missile, Greene launched into her Grand Teton weekend by blowing her competitors away in the season’s penultimate race. By the next day and the start of the slalom’s second run, Greene was in a three-way tie for the race lead. The overall title was now within her grasp. But the Canadian had to win the run.

“The course-setter for the second run has provided the racers with a choice,” she remembers. “There’s an elbow set halfway down the course. The rhythm goes one way, but if you jam your skis hard, you can straight-line the gates, and come out of the elbow with way more speed. But it’s risky…” 

Greene sees the trick passage during inspection and thinks, ‘I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m going to shoot the gate.’ But it might prove costly. While most of the women take the easier route, the racer just ahead of her attempts the straighter line, catches a tip at the top of the elbow and takes out all the gates.

Now it’s the Canadian racer’s turn to worry. “There I am standing in the start gate thinking to myself: ‘If they re-set the course any different than it was, I’m hooped.’” 

Meanwhile, the announcer at the finish line is whipping up the crowd. What he doesn’t know is that there are loudspeakers at the start too. Says Greene Raine: “I’m still in the start gate, waiting for the course to be cleared, and all I can hear is the emcee saying over and over: ‘The next racer is Nancy Greene. She needs to win here, folks, second place isn’t any good.’” She laughs. “I think it’s around the fourth time that he says ‘this could be the most important moment in her life’ that something snaps inside me. ‘This is ridiculous,’ I think. ‘It’s Easter Sunday. Look at the view. What a beautiful place this is.’” She pauses for a beat. 

“I’ll always remember that moment,” she says. “It was like an out-of-body experience. And it put me in just the right frame of mind to race that final run.” Another stop. More laughter. “Well, I shot the gate just like I’d planned, and made it safely to the finish line. I think I beat Marielle by 0.07 of a second in the total time.” But it was enough. Tiger had just won history’s first ever World Cup of skiing by the merest of margins: four points (176-172). It was a racing tour de force rarely matched since. And it ensured Nancy Greene’s place in the ski pantheon of all-time greats.