Competition

How concern for the national health and military preparedness led France to build the infrastructure for Chamonix, 1924.

By E. John B. Allen

 

The generation of men and women who took to recreational skiing on the Continent prior to the World War I looked to Scandinavia as the fount of all things skiing, northern countries with a five-thousand-year head start in utilitarian and sporting activities. The Continent’s military noted the effectiveness of Norwegian ski troops and eventually emulated the notion, Russian, German, Austrian, Swiss and Italian regiments were experimenting with ski troops in the 1890s. The English were contemplating training ski soldiers to guard India’s Himalayan frontier.

The French soon followed. Toward the close of the 1800s, Italian-French border relations had taken on a wary unease. The Revue Alpine of 1901 noted that France and Italy had designated frontier zones in which civilians were not allowed. It was natural then that French military officers stationed in the alpine forts had begun by 1891 to consider using ski troops to patrol the alpine border.

Four French officers made attempts to introduce skis to the military: Lieutenants Widmann, Monnier and Thouverez, and Captain Francois Clerc. Widmann was Swedish, Monnier had skied in Norway, Thouverez was with France’s 93^rd Mountain Artillery, and Clerc commanded a company in the 159th Infantry Regiment. These four wrote to the French Ministry of War, prodding them toward establishing ski troop detachments.

The major obstacle to the idea was the general ill health of the French mountain people—the population habituated to the altitude and climate from which the crucial recruits must necessarily be drawn. French villagers of the time survived in primitive and unsanitary conditions that were especially deleterious in winter. Tuberculosis and influenza were rampant, along with the afflictions of goiter and rickets. The romantic patina often applied by writers of village life in the Alps before the intrusion of tourism and urbanization ignored the struggle for survival against disease, malnourishment and unsanitary conditions that were endemic a century ago.

The health problems were acute enough that governmental efforts to improve them took on a note of urgency. In 1902 the French Assembly passed a public health law. How it was carried out depended on the efficiency of each region’s Hygiene Council. In Grenoble, for example, the Isère council took up anti-tuberculosis measures right away according to the 1902 archives of the Grenoble Counseil d’Hygène. Problems with drinking water and sewage disposal continued, however, until addressed in 1908.

A French law of April 15, 1910 gave to the high altitude, climatic stations the right to charge vacationers a residence tax under the condition that certain hygienic conditions be guaranteed, a closed sewer system, etc. These rules were modified and finally set down by France’s Academy of Physicians in May 1913.

Both French national and regional governments were also deeply desirous of supporting and maintaining the growth of mountain tourism. Government health initiatives were driven increasingly by economic as well as military and public health considerations. The steep growth of winter sports devotees early in the 1900s occasioned sharp scrutiny during the winter months by local health commissioners. A not inconsiderable amount of money was at stake. The fortress town of Briançon, for example, hosted 50,000 visitors in 1909, a figure that rose to 65,000 by 1911, according to La Montagne, the publication of the Club Alpin Francais (French Alpine Club, or CAF). Mountain tourism was growing to the extent that huts owned by the French Alpine Club were being replaced here and there by small hotels catering to sportsmen.

There was also a second growing stream of city people who came for “the cure,” a better chance to recover from tuberculosis or influenza. Allotte de Fuye, an early alpinist-skier, wrote in 1891, “Doctors will very quickly understand…that influenza cases…should be sent fleeing from the pestilential centers to breathe the revivifying air…with no trace of microbes.”

There were no flu vaccinations in that day. In the next quarter century, the flu mercilessly wiped out a hundred million people around the world  in recurrent epidemics.  In the West, more individuals died as a result of the 1918 flu epidemic than were killed in World War I to that point. People paid great attention to scientific studies promising a healthier environment at higher altitudes. A report in the 1884 Annuaire de l’Oservatoire showed that a cubic decimeter of air could have a widely-varying bacteria count: 55,000 in the Rue de Rivoli, Paris; 600 in a Paris hotel room; 25 at 560 meters altitude in the French Alps and 0 at 2,000 to 4,000 meters. Clearly, such studies supported the belief in the healing and hygienic advantages of health-cum-sporting stations.

The health problems of the mountain population had to be dealt with, first and foremost. Along with disease, alcoholism was frequently given as a reason for their ill health.  But alcoholism was probably not a problem on a level with that of winter living conditions. Maintaining sufficient warmth to sleep comfortably, in the context of sparsely available firewood forced the villagers to use body warmth of their domestic animals. Mountain farmers simply moved above their stables from December to April. The degeneration of the mountain population, Clerc wrote, “is not due to alcoholism…but to the fashion of living in winter.” The captain had recruited in these villages, had gone into “these dens [where] one cannot breathe after a few minutes.”

“Five months stable living,” commented another observer of winter conditions in the French alpine villages. Val d’Isère was Val Misère: “snow, always snow, then snow again and after three days no hope; the beasts are shut up for six months. For a month now the snow has kept us in our houses and all work stops. We await March and April,” was the summation appearing in the 1903-04 Revue Alpine.

Malnourishment was also severe. In 1905, Captain Clerc noted that “in certain high villages…one is unhappily impressed by the rickets of the race. In five male births, one has trouble in a few cantons to find a [20-year-old] fit for service.” A survey by the military showed that a great number of  conscripts from mountain villages had failed to grow to a mature height of more than five feet. Another result of poor diet was that four per cent of the population of mountainous Savoy, long known as “the fortress of goiterism,” suffered from the affliction. Recruits at the Briançon garrison were taken to see the unfortunates, “emblems of beauty,” as one wrote on a postcard home.

The immediate military threat from Germany became stronger toward the close of the 1800s. With the defeat of 1870-71 always in mind, the national need for a pool of youth strong enough to withstand warfare both in summer and in winter spurred the French to found a number of sporting associations to promote healthy, athletic pursuits for youngsters. The Ferry laws of 1881 made military exercises compulsory in schools and may have given the impetus to the burgeoning number of sports clubs engaged in shooting, gymnastics, running and swimming. Although a report from the Jura noted that, while there were 105 shooting clubs in the region compared to eight ski clubs, skiing nevertheless became part of this movement to combine sport, morality, health and patriotism. 

The Cercle de gymnase de Serres was founded in 1876 for “honest recreation and to encourage sentiments of virtue, fraternity and patriotism.” In Gap, Les Etoiles des Alpes was founded in 1884 “to give youth a civic education as preparation for military service.” One sports organization published a statement in 1911 stressing development of the “physical and moral forces of the young, [to] prepare in the countryside robust men and valiant soldiers and create among them friendship and solidarity.”

This is exactly what the French Alpine Club implied in its motto Pour la Patrie par la Montagne. Its leadership sought to persuade mountain villagers that skiing was not just some wealthy acrobatic sideshow. The French Alpine Club’s Winter Sports Commission, created in 1906, was given official charge of French skiing a year later on the condition that the commission recognize the importance of “skiing’s patriotic and military importance and, its moralizing force as a sport.”

The sentiment was based on the belief that, at the turn of the 20th century, the Norwegians had taken to skiing “as part of their regeneration” during their bloodless but acrimonious and bitter struggle for independence from Sweden. Thanks to a general belief that physical exertion could halt the degeneration of the French mountain people, skiing was transformed from a pastime of the adventurous and wealthy into a means to ensure “strong men and strong soldiers.” Herein lay the true purpose of what was billed as CAF’s first Winter Sports Week, yet the diplomas were for a Concours International de Ski. It was held at Mont Genèvre, near Briançon on February 9-13, 1907. Designed as propaganda for military preparedness, it also had the effect of bringing skiing to civilian notice. The French Alpine Club and the French military both pushed skiing as a means to “better the nation’s defense at the same time as bettering the alpine population.” Both Clerc and subsequent commanders at Brançon, Captains Rivas and Bernard, encouraged soldiers who had received ski training during their periods of military service to return to their villages and teach children to ski. This would drag the villagers out of their winter hibernation and ensure a supply of able ski troop recruits. Rivas, for example wrote in 1906 that he was delighted that 15 out of 18 demobilized servicemen were making skis in their own villages that year.

The French Alpine Club made skiing as a patriotic fitness crusade. “The amelioration of the race haunted us,” wrote Henry Cuënot, the leading CAF spokesman as president of its Winter Sports Commission, looking back at the club’s early efforts to promote the sport. “One knew that Norwegians took to skiing as part of their regeneration, one understood its patriotic and military reach. One wanted to make strong men and strong soldiers.”

The French Alpine Club undertook to organize annual international ski meets, beginning with the one in 1907 at Mont Genèvre near Briançon. From the first, these ski meets ranked as major national sporting events covered by a large number of French papers. There were reporters from L’Illustration, L’Auto, Armée et Marine, Le Petit Parisien, Les Alpes Pittoresques—to name five of twelve newspapers represented at Mont Genèvre. Visiting foreigners brought the excitement of international competition with the Italian Alpini providing a special dash. At Genèvre there was an ice Arc de Triomphe. On one side was CAF’s motto, Pour la Patrie par la Montagne (For the Fatherland by way of the Mountains), on the other was L’Amour de la Montagne abaisse les Frontières (Love of Mountains does away with Frontiers).  Patently, skiing was part of the Franco-Italian détente. CAF held its second meet in 1908 at Chamonix. The third in 1909 was at Morez in the Jura. CAF’s letter soliciting prizes for the Morez meet was clear in its meaning: “Our context is the most powerful means of spreading in our country, a sport which regenerated the Norwegian race.” And Norwegians were always present, adding their supreme authority to the competitions.

The theme of regeneration runs through club discussions and reports. Henry Cuënot, the spokesman for regeneration, wrote many of CAF’s notices. The military fully supported the annual meets by providing a band, teams of soldiers, and the patronage of any number of high-ranking officers. These patrons, if they did not attend themselves, sent deputies to speak the right words at the award banquets. At the 1908 meet, General Soyer, filling in for General Gallieni (who had been at the meet the previous year), affirmed that “all mountain sports are incomparable in making men valiant and vigorous.” 

The fourth CAF meet was held in 1910 at Eaux Bonnes and Cauterets and the fifth, the following year, at Lloran. It was CAF’s policy to hold the meets all over snow-covered France. By the time the seventh annual meet rolled around, correspondents from 17 papers covered the event held in the Vosges  at Gérardmer in 1914, and was the occasion of the awarding of the first military Brévet for skiers. Successful candidates won the right to choose which ski regiment they would join when called to the colors, which happened all too soon; August 1914 the tocsin sounded for World War I.

But Chamonix was coming into its own during those years. It was not the mountains that had first attracted men to the Chamonix valley, but its glaciers. In the enlightened 18^th century had come the Englishmen Windham and Pocock, the first of a long line of gentlemanly amateurs. Mt. Blanc was climbed in 1786. In the Romantic age, the high lakes were the attraction, and only from about the mid-19^th century did alpinism take hold. There was much foreign business prior to skiing in the valley. In 1860 Chamonix welcomed 9,020 visitors, in 1865 the number was up to 11,789, with the English supplying about one third. Chamonix became “a little London of the High Alps” in the summer season. In 1860 there were 7 hotels, 10 in 1865 including the 300-bed Grand Imperial. An English church was built in 1860, the telegraph arrived two years later, the first of the mountain huts, the Cabane des Grands-Mulets was ready in 1864, and Whymper climbed the first ‘needle’ in June 1865. Skiing came in 1898. Arnold Lunn remembered the guide “who regarded his skis with obvious distaste and terror. He slid down a gentle slope leaning on his stick, and breathing heavily, while we gasped our admiration for his courage.” Chamonix skiing prospered thanks to the local GP, Dr. Payot, who took to visiting his patients on skis. By the beginning of the 1907-08 season there were about 500 pairs of skis in town. CAF was mightily pleased with its propaganda, for skiing was “social and patriotic at the same time.” Chamonix was CAF’s choice for its Second International Week in January 1908. Two hotels had remained open for the winter of 1902, four in 1906, and the number tripled by 1908. The hoteliers had been skeptical at first of CAF’s enthusiasm, but had joined in as the day grew closer. They ended up “surprised by the affluence of their visitors” whose choice was for hotels with central heat. Heating was a major concern for villages and towns as they started to attract winter visitors.

The meet was a resounding success. The reception for the alpine troops, the gentry in their sledge carriages made a fine show, baby carriages on runners provided a charm and calm to the physical presence of all the skiers, the lugers, and bobsled teams. The sober colors of the skiers’ clothes mingled with the elegant costumes of the ladies. Officers from Norway, troops from Switzerland and of course, France’s own Chasseurs Alpins were the cynosure of all. The throng included amateurs from home and abroad, and guides and porters busied themselves throughout the town: all under a radiantly blue sky with the Mt. Blanc chain creating a magnificent backdrop, “a picture rarely seen and suggestive to a high degree.” Chamonix had become Chamonix-Mt. Blanc, a “new winter station…equal to the big Swiss centers,” enthused one commentator in the Revue Alpine.

A new winter station? Maybe. Certainly one not to equal those in Switzerland, nor, indeed, could it compare with its status as a summer destination. In the summer of 1907, Chamonix welcomed approximately 2,000 visitors a day, for a total of c. 170,000. A little more than 2,000 had been in town for its winter week. It was a start to Chamonix’ becoming France’s premier ski and winter sports station, even if it could not compete with St. Moritz and Davos.

Although the numbers of visitors did not greatly increase during the winter seasons—11,725 in 1911-12 to l2,975 in 1912-13—Chamonix’ standing as premier in the places to ski was enhanced by CAF’s sixth international competition in 1912. Of course there was commentary in the French papers, but it also received notice in Oslo’s Aftenposten  and in the Italian paper, Lettura Sportiva. Excelsior, a French paper, put it exactly right, just what CAF wanted to hear: “Chamonix shows, this year, as in others, that it knows how to organize sporting events.”

Chamonix capitalized on its renown and started major advertising abroad. “Sunshine is Life” read an advertisement cued to the fogged in English in 1913. Cheap 15-day excursion return tickets from London cost just £4.0.3 in 1913.The following year the town’s tourism committee decided to spend some of its advertising budget on Algerian and Tunisian newspapers. As the war loomed, Chamonix was thinking internationally.

During this pre-war period, skiing also spread throughout the local community. Much of the early enthusiasm was generated by Dr. Payot. He made the Col de Balme on February 12, 1912 and followed it by crossing the Col du Géant to Courmeyeur in 14 hours two weeks later. The following season he did the traverse Chamonix to Zermatt. He not only was an ardent apostle for skiing, but also for its physical benefits. Skiing was seen as liberating Chamonix folk from the servitude of the snow, bringing health and renewal. As Payot wrote in 1907 in La Montagne, Chamonix residents of all ages were taking to the sport enthusiastically. It was life in the open air. It was impossible, wrote Payot, “when one has got the blood going and the lungs full of pure air to endure the nauseous atmosphere of double-windowed houses.”  It was the end of anemia by confinement. Living was being aerated and sun-drenched, and this, better than thirty ministerial changes in the government, would bring both moral and physical benefits.

It was to youngsters, though, that the French government leadership looked, “impetuous and fecund youth which is little by little declining; they all come to ask of the sun and the pure air power for the days to come or the courage to replace what the days past have extinguished.” There was a strain of romantic desperation sounded as the ominous possibilities of armed conflict between France and Germany turned to probabilities on the eve of World War I. Pour la Patrie per la Montagne took on new significance in the years leading up to the declaration of war in 1914. The French Alpine Club organized L’Oeuvre de la Planche de Salut to provide free skis for mountain children. Few would miss the double meaning of Planche de Salut—these skis were not merely healthy boards but they were also boards of last resort, as one might throw out to a drowning swimmer.  In a few years the children “will make a marvelous army of skiers perfectly trained and ready to defend the soil of the fatherland if needed.”

 “Today,” wrote one of the very few critics of the idea of mingling the ideals of sport and war, “it is not only correct but elegant to be patriotic. The wealthy…add snobbism to their personal pleasure in the aid of national defense, even of the regeneration of the race.”

But a patriotic attitude rather than irony held sway generally. The enthusiasm for fitness manifest in the French Alps, was echoed equally in the Jura, where the earliest sports organization was the “Vélo-Club,” founded in 1892, followed by the “Union Athlétique Morézienne” whose manifesto referred to skiing as “an excellent means of social hygiene.” The sick and the tourists came to the little towns of the Jura “to find repose and health in the mountains and the forests of fir.”

As proclaimed in Savoy, the French needed regenerating because of the squalid conditions of the cities. “Alcoholism, venereal disease and tuberculosis continue death’s work,” was one Savoy doctor’s summation in 1906.

The “air cure,” especially for weak children, was promoted in Chamonix. There puny mites were being turned into robust little fellows by sport and sun well prior to the onset of the Great War. Chamonix’ Dr. Servettaz claimed he required only two months to make children “stronger, with larger chests and lungs, muscles more solid and dense, blood more rich.” Chamonix’s high altitude was widely credited with increasing appetite as well as being good for sleeping.

A Mirroir article in 1914 carried a photo of tracks leading straight to a snowy peak with the skier victorious on top. The caption praised the true alpinist who forgoes the easy pleasures of luge and skeleton and who “with will power, courage, endurance, a strong heart, and fighting white vertigo, specializes in great ascents.” These physical and mental attributes, it was widely believed, would carry Frenchmen to victory in the oncoming battles of World War I. In the midst of the war, the French Alpine Club publicly speculated that one possible positive aspect of the war was that it would exercise a happy influence on general health. Whether it did is immeasurable.

Still, the Ministry of War in 1920, two years after the Armistice had been signed, recognized the French Alpine Club as the organization promoting “physical instruction and preparation for military service” by giving CAF a ten-thousand franc subsidy. Tourism and national health, however, had  by then become of more immediate concern than military preparedness. France was urged “to win the peace.” The National Tourist Office, the Ministry of War, the French railroad companies, and syndicats d’initiative all involved themselves deeply in the “future of tourism in France and the development of the race by the cult of sport.”

After the war as well, France’s mountain communities turned the number one national health problem to advantage. In the generation before the advent of antibiotics, tuberculosis killed off French citizens by the tens of thousands. In 1926, it was responsible for some 20% of all French deaths—almost 150,000. Since the only known effective cure was to dwell for considerable length of time in cold, clear mountain air, mountain villages began to bloom with “cure hotels” for tuberculosis patients. The extensive services required by the sanitariums busied villagers profitably in supplying the services required.

The tuberculosis bonanza, paradoxically, could have driven off healthy tourists. The French government, to meet this threat, distributed subsidies to the mountain villages agreeing to stringent conditions for hoteliers in order to separate patients and tourists. In Mégève, for example, all visitors in 1932 had to present a doctor’s certificate, attesting that they were free of the contagion.

The village of Passy went at the problem by dividing itself into two zones: between 1,000 and 1,400 meters, “cure hotels” and pensions catering to the tubercular received guests under medical supervision. The sick were barred from the second zone, within the village itself. As a result of the quarantine approach,  tourists continued to come. In the twenty-five years between 1914 and 1939, Mégève grew from a village with three hotels to a town with 66 hotels—from 140 beds to 2,400.

 Enter the Olympic presence: Winter Olympics had been contemplated since 1899 but had always run up against Sweden’s Colonel Balck, the promoter of the Nordiska Spelen.  His friend, Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games and president of the International Olympic Committee, was not especially noted for his keen interest in skiing. He had been impressed with Balck’s Games (particularly the military skijoring races) run every four years, and did not give much thought to trying to incorporate skiing into the Olympic program, in spite of what he said at Chamonix in 1924. He believed, in 1908, that skiing had a “hygienic value of the highest order” and called it “the best medicine for tuberculosis and neurasthenia.”  However, he was often invited to join the Honorary Committee of CAF’s meets.

 

After the war, Chamonix was also growing apace in the twin categories of health center and ski station, particularly the latter. It developed the best lifts and the most expert terrain and was, in that sense, the country’s most prestigious ski village. Chamonix in particular and the French in general had acquired an infrastructure and the experience needed to host ever larger winter competitions—both accumulated beginning in the prewar governmental programs concerned with health, war and tourism. The climax of all this effort came in 1924 when Chamonix was chosen as the site of what became in retrospect authorized as the First Winter Olympic Games. It had not been easy. The Scandinavians had opposed joining the Olympics for years. Coubertin was never an advocate and in 1920 believed that “les sports d’hiver sont douteux,” (winter sports are doubtful) as he penciled in on one protocol. The IOC felt increasing pressure to award the 1924 Games to France, “victor and martyr” of World War I. CAF threw its weighty support behind the proposals for winter games. Meanwhile the Scandinavians sent a warning to the IOC that if skiing were included, they would not attend. At its meeting in Lausanne in 1922, the IOC decided that there would be Games under its patronage but they were not to be thought of as “Olympic” and “champions had no right to medals.” The Games, then, were to be considered as merely an extension of CAF’s International Sporting Weeks that had begun at Mont Genèvre in 1907. The Scandinavians did not approve of this but went along with the contract signed with Chamonix (Gérardmer and Superbagnières were mildly considered) on February 20, 1923 since they were assured that they would not be Olympic Games. “It is absolutely essential,” wrote Siegfrid Edström, the Swedish President of the IOC to the French representative Baron W. de Clary, “that the Winter Games do not take on the character of the Olympic Games,” but to characterize them as “international” would ensure Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish participation.” All parties involved kept this international, as opposed to Olympic, front while the Games were in preparation. The Winter Sports Week was “not an integral part of the Olympic Games,” confirmed Fratz-Reichel, the Secretary of the Committee overseeing the plans and installations at Chamonix. As the opening of the Games drew closer, the difference between an international sports week and a Winter Olympic Games became increasingly blurred, even in the Executive Committee of the IOC. In effect, France’s immense turn-of-the-20^th century concern with the deteriorating health of its mountain villagers, its efforts to create a healthy population for military preparedness in the first instance, and a desire for profitable mountain tourism as a second priority led to a much grander concept. The mounting of ever more grand ski tournaments readied France in general and Chamonix in particular to produce what amounted to the First Winter Olympics, retrospectively granted that status by the IOC in 1925.

The uneasy beginnings of Winter Olympics at Chamonix continued to plague the Games in 1928. The Norwegian Ski Association voted 29 for participation, 27 against—hardly a vote of confidence for the Winter Olympics. Not one European had faith that the United States could pull off a successful ski meeting at Lake Placid in 1932. At the end of those ill-attended games, the Technical Committee of the FIS sent a stinging rebuke to Godfrey Dewey. In many ways it was remarkable—considering the politics of the 1930s—that the Winter Games survived the Nazi extravaganza at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1936. And then the Second World War put Olympic competition on hold for the duration.

Following the war, the Winter Games increasingly took on a powerful life of its own, particularly after it became fueled by television funding. It is now that huge international undertaking quadrennially riveting the attention of the world’s sports-minded.

The focus has changed drastically. Modern Winter Olympic commentators never hazard the thought that the Winter Olympics are put as a marvelous engine for producing a healthier world population or that these Games constitute fine physical conditioning for potential infantrymen. The theme of the Winter Games (and of the Summer Games as well) has become something altogether different, standing in as a benign substitute for war between nations, a sublimation of future Hiroshimas one hopes will never happen.

Today’s Winter Olympics is an exponentially-growing entity producing ever-larger spectacles for the world’s entertainment, achieving ever-greater complexity within its competitions and attracting ever-larger portions of the world’s attention during those weeks every four years when it is being held on the television screens of the world. In retrospect, it exhibits a wondrously paradoxical contrast to that long-ago series of modest French Alpine Club ski competitions from which those first Winter Games were born three generations ago.

A veteran journalist on the world alpine racing circuit recalls moments of high drama—and humor—from the Winter Games.

STORY BY PATRICK LANG

 

INNSBRUCK 1976

FRANZ KLAMMER’S RECKLESS
GOLD-MEDAL RUN

Franz Klammer produced one of the most thrilling moments in alpine racing history with his reckless gold-medal run on the treacherous Patscherkofel downhill course at Innsbruck, Austria in February 1976. It was a huge achievement, as there was so much pressure on him prior to that Olympic race. The Austrian had become a hero in his country after having won a dozen downhill races in previous seasons. His fans adored his down-to-earth personality and his aggressive style.

Klammer felt he “had” to win the Olympic downhill for the honor of his ski-crazy country and the estimated 60,000 spectators who gathered along the race course to watch the competition. The streets across the nation were empty and factory workers received a special break, so they could watch the event on TV with millions of their compatriots.

Everyone got nervous after defending Olympic champion Bernhard Russi from Switzerland set the best time after a nearly flawless run. The course was rougher when a nervous Klammer pushed himself out of the starting hut. The screams of thousands of spectators must have been heard for miles. The blow-by-blow delivered over the PA system didn’t help their nerves—Klammer was behind the leaders at the intermediate times. Even his coaches were tense. “He is out, he can’t make it…” shouted triple Olympic champion Toni Sailer, alpine director of the Austrian team, after seeing Franz fly high into the air off the Ochsenschlag jump in the upper part of the run.

Yet Franz fought hard to stay on line, his arms wheeling in the air while approaching the last turns. He was two-tenths of a second behind Russi. He nearly crashed again on one of the last jumps yet recovered to cross the finish line with the winning time, only a few tenths of a second ahead of his Swiss rival and friend. The crowd went nuts as the announcers in ABC’s commentator booth—Frank Gifford, Bob Beattie and their special host Jackie Stewart, the former Formula One world car-racing champion—told the world the results. “I can’t believe it, he has been amazing!” Stewart said. 

Only a few months later, Franz told me how he managed to clinch that title after his fantastic run. “When I started, the course was basically ruined and I knew I had only a small chance to win,” he said. “So I decided to take even more risks than I had planned, especially in the Ochsenschlag section.

“I had seen in training that a few skiers, including Ken Read of Canada, had tested a straighter yet very risky line there. As I approached it, I made a last-second decision to go for it instead of following my usual rounder line. I made a huge jump and thought I would crash, yet I managed to survive and land on my skis. I was not sure how much time I gained or lost, yet it gave me so much determination that I kept risking everything until the last meter. 

“I was amused later to discover that I was the only skier who dared to take that line. The other favorites were not as gutsy or crazy. That’s how I won that day.”

Photo caption: The race course was rough and the pressure was on when Klammer pushed out of the starting hut in the downhill. “I knew I only had a small chance to win,” he told the author. “So I decided to take even more risks.”

LAKE PLACID 1980

MOSER-PROELL WINS THE RACE… AND WINS REDEMPTION

Annemarie Moser-Proell dominated her time as no other skier before and after her. The Austrian set an impressive record of 62 victories and 115 podium finishes on the World Cup tour in only 175 competitions. Her last victory—in the Olympic downhill at Lake Placid in 1980—was particularly emotional and a great story, too.

To fully understand Annemarie’s crowning achievement, it’s important to look back at the 1972 Olympics at Sapporo, Japan. She was the skier to beat after her great season start, marked by five victories and four podiums finishes in all three classic specialties: downhill, slalom and giant slalom.

Yet the 18-year-old turned out to be the victim of the political storm that eliminated her teammate Karl Schranz, unfairly disqualified by the IOC at the beginning of the Games for having apparently earned endorsement money as a ski racer. 

Schranz didn’t want to leave Japan alone and he put pressure on the entire team to fly back home with him. There were some hot meetings within the Austrian squad, but the other racers didn’t want to miss their chance for an Olympic medal just a few hours before the start of the show. 

One of his strongest opponents was the very determined Annemarie Proell. She fought for her rights, yet lost focus and energy during the intense political battle.

After Schranz flew back to Vienna, where he was welcomed by a huge crowd on the main square, “La Proell” did her best to recoup, yet could not achieve her potential on race days. She finished second in downhill and giant slalom behind the unknown Swiss teenager Marie-Therese Nadig, who had never reached any major podium before the 1972 Olympics.

As a consolation prize, Proell won the FIS gold medal for her success in the three-event combined, yet she apparently threw the medal away after receiving it. 

Four years later, she missed the 1976 Games at Innsbruck; she had retired from racing the previous year to get married and take care of her dad, who was seriously ill. After his death, she staged a successful comeback. After clinching her sixth crystal globe for the overall World Cup title in 1979, Annemarie was aiming for the elusive Olympic gold medal in 1980 that she had missed eight years before. 

Yet this time, she was the hunter: Nadig had dominated the previous downhill races, winning six out of seven, as well as a giant slalom.  Moser-Proell had won three events, including a downhill, yet she had not been charging as hard as usual. But she still appeared confident heading into the Games. “I’m fully ready for Lake Placid; I have enough confidence for the big day,” she told me in January after her win at Pfronten in western Bavaria.

At Lake Placid she managed to stay quiet, resolute and ready for the last assault. On race day, she stayed laser-focused as she made her way down the course, despite strong gusts of wind that disturbed some of her main rivals, including Nadig. The Swiss favorite came in third this time, behind Moser-Proell and silver medalist Hanni Wenzel, who took gold in slalom and GS. Eight years after Sapporo, “La Proell” had enjoyed a superb revenge.

“I’m extremely happy. This success means a lot to me after all those years,” she told reporters at the post-race press conference that I was running in the modest base lodge of the resort. “Even though I had nothing to prove here, it’s a special victory after that nightmare in Japan.” The Austrian was obviously relieved to have blown away the dark clouds of Sapporo that had haunted her.

Having followed her career since her first victory in 1970, it was electrifying to hug her after the press conference—a record-setting athlete who had become a good friend.

CALGARY 1988

ALBERTO TOMBA, WINNING AND WATCHING WITT

The 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary were particularly intense, with ten alpine competitions held over two weeks. The preceding ski season had been terrific, too, as big crowds closely followed Italy’s unpredictable phenomenon Alberto Tomba, who was dominating the World Cup that season with six victories and a second place standing in the technical events.

In an interview before the Games, La Bomba told the press that his dad, Franco, might buy him a Ferrari if he clinched two gold medals in Canada—a mission he accomplished by winning the slalom and the GS. After his victories, Alberto told me he’d be pleased to watch East Germany’s attractive superstar Katarina Witt competing at the ice arena in Calgary. I spoke about it with ABC studio producer Draggan Mihailovich, a Tomba fan, who organized the journey.

An ABC van brought us from the medal plaza to the Saddledome arena. The Italian skier, closely followed by a crew from a U.S. network, was proudly wearing his two Olympic gold medals around his neck. Thanks to special accreditations, we were standing right at the rink when Witt started to perform. 

We had briefly seen Witt during our walk under the crowded stands, as she was exercising with her trainer, Jutta Mueller. As we approached her, Mueller, who recognized Tomba and might have read about his wish to meet her protégé, pushed Katarina into another room, so she wouldn’t be distracted by the handsome Italian playboy.

We enjoyed watching Katarina claim her second Olympic title after a brilliant show. But the skating star didn’t meet Alberto afterwards. They met later that year in Italy during an exhibition—and then again four years later at Les Menuires, the site of the slalom race for the 1992 Albertville Games.

Once more, it was Draggan, working then for CBS, who set up the encounter in a nice restaurant in the French resort. During the evening, Witt expressed her desire to ski once with Alberto, who had just collected his third Olympic title in giant slalom at Val d’Isère. “No problem, let’s meet tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

The next day, Katarina showed up on time with her gear, which Alberto’s personal bodyguard carried up to the hill. Nearly two hours later, they came back smiling. Witt was exhausted but happy about her exclusive ski lesson. “He was adorable. He showed me plenty of tricks and we had so much fun,” she told me afterwards as we sat down to enjoy hot chocolate and cakes.

The next day, Tomba finished a strong second in a slalom dominated by Norway’s Finn Jagge. Two years later, both Tomba and Witt competed again at Lillehammer. This time, Alberto could not attend her performance, but Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf was sitting next to me.

Photo caption: Italian superstar Alberto Tomba won gold in slalom and GS at Calgary, then cheered from the side of the rink as Katarina Witt of East Germany claimed her second Olympic figure-skating title. Four years later, they met for dinner and a private ski lesson. “He was adorable,” said Witt of her time with La Bomba.

ALBERTVILLE 1992

LITTLE-KNOWN PATRICK ORTLIEB SHOCKS THE SKI WORLD

The steep and sinuous La Face course at Val d’Isère, France, which was built in the late 1980s by Switzerland’s Bernhard Russi, the 1972 men’s downhill Olympic champion, launched an unexpected revolution in the sport.

Russi was selected to design the course by Jean-Claude Killy, co-president of the 1992 Olympic organizing committee, who used to ski on that part of the Bellevarde slope as a kid. Russi traced a new type of downhill that required great technical skills from athletes and a high level of performance from their skis. In fact, the course contributed to new technology in ski construction, ultimately leading to the parabolic “shaped” skis now used by most recreational skiers.

The older generation of established alpine speed specialists from that time—led by Swiss racers Daniel Mahrer, William Besse and 1991 downhill FIS world champion Franz Heinzer—had great difficulties in negotiating La Face with their traditional style, which was to enter the turns at full speed and throw the skis sideways to change direction.

The new downhill skis produced ad hoc for the Albertville course were shorter and narrower at the middle. They also required more feeling from the racers, who needed to steer them continuously from the entrance to the exit of each turn. It turned out that powerful skiers could exit the turns with amazing acceleration, a situation that caused some spectacular crashes.

Interestingly, none of the well-known “technicians” on the tour, like multiple overall World Cup champion Marc Girardelli or local favorite Franck Piccard, the 1988 Super G Olympic champion, clocked the fastest downhill time on race day. That honor went to a little-known Austrian from Lech, Patrick Ortlieb, who had never won a major event.

Wearing bib 1 and with nothing to lose, as he didn’t belong to the circle of favorites, he achieved an aggressive yet controlled run and set a time that nobody could beat. Many of the top guns failed to control their line in the tricky parts of the course.

Patrick Ortlieb’s win was the first surprise of the men’s Olympics events at Val d’Isère, yet he confirmed his success in the following seasons with significant triumphs on the World Cup tour, including winning the legendary Hahnenkamm race at Kitzbühel.

Another surprise was revealed later when my father, World Cup founder Serge Lang, intrigued by Patrick’s last name, discovered that he was a double national: Austrian, as he was born in that country from an Austrian mother, but also French through his dad, a cook from Alsace, who had emigrated to Lech to work, raise a family and run the Montana Hotel there.

“Ortlieb is a well-known name in Alsace; I think I know some of his relatives,” explained Lang, who was also born in Alsace in 1920. Patrick Ortlieb admitted afterwards that he had a French passport lying around somewhere at home, yet he was happy to race for Austria.

Ortlieb’s daughter, a tall racer and 17-year-old beauty named Nina, is now a member of the Austrian C squad after achieving some promising international results. She may soon compete on the World Cup tour. “Is she also French?” I asked him at the 2013 World Cup season start at Soelden. “Possibly yes,” he answered with a grin. 

Photo caption: Ortlieb takes flight over the men’s downhill course on his way to winning gold at Albertville. He was able to hold his line on a difficult course, while established speed specialists struggled.

 

NAGANO 1998

AFTER A SPECTACULAR CRASH,
HERMINATOR MEETS TERMINATOR

Some of ski racing’s greatest characters have attracted even more attention from the media and the crowds, thanks to nicknames invented by fans, friends or reporters. The best example is Austria’s Hermann Maier, one of the greatest personalities in alpine ski racing. He became famous in 1998 after clinching two Olympic gold medals—in Super G and GS—at Nagano despite a horrific crash in downhill. After that, he was known as The Herminator.

His formidable appearance, his determination on the slopes, and his numerous victories in the weeks prior to his trip to Japan had led reporters to use rougher nicknames, like The Beast, which Maier didn’t like at all. One of them had also briefly mentioned The Herminator, a combination of his first name and the invincible ‘Terminator” movie character, played by another Austrian legend, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The nickname became particularly apt after he survived his spectacular flight, several meters above the slope, and the post-landing cartwheels in soft snow. Two days after that frightening accident, he was facing the press to confirm his intention to race the following day in Super G. “It was quite a flight—for sure not as comfortable as our journey over here with Lufthansa,” he said with a grin. In a quick one-camera interview I made with him later on, he added, “I’ll be back!”

During one of our early morning production meetings at the CBS office at Hakuba, I discussed Hermann’s chance to excel in the Super G with play-by-play announcer Tim Ryan. “If anybody could do it, it’s for sure Hermann,” I explained with great optimism. I also told Ryan about that funny nickname and Maier’s comment. “That’s a fun story. We should do a feature on it with Arnold,” he said. “I think he is skiing right now at Sun Valley and I know his ski instructor. I’ll call him.”

Ryan didn’t need much time to get hold of Schwarzenegger’s Austrian-born ski instructor, Adi  Erber, and to organize a crew to do an interview with the movie star. Tim also talked directly to “Arnie,” who asked him for Maier’s phone number. 

I gave him the local phone number of Austria’s media coordinator, who did receive a call from Idaho after Hermann’s amazing comeback in Super G. Schwarzenegger was so impressed by Hermann’s triumph and his funny nickname that he wanted to speak to him. During the call, he also invited Maier to visit him next spring in Los Angeles.

They also had a great time in California, so it was no surprise when Arnold came the following year to Beaver Creek to encourage his friend, who clinched two more gold medals at the 1999 Ski World Championships. Apparently they also threw quite a party at Arnie’s suite at the Hyatt Hotel to celebrate the wins. 

Photo caption: Hermann Maier’s nickname, the Herminator, was inspired at the 1998 Games by the movie character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The two became friends. Above: Maier on the GS course in Nagano. Right: Schwarzenegger and Maier at the FIS Alpine World Championships in Schladming in February 2013. Austria in February 2013.

 

Patrick Lang, the son of World Cup founder Serge Lang, has covered 11 Winter Olympics since 1972 and has written about ski racing for dozens of media outlets. His company BioramaSports.com produces the Ski World Cup Guide and provides TV stations with reports from the World Cup circuit. He is a member of the Skiing History magazine editorial board.

History magazine editorial board.

This article first appeared in the January/February 2014 issue of Skiing History magazine.

How the Olympics came to a sleepy Adirondack village

 

BODE: LOOKING BACK TO THE 2006 OLYMPICS

By John Fry

Even before they turned off the gas to the Olympic Winter Games flame at Turin, the celebration of the world’s most famous skier had become a roast. At websites, Bode Miller fans despaired about their zero-for-five hero who didn’t try hard enough. The U.S. Ski Team’s trustees seethed at Miller’s expression of gratitude to them, “unbelievable a-holes, rich, cocky, wicked conceited super-right-wing Republicans.”  Washington Post sports columnist Tony Kornheiser created bodemillersucks.com about "one of the more colossal losers in recent sports history."

But then a remarkable thing happened. After a couple of weeks of playing golf and sightseeing in Paris, the prodigal star showed up at the World Cup finals in Sweden and did what he was supposed to have done in Italy. He won the Super G and placed second in the winter’s last downhill. He was relaxed and focused. Contrary to popular perception, Miller said that at the Olympics he’d been physically prepared and had tried hard. He complimented the Ski Team and its coaches. And his skiing reminded us of his prodigious talent.

Miller is the only American racer to have gold-medaled twice in a single alpine world championships. He is the first American to have won the overall World Cup title in more than 20 years. At his best, he combines Jean-Claude Killy’s natural feel for equipment with Hermann Maier’s colossal strength at his peak.

Along with Maier, he has shone a needed light on the invasive, less than foolproof way that the IOC’s Dick Pound and WADA are dealing with performance-enhancing drugs and blood enhancement.

Contrary to his self-indulgent image, Miller embraces the sport’s heritage. While other racers gobbled up World Cup points and money by specializing, Miller idealistically pursued the historic World Cup title of all-round skier, competing in every event. A purist undertaking.

In suggesting before the Olympics that participation is his main goal, Miller, in fact, echoed the ideal of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the modern Olympics. Participating, not winning, is a good message to send to kids, even though Miller is not every parent’s idea of a role model.

Before the Games, Miller accurately reminded us, as Phil Mahre did 20 years earlier, of the slim chances of winning Olympic gold in alpine skiing, where the difference between winning and losing a two-mile race can be as little as one-hundredth of a second, only a few inches of distance. However, that insight, along with Bode’s weak performance leading up to the Games, was ignored by the national media as they played up the exotic story of a White Mountain Tarzan.

Miller has two personae which resonate with contemporary society and the press: the spectacular athlete and the celebrity bad boy. The squandering bad boy, rebelliously bristling at institutions, was on full display at the Olympics, willing to declare that he was comfortable with not winning a medal. He seemed barely to study the courses. Critics wondered: Why practice and go to Carnegie Hall just to be seen on the stage?

When the U.S. Ski Team was in need of leadership, Miler was AWOL. He lacked the grace to show up at the finish line of the Combined slalom to congratulate teammate Ted Ligety on winning the gold that Bode was expected to win. He failed to shut down the motor on the mouth that quipped it was convenient not to have to motor to Turin to accept a medal.

Not that Bode’s sponsors minded. It is sufficient today for an athlete not to win but to talk about his fantasies of meeting a certain figure skater or to perform a cockamamie stunt before the finish line and miss winning the gold medal. The reward of behaving like an arrested adolescent before or at the Olympics is that magazines and TV shows, which seldom cover winter sports, will play up any color and controversy they find.  Bode perfectly fit their quest. He was the gold medalist of publicity.

It was not the kind of publicity, however, that pleased Bill Marolt, the U.S. Ski Team’s chief executive officer and the architect of its recent successes, who had flown to Europe before the Olympics to give his best racer a verbal spanking. Asked later about athlete deportment during the Games, Marolt stiffened his lip and said that, “We will manage these situations with both short-term action with those involved.”

The truth is that the U.S. Ski Team has never enjoyed much success in keeping its competitors in a state of sober obedience. Marolt’s own earlier governance in the 1980s drew resentment from the Mahre twins and wild Bill Johnson. In the 1970s, Spider Sabich and Tyler Palmer rebelled against alpine chief Willy Schaeffler. Miller is heir to an undistinguished American ski racing heritage.

To succeed the team must create an environment for individuals like Miller to succeed. On the other hand, the racer who is selfish and overweening forgets why he needs the team. He may even move into a motor home.

As a consequence of his stoic, lonely Outward-Bound upbringing as a child, Miller tends to isolate himself in a world-defying solipsism. “I don’t have to be what you want me to be,” he seems to say. Actually, it was Muhammad Ali who said that. Not coincidentally, Miller brings to skiing the kind of wondrous technique that Ali brought to boxing.

Having persuaded myself to forgive his Olympic conduct, I suggest that you do the same. A tad of perspective may aid the act of forgiveness.  Skiing itself has not been without its malingerers, including racers who ignored Olympic rules by taking money under the table. Professional athletes are not models of decorum, as newspaper sports pages sordidly remind us daily. But Bode Miller is not among those who have assaulted coaches and hotel receptionists. He hasn’t Terrell-Owened his teammates, or served prison time. He’s simply an eccentric Yankee who tries people’s patience because he stubbornly persists in learning about life on his own.

After Sochi, and another bronze medal, Bode stands 11th on the men's all-time list of "Most Valuable Racers" in Alpine Olympic events. See Matteo Pacor's statistics here.

 

 

An outraged IOC czar, an impenitent ski racer. Their loathing was mutual.

BY JOHN FRY

Prize money in a single World Cup race is now in six figures. Competitors openly negotiate contracts to promote skis and boots and snowboards, and earn mega-buck bonuses for winning Olympic medals. Commercialized racing on this scale didn’t exist under the FIS (Federation Internationale de Ski) 45 years ago, and prize money was forbidden. Nonetheless, at the 1972 Winter Games in Sapporo, Japan, members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) regarded ski racing as so tainted by money that it perhaps no longer belonged in the Winter Games.

At the storm’s center were IOC president Avery Brundage, a wealthy, autocratic American businessman, and Austrian racer Karl Schranz, two-time overall champion of alpine World Cup skiing and a favorite to win the Sapporo downhill. Their loathing was mutual. An outraged Brundage saw Schranz as someone who had to be ejected because he stood for the professionalism that would ruin the Olympic movement. An impenitent Schranz mocked the wealthy Brundage, branding him a hypocrite for denying athletes the opportunity to make money from their sport. Today, surveying the often obscene array of corporate logos smothering clothing and banners at Olympic sports venues, the dispute seems laughable. But it attracted world-wide attention at the time.

For some, the story began in 1968 with another controversy. . . perhaps the greatest surrounding the finish of any ski race ever held. Karl Schranz was again the central character. On the final day of the Winter Olympics above Grenoble, France’s national hero Jean-Claude Killy was poised to win the last of the three alpine skiing gold medals. The conditions for the slalom, however, were atrocious. Fog shrouded the course. Gatekeepers often could not see if a racer had made it around a pole. Racing in the second run,  Schranz claimed a figure crossed the course and interfered with his descent, although no official saw anyone. Climbing back to the top, he received permission to re-start his run, and beat Killy by a full half-second. Within hours, though, the jury disqualified him. The next day, I attended a press conference organized by the Kneissl ski factory for Schranz so he could protest his gold medal loss. It was an act that specially irritated IOC chief Brundage, who had earlier attacked the commercial relations between ski manufacturers and racers.

In the four years between the French and Japanese Winter Olympics, the FIS did little to appease Brundage. Among all the sports federations concerned with finding ways to allow athletes to earn money, the FIS proved itself the most inventive and liberal. It began to permit national ski federations, for example, to organize the present-day manufacturer pools through which sponsors funnel money to racers. In return, it allowed the racers to wear commercial logos.

To Brundage, all this was a clear violation of Olympic standards. At 84, after running the IOC for 20 years, he was determined to end the commercial abuses of skiing. . .if necessary, even by throwing as many as 40 of the leading racers out of the Olympics. Not surprisingly, the skiers kept a low public profile.

Except for Schranz. He attacked Brundage and his wealthy, senescent Olympic Committee members directly.  “How can they understand the situation of top ski racers,” he asked the press, “when these officials have never been poor?” That was enough for Brundage, who easily persuaded the IOC to to expel him from the Olympics.

Back in the Tyrolean Alps, prodded by incendiary newspaper headlines, infuriated Austrians called for their racers to leave Sapporo and come home in sympathy. But they didn’t. The tough, embittered Schranz was not popular with his teammates, despite his ranking as the number one alpine skier of the post-Killy era.

When the racers didn’t return, threats were made to burn down the home of the Ski Federation’s chief. Another official’s children were beaten up at school. Austrians perceived Schranz as a hero from a small country, bullied by bigger nations. Stores were flooded with Schranz T-shirts. When he flew back to a parade in Vienna, a horde of 200,000 people welcomed him home, chanting “Karl is richtig, Brundage is nichtig.” A beaming Schranz raised his arms in vindication.

The ski events at Sapporo took place on schedule. Petite Barbara Ann Cochran won America’s only gold, in the slalom. Brundage died in 1975. Efforts by International Management to market Schranz in America failed . . something of an irony. Today he operates a small hotel in St. Anton. To anyone timorous enough to ask, he will affirm that he was robbed of his gold medal in 1968 and that Brundage was wrong.

The truth? I’m certain he never won the Grenoble slalom.

On the other hand, Schranz-- a leftist with a keen sense of class strife -- won the battle to allow succeeding generations of skiers the right to make money. He also helped open the door for legions of sports marketers, lawyers, athlete agents, product sponsors and manufacturers, to say nothing of conflicted IOC officials, to make millions. Is this progress? No. Despite the influx of big money, ski racing was as exciting without it as with it. 

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.  

HARRACHOV, Czech Republic (March 10, 2011) — A 47-year-old ski jumper stands atop a HS-40 ski jumping hill. His body isn’t what it used to be, abused by thousands of jumps and landings and a seemingly lifelong battle with alcohol. Still, he’s hopeful. The Finnish legend, whose likeness has appeared on his country’s postage stamps, has given up the bottle, been training hard, and believes he may be peaking for this competition. He proceeds to jump 34 and 36.5 meters. His longest jump on that hill is less than 20 percent of his former world record, but it’s good enough. Matti Nykänen, arguably the greatest ski jumper ever to step into a pair of boots, has won the gold medal at the Unofficial World Championship of Veterans.

Born on July 17, 1963, in Jyväskylä, Finland, Nykänen was eight years old when his father dared him to try a ski jump near the family home. Matti obliged and ski jumping quickly became an obsession. “The only thing I wanted was to jump,” Nykänen says in Matti: The Biography of Matti Nykänen by Egon Theiner. “And to jump, and to jump again.” On March 19, 1974, Nykänen entered his first contest, on a small eight-meter hill, and took first place in his age group. 

By the 1975­–76 season, Nykänen was jumping from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day of the week. The ski jumping hill in Jyväskylä had a chairlift and floodlight, allowing him to put in more jumps per day than rivals who lived elsewhere. Theiner credits this local advantage, Nykänen’s singular focus on ski jumping, and new training techniques developed by Nykänen’s coach, Matti Pulli, such as having his jumpers wear weight vests, for the Finn’s future success in the sport. There were also many subtle technical aspects to Nykänen’s jumps that enabled him to fly farther than anyone else.

Nykänen’s domination of the ski jumping world began on February 11, 1981, when he took home gold at the FIS Junior World Championships. He claimed his first victory in a World Cup competition on December 30, 1981 and his first World Cup title in 1983. At the 1984 Olympic Games in Sarajevo, Nykänen won gold on the large hill and silver on the normal hill. His 17.5-point margin of victory on the large hill remains the largest in Olympic history. “No one could really touch him, it seemed,” says former competitive ski jumper Michael Collins. “He was definitely the guy you looked to, you watched for technique, because he did stuff no one else did.”

In March 1984, Nykänen broke the ski jumping distance record twice at Oberstdorf, Germany. He repeated that feat in 1985 while becoming the first person to clear the 190-meter barrier with a 191-meter jump. He also took home the World Ski Flying Championship in the process. Nykänen added more World Cup titles to his collection in 1985, 1986 and 1988. At the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, he became the first ski jumper to score three gold medals in a single Olympic competition as he won the normal hill by 17 points, the large hill by 16.5 points, and led Finland to gold in the team event. On the large hill, 23 percent of Nykänen’s flight was beyond the K-point, a record in the parallel style era. 

By the time Nykänen retired, he’d rewritten the ski jumping record book in his own image with five Olympic medals, 46 World Cup victories, four Olympic gold medals (since tied by Simon Ammann), three individual Olympic gold medals (since passed by Ammann), four World Cup gold medals (since tied by Adam Malysz) and 76 World Cup podium appearances (since passed by Janne Ahonen and Malysz). “He was kind of a savant," says former USSA ski jumping coach Larry Stone. “He couldn’t tell you what he was doing, but he was absolutely the best in the world by so much for those years…He was a genius. Absolute genius.”

Flying high and falling far

Nykänen, however, possessed an Achilles heel: alcohol. The ski jumper started drinking when he was 14. By the mid 1980s, drinking was having negative impacts on his behavior and, occasionally, his performance. Fights, breaking windows with his bare hands, lockups in police holding tanks, drunken interviews, being sent home early from competitions—they were all part of a perpetual Nykänen hangover.

“They tried everything with Nykänen,” Stone says of the superstar’s coaches. “They made him take pills that would make him violently nauseous when he would take a drink. For every athlete that’s a wild man, you’ve got to find a balance that doesn’t destroy what makes them great, but by the same token try to keep them from destroying themselves. And sometimes you find that there’s no way.”

Alcohol abuse combined with the cumulative effects of injuries fueled Nykänen’s competitive decline. By 1991 the last great star of the parallel era was finished, but retirement didn’t calm him. Lacking an outlet for his hyperactivity, Nykänen did not adjust to post ski jumping life well and became even wilder. “I changed from a well-known system into a phase of insecurity,” Nykänen says in the biography Matti. “For all my life I had been doing something else and now that did not matter any longer … The world away from ski jumps was absolutely different from the one I knew so far.”

A stint as a pop singer in the early 1990s had a promising start, but soon fizzled. Financial problems quickly befell Nykänen, who peaked before big time prize and sponsor money was part of the ski jumping circuit. To deal with various debts, he reportedly bartered his gold medals, worked for a phone sex line and stripped at a Järvenpää casino. Nykänen’s been married five times, twice to millionaire sausage heiress Mervi Tapola, with whom he’s had a stormy relationship that has involved fights, restraining orders and more than a dozen filings for divorce.

Nykänen’s alcohol induced rages have led to brawls, knifings and domestic violence. He’s been incarcerated on several occasions, including a 13-month sentence in 2004 for stabbing a friend in a drunken brawl. Less than five days after his release on that charge, Nykänen was in prison again, this time for assaulting Tapola. “He’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Theiner says. “When sober, he’s one of the nicest and friendliest people I've ever met. When drunk, he’s dangerous and aggressive.”  

A return to the senior circuit and an International Masters Championship victory in February 2008 did not solve Nykänen’s problems. He was arrested again in December 2009, when, in yet another drunken rage, he reportedly drew a knife on Tapola and tried to strangle her with a bathrobe belt on Christmas Day. In August 2010, he was sentenced to 16 months in prison. The decision was recently upheld by the Court of Appeals, and at press time, he was appealing the sentence to the Supreme Court.

Still, there may be hope. The most recent reports about Nykänen are positive. He’s engaged to Susanna Ruotsalainen, a brand manager who gained some notoriety appearing on the Finnish version of The Apprentice.  Reportedly, Ruotsalainen has helped Nykänen give up alcohol and live a healthier lifestyle; his recent success on the veterans circuit being one sign of his healthy living. Nykänen also restarted his on again off again singing career and continues to make more positive headlines in Finland. The wedding between the two celebrities, however, has been postponed due to Nykänen’s legal issues.

“It won't last,” says Theiner of Nykänen’s new leaf. “Nobody can deal with the phenomenon Nykänen forever. And when you give him the possibility, he will drink and fight again.” 

A century-and-a-half after a Norwegian woman soared 20 feet in the world’s first recorded ski-jumping event, female flyers were still fighting for international recognition.

At the first recorded event in history dedicated solely to ski jumping, one of the jumpers wore a skirt. Ingrid Olavsdottir Vestby probably left the ground for around six meters, or almost 20 feet—“past the point where many a brave lad had lost his balance earlier in the competition.” Spectators shouted bravos because “they had never seen a girl jump on skis and they had been more than a little anxious as she flew over their heads.” She jumped in Trysil, Norway. She jumped in 1862. She landed in obscurity.

Today the history of women’s ski jumping has just begun to be written. Only in the 1990s were women first allowed to fully participate in international jumping competitions. For more than a century after Vestby’s historic jump, the spectacle of woman soaring on skis was widely regarded as dangerous, unhealthy, immoral, unladylike and unattractive. Of course, there’s a good explanation for the latter: the horror of mussed-up hair. Austrian Paula Lamberg, the “Floating Baroness” who set a world record in women’s ski jumping at 22 meters, was given grudging admiration in her country’s Illustrierte Zeitung magazine in 1910. But the quote provides a glimpse into the on-again, off-again history of women’s ski jumping—and the stubborn prejudice with which the sport has long been forced to contend.

“Jumps of this length are very good, even for men. It is understandable that ski jumping is performed very rarely by women, and taking a close look, not really a recommendable sport. One prefers to see women with nicely mellifluous movements, which show elegance and grace, like in ice skating or lawn tennis…and it is not enjoyable or aesthetic to see how a representative of the fair sex falls when jumping from a hill, flips over and with mussed-up hair glides down towards the valley in a snow cloud.”

How embarrassing was that?

Women’s jumping were not on the schedule at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, but they will be in 2014 at Sochi, Russia.

In November of 2006, in response to a proposal from the Fédération International de Ski (FIS), the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ruled that there was not enough technical merit among women ski jumpers to allow them on the jumps, and then immediately stated that the decision had nothing to do with gender. “There is no discrimination whatsoever,” IOC President Jacques Rogge said.

With a quick look at history, it becomes obvious that women’s exclusion has everything to do with gender. The reason too few women have been able to develop enough technical merit for the IOC’s standards is because they have been actively discouraged from ski jumping, from 1862 until today.

Under today’s helmets, nobody’s hair gets mussed, so that can’t be the problem. Could there be another reason why women have been kept from this last fortress of manliness?

Ladies Can’t Jump

At the beginning of the last century, the infant sport of skiing was introduced to North America by immigrant Norwegian miners and lumberjacks. They had a name for their sport: Ski-Idraet, meaning the sport of skiing that showcased high ethics, courage, discipline and physical fitness. By contrast, they preferred their women sweet, pleasant and soothing—and safely tucked away at home.

“To keep women away from sports and primarily men’s sports, medical arguments were quite often used,” says Annette Hofmann in her paper, “Female Eagles of the Air: Developments in Women’s Ski Jumping,” published in New Aspects of Sport History in 2007. “Vital energy theory,” for instance, said that women were born with a limited amount of energy; as child-bearers their bodies were reduced to “a morbid state” and thus were at risk when performing jumps, said Norwegian Christian Døderlein in 1896.

By the 1920s, doctors and female physical educators began to understand the importance of physical activity for women. They encouraged them to get out in winter, and enjoy themselves with skating, snowshoeing and skiing. But jumping was still out of the question. The latest medical concerns focused on the jolt of landing or a possible fall; at the time, uterine stress was believed to cause sterility. “Ski-jumping is not good for the female organism,” declared Gustave Klein-Doppler in the 1926 Wintersports Yearbook.

“This might be physiologically explained by the different construction of this sex. At this time there is no need or reason to organize jumping competitions for the ladies. Because of this unanswered medical question as to whether ski jumping agrees with the female organism, this would be a very daring experiment and should be strongly advised against.”

Those that spoke out against women in ski jumping even included sports women, like Germany’s Alpine World Champion skier Christl Cranz: “Cross-country skiing and ski jumping are athletic performances…for which a lot of strength and endurance is necessary, more than women can give without harming themselves…Certainly no reasonably sporting girl would think about participating in a marathon or boxing, and that is how it is with us women skiers; there is no interest in running or jumping competitions.”

Spooked mothers kept their daughters off ski jumps for more than half a century. Those fears and excuses seem positively Jurassic more than eighty years later. Imagine someone today saying, for instance: “Ski-jumping is like jumping down from, let’s say, about two meters off the ground about a thousand times a year, which seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.”

Yet that’s what FIS and IOC official Gian Carlo Kasper said—in February of 2006. Meanwhile, women are participating in much more dangerous Olympic ski events, such as the downhill, in which racers are occasionally killed, and in the brand new skicross and snowboard cross, where four racers hurtle down a twisting, bumpy track at the same time.

At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Alissa Johnson sat on the sidelines and watched her brother slide down the inrun instead. “So far, we’ve been told every excuse in the book. That it’s too ‘dangerous’ for girls. That there aren’t enough of us. That we’re not good enough. That it would damage our ovaries and uterus and we won’t be able to have children, even though that’s not true. It’s so outdated; it’s kind of funny in a way. And then it’s not.”

To Make a Long History Short

Ingrid Vestby may have made a daring venture into ski jumping in 1862, but she certainly didn’t jump into any history books. She must have influenced a few of her fellow Norwegian women, however, because by 1896 there were enough of them to organize the first (unofficial) national ski-jumping competition for women.

The self-proclaimed Mecca of ski jumping, the mighty Holmenkollen, was built in 1892 to host the Norwegian national cross-country and jumping competitions, and Scandinavians held tight to their tradition. Even as they immigrated to North America, particularly the American Midwest, they set up their rickety scaffolding and continued to dominate the sport. Early men’s competitions literally put Norwegians in their own class to give newcomers a fighting chance at winning a prize of their own. Women didn’t have any class at all, on either side of the Atlantic. No woman would “diminish the allure of the sport” by being allowed to jump at Holmenkollen in Norway until 1978.

Official recognition didn’t stop them from jumping. In 1904, a Norwegian Miss Strang jumped 14.5 meters; Tim Ashburner’s History of Ski Jumping (Quiller Press, 2003) noted that the English Miss Hockin jumped “very gallantly” at the first British Ski Championship in 1911, landing seven meters without falling.

Probably the best-known woman jumper of the era—even of the century—was “the Floating Baroness” Paula Lamberg, from Kitzbühl, Austria. She set a record of 24 meters in the 1920s. By 1926, the Norwegian Olga Balsted Eggen had jumped 4.5 meters further.

The extent of the Baroness’ fame was obvious even in Canada in 1921. That year at an Ottawa jumping championship, the Montreal Star reported, spectators were shocked to see that the world title for ski jumping was going to be challenged by a woman. The flamboyant “Countess Alma Stang” soared off the platform, looking to set a new record—until her wig fell off and revealed her as a man in drag. It was a backhanded compliment to the Baroness.

Queens of the Skies

Before the 1990s, ski jumping for women probably enjoyed its biggest surge of popularity in the Roaring Twenties. When a new jump was built in 1922 in Brattleboro, Vermont, the first person to fly off it was the man who got it built, Fred Harris, founder of the Dartmouth Outing Club; the second person was his sister Evelyn. All over town, the local papers reported, “youthful interest manifested itself by the innumerable ski jumps built all over town by the boys and girls.”

It may have sounded like equal opportunity, but during the 1920s and 1930s women were kept off the official jumping programs. Norwegian stars like 14-year-old Hilda Braskerud and 17-year-old Johanne Kolstad matched the boys in their distances, but were regulated to jumping “outside” as “trail jumpers” during the breaks. After a decade of constant scolding by the Norwegian Ski Federation that “women’s cross-country skiing and ski jumping are not desirable,” Kolstad left for the USA. Re-christened the “Queen of the Skies,” she proved it by jumping a world record of 72 meters in 1938.

When women did go off the same jumps as men, they often went as “glider girls,” taking off while holding hands with a male partner—a trick that seems more dangerous than going solo.

One woman who didn’t want her hand held was Isabel Coursier. Born in Revelstoke, British Columbia, Isabel watched the boys leaping off the new jump there, but nobody thought to ask her to join them. Instead, at a winter carnival she entered the “ski-joring” competition, a race in which the skier is pulled behind a galloping horse. “She beat all the boys,” says Wendy Bryden in her book Canada at the Olympic Winter Games. That finally got her the invitation to jump on the “Boy’s Hill” on Mount Revelstoke.

By 1923 Coursier got on the big jump, and promptly bested the Baroness’ world record by jumping 25.5 meters (84 feet). She was the only woman on the jump that year to compete unassisted, and went on to soar from numerous jumps across North America. Her fame led to a jumping exhibition with men’s world-record holder Nels Nelson for then U.S. President Warren G. Harding.

Like Coursier, many other women were able to jump throughout North America, for the most part in winter carnivals. At Colorado’s Steamboat Springs, for example, “ladies and girls” had their own jumping events. One of the most notable jumpers was Beatrice (Bea) Kirby. Since 1993, a trophy in her name as been awarded to the best jumper.

Another exceptional (in every sense of the word) American jumper of the period was Dorothy Graves of Berlin, New Hampshire. After jumping with the Queen of the Skies at an indoor international meet at Madison Square Garden in 1938, she went on to a career competing with men in both Class A and B during the 1940s.

In 1924 at the first Winter Olympics (which weren’t given that title until a year later) in Chamonix, France, ski jumping was one of the original six sports. But despite all the proof of women’s skill and bravery in making world record jumps—despite the Floating Baroness, despite the Queen of the Skies, despite Isabel Coursier’s Presidential jumps—women’s ski jumping was banned from those first Games.

It would take the IOC until 1991 to rule that each event must have a female equivalent. They made an exception, of course, if the sport was “grandfathered” in without a women’s component…like jumping.

With such a lack of respect for their abilities, and without encouragement for future generations, women’s jumping soon faded into the background. Over the next decades even men’s ski jumping (with its high insurance premiums) lost popularity to slalom, downhill racing and ever more extreme sports. It took until 1972 for a woman to beat the 72-meter jump record of Johanne Kolstad. Anita Wold of Norway, who had started during men’s competitions and was the first woman to jump at Holmenkollen, jumped over 80 meters that year. Four years later, while trying to bust the 100-meter mark, she reached a world record of 97.7 meters in Sapporo, Japan. In 1981 Finnish jumper Tiina Lethola soared 110 meters. Then things got quiet again, until a girl who had begun ski jumping at six years old entered the scene and began to forever change the complexion of women’s ski jumping.

The First Competitions

A modern ski jumper slides onto a horizontal start bar. Beneath the skis drops a narrow strip of snow and ice 90 meters (300 feet) long, with two perfect tracks and only one way to go. As the light turns from red to green, the jumper shifts forward and commits to sliding down the track at 60 miles an hour. When the tracks end and the slope flattens at the take-off, the jumper springs forward, arms pinned to the sides, head just above the ski tips, splayed skis slicing the air.

And then, a few seconds later, they land back in reality.

In 1991, Austrian Eva Ganster and her friend Michaela Schmidt, who had both headed down those slick slopes since they were young girls, began ski jumping at competitions. Only there weren’t any competitions for women. They jumped at men’s events as pre-jumpers, or jumped against men, or if they were lucky, like Karla Keck in the United States, they jumped in junior competitions. At every turn, like most women before them, they fought against officials who did not want the girls to jump, no matter how successful they were.

But by the mid-1990s, both Ganster and Schmidt had secret weapons: their fathers. Dr. Edgar Ganster and Hans-Georg Schmidt saw no reason why their daughters were not allowed to compete.

FIS officials trotted out that century-old scare of the female uterus bursting upon landing, but Dr. Ganster was having none of it. He and Schmidt began to push towards getting women their own jumping competitions so their daughters would have a place to show their stuff.

It soon paid off. Eva Ganster made a pre-jumper appearance at the famed Viersschanzentournee (Four Hills Tournament) in Europe, and then in 1994 made a breakthrough by starting as a pre-jumper at the Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. She was 16 years old, and set a women’s world record of 113.5 meters at that event.

The FIS cautiously began to notice the girls, and in 1994 set up a group to study the possibility of accepting women. Meanwhile, in 1995 women were allowed demonstration jumps at the FIS Nordic World Cup in Thunder Bay, Canada, and again in 1997 in Trondheim, Norway.

By that time Ganster had set another record by being the first woman to jump on a ski-flying hill, designed for long jumps; she set a new women’s world record of 167 meters. Six years later fellow Austrian Daniela Iraschko would break the record with a 200-meter jump.

That summer of 1997, the first international meet for young female jumpers was held in Voukatti, Finland. It was a slow start; the competition was unofficial, the girls jumped in the men’s pre-program, and they were given no score. Not content with that, Dr. Ganster and Mr. Schmidt then organized a girls-only competition at the Junior World Championships in St. Moritz in 1998, hosting 17 jumpers from seven countries on a 90-meter jump. It was not sanctioned by the FIS.

With that minor success, the fathers put together a Ladies’ Grand Prix as a counterpart to the Four Hills Tournament for 1999. The 13-day tourney hosted 29 women from nine countries, with five different competitions. That year too, the US Ski Association included for the first time a women’s class in the US Ski Jumping Championships.

By the 2002-2003 season, the Ladies’ Grand Prix became the FIS Ladies’ Tour Ski Jumping; that summer a Summer-Tournee Ski-Jumping was established as well, and in the United States, FIS-sanctioned ski jumping competitions were held with five competing nations. But the USSA still refused women the opportunity to win prize money at the national level, even though they did so in all other skiing disciplines.

At the Nordic National Jumping Championships in Steamboat Springs, Colorado that season, coaches and parents pressured the USSA to get a prize together for the girls. The organization yielded, and a big deal was made of presenting a check so large three people had to hold it up. The amount first place winner Jessica Jerome received was $150. The men’s winner took home $1,200.

Thanks to Eva Ganster’s record-making jumps and her father’s history-making stubbornness, the Austrian Ski Federation became the first country to form a national female ski-jumping team in 2000, with its first members Ganster and Iraschko (Ganster retired in 2005). The next year, both Norway and Japan had national teams too, followed by Canada in 2004 and Germany in 2005. Although the United States had a team by 2004 (and a regular sponsor in VISA), the USSA accepted the American team in 2006. Since then, the Germans have ranked first in the world in women’s ski jumping, followed closely by the United States.

Another event in 2004 triggered more attention for the women jumpers. One of the best female jumpers of all time who had already won the Holmenkollen women’s title in 2004 and 2005, Norwegian Anette Sagen, was not allowed to jump K185, the Ski Flying platform in Vikersund. Torbjørn Yggeseth, FIS chairman of the ski jump committee, opposed Sagen, saying the jumping ability of women was not good enough to jump at international venues like this one. Media coverage was ferocious, and the debate led to an open battle over women’s rights in sports.

That same year, the FIS allowed the women the “B” category. The points won during the Grand Prix count for the Grand Prix and the total score of the Continental Cup, now the closest thing to a World Cup and “A” status for women jumpers. In 2006, women had their own category at the Junior World Championships in Slovenia.

All that was missing was their own World Cup, and inclusion in the Olympics.

The Real Fear Factor

By the mid-1990s, men’s ski jumping was in a deep crisis. Fabled Norway had more ski jumps than jumpers in the Norwegian Federation. Sexy and more dangerous sports like inverted aerials, skicross and snowboard cross were all over the place—and women were doing them. Those factors may have contributed to the FIS finally recognizing the first women’s ski jumping event on the eve of the new millennium. What took them so long?

There are a few theories, but it’s the way officials act towards the athletes themselves that gives the broadest clues. When FIS ski-jump chairman Yggeseth denied the “little girls” the right to ski fly, he said most jumpers were “doing something similar to sledding. They should stay on the small hills,” he counseled.

This kind of belittling of women jumpers happens, says Annette Hofmann, because “There is a hidden fear that women will be as good as men, and thus threaten men’s dominance.” A study published in the Journal of Biomechanics (commissioned by the FIS and IOC) proved that women jumpers could become “a real competitive threat,” thanks to their lower body weight. Both organizations introduced strict rules in 2004 to take away any weight advantage—men were already “dieting to the point of illness,” said an official in SKI magazine. Anorexia in men, traditionally a female disorder, has contributed to the fear that the sport (judged not only on distance but by mellifluous style as well) will be taken over by women. More concretely, there’s a real fear that women asking for a piece of the pie would cut into resources like contracts, prize money and positions.

Not in My Olympics

Nothing helped get women into the Olympics in 2010, including the fact that women’s ski jumping was a demonstration sport at the 2006 Olympics. Not even the historic decision on May 26, 2006, when the FIS accepted that women jumpers would have their own World Cup at the 2009 Nordic World Ski Championships in Liberec, Czech Republic. Or the FIS decision to let women have a team event at the 2011 World Championships.

The IOC’s decision to ban women from ski jumping in the Games (they had done it in 1998, 2002 and 2006 as well) were:

• Women’s jumping was still developing in its early stages

• It lacked a sufficient number of countries participating

• It didn’t meet the technical standards required

Also cited was the problem that two world championships had not been held. That rule seemed flexible—women’s cross-country skiing had its first world championship two years after it was accepted in the Olympics in 1952. Then one year after the IOC’s decision to disallow women, the rules were changed to a sport only needing one world championship.

“There are 80 women” ski jumping, IOC President Jacques Rogge said. “In any other sport you are speaking about hundreds of thousands, if not tens of millions of athletes, at a very high level, competing for one single medal. We do not want the medals to be diluted and watered down.”

Those in the sport come up with different numbers than the IOC. Jumpers claimed there were 135 elite female ski jumpers registered internationally, in 16 countries. To put that in perspective, snowboard cross had 34 female competitors in ten countries; bobsled had 26 women in 13 countries; and the new skicross had 30 women in 11 countries.

In 2006 Women’s Ski Jumping USA said that “there are more women jumpers worldwide, and competing on a higher scale, now than there were women competing in bobsled or skeleton at the time those sports were added to the Olympic program for women.”

A Legal Right?

American downhill and World Cup overall champion Lindsey Van is a fighter, and she’s hungry. She’s been jumping internationally since she was 13 in a sport that itself is fighting for recognition. She parties hard, she works hard at her sport, and she works hard at keeping her weight in line. “I’ve been hungry for twelve years,” she says.

In May of 2008, a who’s who of international women’s jumping stars filed lawsuit in the British Columbia Supreme Court against the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), the host of the 2010 Olympics. Canadian taxpayers footed a $580 million bill, they claim, for facilities with a men’s only sign; lawyer Ross Clark said that the absence of a women's competition is a violation of Canada's equal rights law, which is guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights.

The plaintiffs included Lindsey Van, along with Americans Jessica Jerome and Karla Keck, Annette Sagen of Norway, Daniela Iraschko of Austria, Jenna Mohr and Ulrike Grassler of Germany, Monika Planinc of Slovenia, and retired Canadian Marie-Pierre Morin (who had earlier moved to the U.S. after facing discrimination in Canada). Seventeen-year old Canadian Zoya Lynch joined the lawsuit later, but has since resigned from the Canadian team “out of frustration.”

“We're not asking for a new sport,” said Jessica Jerome's father, Peter, the vice president of Women's Ski Jumping USA. “We're not asking for a new discipline. We're just asking that an existing Olympic event allow women to compete.”

Yet the protests of women ski jumpers  did not fly. “It’s not a human rights case,” says Dick Pound, the Montreal lawyer and chancellor of McGill University—and member of the IOC since 1978. “It’s a decision on the part of the IOC. And it’s not going to stand them in good stead to sue a bunch of grumpy old men.”

Pound is no stranger to controversy and protests, and may even include himself in the Grumpy Old Men category. He was a mediator on the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the Chair of the Anti-Doping Agency, and as the ethics watchdog for the IOC, the investigator of the Salt Lake City Olympic scandal.

“They’ve missed the mark,” he said of the plaintiffs’ suing VANOC for not letting women use a Canadian facility, “because women will use the jump before and after the Olympics.” (The Continental Cup for women took place at Whistler in the middle of December 2008.) Conversely, “The International Committee is using that facility for just one event.”

Instead, Pound says women jumpers should look to the real source of their problem: the FIS. “We looked at the proposal from the FIS [in 2006]. It was made without much enthusiasm. It was made with them knowing the IOC would refuse it. The FIS have not done their job in promoting women’s jumping.”

Do the Right Thing

The long struggle of women jumpers for recognition is not the first time the FIS has dug in its heels against new sports. There was that incident in the last century where an upstart and extreme version of skiing tried for recognition too, and came up hard against a “Scandinavian ski aristocracy.” The new-fangled thing—out of Britain, mind you—was slalom and downhill skiing, first raced in 1921. The FIS banned slalom and downhill from the first “international world ski championship” (only later called the Winter Olympics) in 1924 at Chamonix, as founding editor Morten Lund has written in these pages. Those new sports missed two more Olympics, those in 1928 at St. Moritz and in 19832 at Lake Placid, and Alpine ski racing’s acceptance into official world competition came only in 1936 at the Garmisch Olympics after having been “delayed at least ten years past the time when it was ripe.” There was, however, a plus side: At Garmisch, for the first time, women had their own slalom and downhill competitions.

Cold comfort for women ski jumpers, perhaps, but what else do they have to hold on to? Well, for one thing, perhaps the International Olympic Committee’s own mission statement and charter?

First there was the new equality rule of 1991 that called for each sport to have male and female components. That didn’t work. Then there was the announcement in 1996 that “The IOC strongly encourages by appropriate means, the promotion of women in sport at all levels and in all structures, particularly in the executive bodies of national and international sports organizations with a view to the strict application of the principle of equality of men and women.” That from the IOC, an executive body consisting of 15 men and one woman.

And then there’s the part of the Official Mission and Role of the IOC that says the Olympics will:

6. Act against any form of discrimination affecting the Olympic Movement;

7. Encourage and support the promotion of women in sport at all levels and in all structures with a view to implementing the principle of equality of men and women.

Few sports have changed as rapidly and dramatically as did cross-country skiing in the 1980s. For more than a hundred years cross-country competitors had universally raced with the ancient diagonal stride, alternately kicking and gliding. In retrospect, it was remarkable that no one saw how much faster a skier could move if he propelled himself by skating with his skis, in the manner of an ice skater. America’s Bill Koch first observed the skate step at a Swedish marathon, then applied it to win the 1982 World Cup of Cross Country skiing. Immediately the sport was engulfed in controversy over the new technique. Within five years, World Championship and Olympic cross-country skiing was utterly transformed. Now there were as many medals for Freestyle, in which skating is permitted, as would be awarded for Classic, in which skating was prohibited. And in three more years, the freestyle revolution was so powerful that it led to the Pursuit competition, with a totally new way of starting racers and climaxing in a telegenic finish.  No one was better situated to observe the revolution than Bengt Erik Bengtsson, Chief of the Nordic Office of the Swiss-based International Ski Federation (FIS) from 1984 to 2004.

The use of a skating technique to ski across snow is hardly new. In the 1930s, when bindings were adaptable to both downhill and cross-country, skiers commonly skated across flat areas, in the style of an ice skater. For a long time cross-country ski racers skated in order to take advantage of terrain or to combat poor wax, although it was difficult to do over grooved tracks and in a narrow corridor.

In the 1960s, participants in the relatively new sport of ski orienteering – I was one of them – commonly skated.  In orienteering we use a map and compass to travel between designated points as fast as possible. The shortest route isn’t necessarily the fastest -- for example, if it’s a bushwhack. If a road is available, the competitor can  switch from traditional kick and glide skiing to propelling himself like an ice skater, going from ski to ski. Some participants even mounted thin steel edges on their skis to get a better bite on the hard snow and go faster.

The Finnish skier Pauli Siitonen was a top competitor in ski orienteering, and when he turned to marathon or Loppet racing in the 1970s he brought the technique of skating to it. But with a difference. Now, in soft snow, Siitonen would leave one ski in the track, and propel himself with the other ski, pushing off repeatedly as primitive hunters had done centuries earlier using the short Andor ski.

Other marathon skiers soon followed Siitonen. They caught the attention of America’s Bill Koch when he was participating in a 1980 Swedish marathon on flat terrain following a river. The race pitted classic World Cup skiers competed against marathon or Loppet skiers. The distance-racers by now were commonly skating. A light bulb went off in Koch’s head. Why not apply skating to standard 15, 30 and 50 kilometer FIS-sanctioned races?

At the 1982 World Ski Championships in Oslo, I was responsible for the split timing. Early in the 30-kilometer race we had a leader, Thomas Eriksson. In one special part of the track he lost so much time to Koch that we thought there was a timing error. We did not know why, but obviously it was due to Koch skating. Eriksson was the gold medalist. Koch not only won the bronze, he went on to skate his way to victory in the season-long World Cup of cross-country skiing. 

By now, the skating technique -- sometimes leaving a ski in the track, more often double-skating (called the V2 skate)-- was spreading through the sport. Officials, especially the Norwegians, were concerned that traditional cross-country racing was going to be corrupted. They wanted to ban skating entirely wherever prepared tracks existed. The ban did not happen, but at the 1983 FIS Congress the

following rules were imposed:

·      No skating in the first 100 meters after the start.

·      No skating within 200 meters of the finish.

·      No skating in the relay race 200 meters before and after the racer exchange.

Not coincidentally, the starting and finishing areas are where TV cameras and photographers are primarily located, so that the ban on skating ensured that the corrupting new technique would be less visibly public.

The issue of skating engendered bitter division within the world of Nordic skiing. On the one hand, Sweden’s Bengt Herman Nilsson, the chairman of the prestigious FIS Cross-Country Committee, welcomed the new technique. “The skating step has come to stay,” he wrote in a 1983 report. “It is even beautiful when three to four skiers in a row race with forceful skating steps - they remind me of exotic butterflies fluttering in the wind.”

On the other hand, Norwegian traditionalists were opposed to the heretical new technique. Ivar Formo, the 1976 Olympic gold medalist, who succeeded Nilsson as chairman of the FIS Cross-Country Committee, wanted to ban skating as soon as possible, and he had the emphatic support of his fellow Norwegians. A victim of their rule-making, ironically, was a Norwegian, Ove Aunli. At the 1984 Sarajevo Olympic Winter Games, Aunli recorded a time in the 30-kilometer race that made him the bronze medalist, but he was disqualified for skating in a prohibited area.

While skating wasn’t allowed in the start and finish areas, it was a free-for-all over the rest of the course, with racers calculating the benefits of waxing to promote kicking, or waxing the entire ski with glide wax for skating. By now, they had mostly abandoned the old Siitonen one-ski-in-the track technique. The gliding ski was now outside of the track, riding on the snow at a slight angle, while the racer used the other ski for propulsion in a furious repetitive move. It came to be known as V-1. No more kick wax. In a late-season meet at Kiruna, Sweden, near the Arctic Circle, the 30-kilometer winner Ove Aunli, and the winner of the women’s 10 km, Anette Boe – both Norwegians – enjoyed decisive victories on skis prepared only with glide wax. . . no kick wax.

Skating raised all kinds of issues. Would it lead to injuries, such as hip displacement. A Swiss wag called skating “the Sulzer step,” after the name of a manufacturer of artificial hip joints.

Did there need to be specialized skis, boots, bindings and poles? Should not limits be placed on shortening ski length and making poles too long? How should tracks be prepared? Since skating speed slows dramatically when temperatures fall below minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit, would not farther north nations be at a disadvantage? What kind of special training was needed, not only in winter, but in summer? What if the radical new technique spread to recreational cross-country skiing?

A whole new situation had emerged, none of it finding favor with the FIS CCC (Cross-Country Committee). The majority on the committee was driven by the fear that skating would kill classic cross-country skiing.  They were resolute in wanting to restrict skating as much as possible. One way was to create narrower courses through the forest, necessarily restricting the size of machines to prepare the tracks. “Back to nature,” was the battle cry. Another idea to discourage skating was to make sure the uphills were so demanding and steep that the skier could not skate, but must herring-bone. But the preventive method most tested was the erection of nets and snow walls to narrow the track so much that skating was impossible.

On December 7, 1984, the FIS Council, the supreme governing body of the international ski federation, directed the Cross-Country Committee to test the use of small nets between the tracks, and to set courses in such a way “that the skating step will physically not be applicable on all parts of the course.”

Dutifully I purchased netting in order to test the application of the proposed new FIS rule. I still remember when I presented the invoice of five thousand dollars to my boss, FIS Secretary General Gian Franco Kasper. Skeptical, shaking his head, he asked me, “Do you really believe in this?”  He sighed and signed the check. A month later I knew that he was right, and I was wrong.

We made our first test in Davos, erecting 12 nets. One was thrown in a river by two athletes whose names were revealed to me just a couple of years ago.

Today, we can laugh about it. The winner of the race, Ove Aunli, made a mockery of the test in another way. In a very steep section, we had not thought it necessary to put netting because no one imagined anyone could skate up such a hill. But the super-strong Aunli did it with the new technique, without grip wax, double-poling and skating.

Ambiguity was in the air when the 1984-85 season opened. In a December World Cup race at Davos, the wife of Ove Aunli, Berit, said to me, “Mr. Bengtsson, you must take away this skating.” She won the ladies’ competition on skis with grip wax. Two hours later, at a press conference, she was asked, “How do you like the skating step?” I thought she would say the same as she did to me, but to my great disappointment she answered, “It is okay for me”.

The next evening I called a meeting of athletes and coaches. Present were 

the two 1984 Olympic gold medalists at Sarajevo -- Thomas Wassberg of Sweden and Nikolai Zimjatov of the Soviet Union. Dan Simoneau of the U.S. took the place of  Bill Koch. America’s Mike Gallagher was among four coaches at the meeting.

Simoneau said that the American athletes wanted skating.  After all, the Olympics are about “faster, higher and longer. ” Soviet coach Venedikt Kamenskij countered by saying that the Olympics are also about offering “an equal chance for all athletes.” As skating destroys the tracks for the later starters, they will not have that chance.

During the meeting, Thomas Wassberg passed me a note which, in retrospect, was prophetic. Cross-country, Wassberg wrote, should become two disciplines: a classical one in which the skating step is not allowed, and another one with no restriction and even allowing specialized equipment. It was an intriguing idea, but ahead of its time.

At the end of the meeting, the entire group, except the U.S.A., wanted a questionnaire sent to the national associations proposing a ban on skating at the upcoming 1985 World Nordic Championships at Seefeld, Austria. There wasn’t much time to act. FIS President Marc Hodler decreed that a skating ban at the forthcoming World Championships was only possible if all officials and all national ski associations accepted it.

The day of the captains’ meeting came. The question was introduced: “Do you agree to any restrictions concerning the skating step during the upcoming championships?”  The voting was carried out in alphabetical order.

Australia? Answer, NO. The question was dead.

Cross-country was back to where it was at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics the year before, except for one significant new equipment rule that had never existed before in cross-country skiing. To eliminate the possibility that skating could be unfairly speeded up by the abbreviating the length of skis, it was ruled that skis could be no shorter than the competitor’s height less 10 centimeters. Also, poles could be no longer than the skier’s height. In reality, nothing was going to stop the revolution in nordic ski technique. Classic-only cross-country by now had become almost indefensible.  Racers adopted the superior two-ski skating technique. They were abandoning the use of kicker wax, and switching to preparing their skis entirely with glide wax. In the men’s 30-kilometer in the ’85 World Championships, the best athlete on skis prepared with grip wax was the Russian Vladimir Smirnov, who placed 24th.

“A revolution has swept away the ancient regime,” wrote Arnold Kaech,  former FIS General Secretary, in Sport Zuerich. “A requiem for the cross-country sport should be sung.”

An advantage of the 1985 championships at Seefeld was that everyone --  spectators, media and above all, the FIS’s own officials -- could now discuss the skating controversy based on actual observation, on something they’d seen for themselves. The FIS Council met in Seefeld, and a group of experts was formed to define the future of cross-country. The immediate outcome was to test more ideas during the rest of the 1985 winter. As before, silliness as well as sanity ruled. Skate-ban zones were tested at a race in the Ural Mountains.  In a competition at Falun, Sweden, in order to prevent skating, officials put soldiers with shovels and rakes to work creating virtual tunnels along the track. Angered, U.S. coach Marty Hall threatened to withdraw his team from the race unless the tunnels were removed. They were. The press unjustly blamed the FIS for conducting an idiotic test.

At Lahti, Finland, in another World Cup race, skate-less zones were created. When an Italian racer skated through one, the Finnish coach grabbed him and threw him off the track. In the ladies’ relay race, restricted to classical technique, two teams skated from the start, hooted at by spectators. At the jury meeting afterwards, one coach reported no violations, even though he observed them.

At the winter’s last competition at the Holmenkollen in Oslo, the course was divided into classic and skating-permitted zones. At the top of a long uphill, Thomas Wassberg stopped and removed from the bottom of his skis duct tape on which he had put grip wax. Now, equipped only with glide wax, he had an advantage over the other competitors.

By the end of the winter of ’85, we concluded that none of the methods that we’d tested for limiting the skate step skating was effective. Nor could it be done by limiting the size of machines approved for track-setting.

Meanwhile, the pressure for change was mounting. Ski manufacturers were readying specialized models of skating skis to be introduced on the market. The skis would be shorter than classical cross-country skis. A decisive moment was approaching with the FIS Congress, the summit meeting of the sport of skiing, taking place in Vancouver, British Columbia.

When the FIS held its Congress in Vancouver in the summer of 1985, a record number of people showed up at the Cross-Country Committee meeting. The forces opposed to skating included Norway, the Soviet Union and Finland. Nations favoring the new technique included the U.S., Canada and Italy. Germany’s Helmut Weinbuch, influential chairman of the Nordic Combined Committee, was in favor of skating in short distance races and the relay. Out of the meeting emerged a proposal to be presented to the Congress. The most radical proposal was that half of the World Cup races over the season be in classical technique and half in freestyle, and the same for Junior World Championships. The format for other international competitions would be at the discretion of the national associations in the host countries.

I had never before taken a stand in the discussion but now I asked for the floor and declared my opinion. We don’t have enough experience. Before proceeding, the most important thing to do, I said, is to formulate rules for the two techniques, and see how they work in practice.

A Working Group was formed under the chairmanship of 1968 Olympic champion Odd Martinsen of Norway. By April 1986 it delivered a framework for the future acceptable not only to the FIS Council, but also to the entire cross-country world. Biathlon and Nordic Combined moved swiftly. The two sports chose freestyle for their competitions.

A major problem remained, however. How to police the classical competitions so that the racers didn’t cheat by skating? One faction thought the classics would be self-policing. The athletes themselves would act as police, reporting incidents of racers breaking out of the kick and stride to skate. Swiss journalist Toni Noetzli, on the other hand, wrote in the influential Sport Zurich that self-policing would never work. The winner will not necessarily be the best athlete, but the one who escaped observation and did not get caught skating. As a result of track police, there will be protests, disqualifications and endless appeals. “It will be the death of cross-country skiing,” wrote Noetzli. Even to this day, America’s Bill Koch agrees. “For the first time, cross-country skiing became a judged event, the woods filled with police looking for skating violations. The very nature of cross-country skiing changed.”

Koch’s and Noetzli’s worst fears of an entanglement of jury decisions, however, were not realized. The 1985-86 competitive World Cup season produced no major protests. Satisfied with the progress, the FIS Council in May, 1986, took formal action. After 63 years of World Championship and Olympic cross-country skiing, the FIS voted for  revolution. It officially divided the sport into classic and freestyle disciplines.

For the 1987 FIS World Nordic Championships at Oberstdorf, Germany, and for the 1988 Olympic Winter Games at Calgary, Canada, the men’s 15 and 30 kilometer races would be classic, no-skating races; the 50 kilometer and the relay (four men each racing 10-kilometers) would be freestyle, with unlimited skating allowed. The women’s 5 and 10 kilometer races would be classic; the 20 kilometer and the relay (four women each racing 5 kilometers)

For those who wondered how different nations would perform in the freshly transformed sport, surprise was in store. At the 1987 World Championships, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) did not participate at all in the classic races. The East Germans believed that classic cross-country was finished as a discipline. With their focus entirely on freestyle, wearing tight-fitting, streamlined suits, both men and women were expected to dominate the 50-kilometer and relay races. But the East Germans failed miserably, and the top coach was fired.

Italy too had been unenthusiastic about the continuance of races in which skating was prohibited. Yet to everyone’s astonishment the Italian cross-country racer Marco Alberello won the gold medal in the 15-kilometer classic at Oberstdorf. As a result, Italy came around to favor both classic as well as freestyle. And so did the rest of the world.

The sport of cross-country was uprooted, shaken, renewed. The Nordic Combined and Biathlon adopted skating. Recreational skiers took it up. Nordic fashion switched from classic knickers to sleek, tight-fitting pants and jackets that suited the faster speeds and dynamic athleticism of skating.

Nor was the rapid change followed by a pause. The spontaneous success, together with the FIS’s desire to discourage specialization in classic or freestyle, inspired the idea of combining the two in one competition, which led to the 1990 introduction of the Pursuit. The finish order of one establishes the start order for a second race. The leader from the first race or from a jumping competition becomes the hare chased. The Pursuit result is a tumultuous finish, appealing to spectators and television.

Nordic skiing has been changed forever. The decision-making, in the end, was wise. I am happy to have been involved in re-invention of what is now the world’s most dynamic sport.

Author Bengt Erik Bengtsson, retired, lives today in his native Sweden. His job at the FIS is now divided into cross-country, jumping and Nordic combined. Special thanks to Bill Koch and ISHA editorial board member John Fry for their contribution to the editing.