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SKIING HISTORY WEEK AND HALL OF FAME INDUCTION

APRIL 8-12, 2015

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, COLORADO

 

Colorado’s Steamboat Ski Resort has been selected as the site of the 2015 induction ceremony of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, as well as the International Skiing History Association’s annual Skiing History Week.

The induction ceremony honoring the Hall of Fame’s class of 2014 will be Saturday, April 11, capping off the April 8-12 Skiing History Week. The week will feature skiing, historical presentations, awards ceremonies and a film festival open to the entire Steamboat community. 

HIGHLIGHTS

•Steamboat Ski Resort has been selected as the site of the 2015 induction ceremony of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. Around 500 are expected to attend the annual installation of the class of 2014 inductees.

•The induction will be the culmination of nearly a week of activities in the Steamboat Springs community during April 8-12 Skiing History Week, which attracts hundreds of skiing history enthusiasts and recreational skiers.

•Centennial: Skiing History Week and the Hall of Fame induction will also celebrate the 100th anniversary of Steamboat’s fabled Howelsen Hill.

•Film Festival: The annual Ishpeming Snow 100 Film Festival will highlight some of the best films in skiing history at Steamboat’s Chief Theater, open nightly April 8-10 to attendees and the Steamboat community.

•Legacy Lectures: A presentation on Steamboat legend Buddy Werner will be one of several legacy lectures celebrating the heritage of skiing.

•Hall Induction: The Hall of Fame induction in the Korbel Grand Ballroom of the Steamboat Grand is expected to sell out with a field of 10 inductees including Olympic champion Ross Powers and Colorado’s noted big mountain skier Chris Davenport among others.

•First Tracks: Skiing History Week will wrapup Sunday, April 12 with a opportunity for First Tracks with Hall of Fame skiers and snowboarders.

•Tickets and Registration: Registration for Skiing History Week and tickets for the Hall of Fame induction are now available online by clicking the link above. Special lodging packages at the Steamboat Grand and discounted lift tickets will be available to Skiing History Week registrants.

SCHEDULE:

Park City, Utah
April 3, 2014

The International Skiing History Association Awards, established in 1993, are presented annually to authors of outstanding histories, films and DVDs, Websites, museum exhibits, and for lifetime achievements in broadcasting and other media. The honored work is judged to have added significantly and artistically to the ski historical record.

An ISHA Service Award may also be presented to an individual for substantial long-term support of a ski history organization in light of ISHA’s mission “to preserve skiing history and increase public awareness of the sport’s heritage.”

The awards are presented for work published or formally completed before the end of the preceding calendar year. For example, ISHA’s 2013 awards, presented in April 2014, are for books and films completed and available for review by the judges before the end of 2013.

ISHA Awards are presented in the following categories, though not every category is honored every year:

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: Presented for contributions over a substantial period of time to ski history, ski journalism, photography, film, radio or television.

ULLR AWARD: Presented for a single outstanding contribution or several contributions to skiing’s overall historical record in published book form.

SKADE AWARD: Presented for an outstanding work on regional ski history, or for an outstanding work published in book form that is focused in part on ski history.

FILM OR PHOTOGRAPHY AWARD: Presented for outstanding contribution to the historical record of skiing in photographic or film/digital form.

CURATORIAL AWARD: Presented for outstanding work in curating a nationally recognized ski museum through its exhibits and publications.

CYBER AWARD: Presented for creating a Website that contributes substantially to the preservation, distribution and expansion of skiing’s historical record.

SERVICE AWARD: Presented for outstanding work over a substantial period of time with an organization engaged in the creation and preservation of skiing’s historical record.

SPECIAL AWARD: Presented for outstanding contribution to the historical record outside the above categories.

Michael Horn
ISHA Lifetime Achievement Award for Broadcasting

For half a century, Austria’s Michael Horn used his skills as an announcer to entertain and educate television and radio audiences, and spectators at ski races around the world.
       Horn began his announcing career—or “hobby,” as he calls it—at the age of only 15, promoting a Kitzbühel tennis tournament by driving around town in a car with a PA system. From that modest start, he advanced to announcing the famed Hahnenkamm ski races in 1963 when he was only 23. When the press chief for the Innsbruck Olympics heard Horn’s manner of speaking in different languages—he speaks seven—he recruited him to be the official speaker at both the 1964 and 1976 Winter Games in Innsbruck. Horn quickly went from being known as the “Voice of the Hahnenkamm” to also being dubbed Austria’s “Voice of Winter.” 
       Other Horn announcing appearances have included the 1982 Alpine Ski World Championships at Schladming, Austria, the 1985 Nordic World Championships at Seefeld in Austria, and the World Cup finals at Vysoke Tatry, Czechoslovakia. He worked as a commentator for the Austrian Radio-Television Network (ORF) at ski races in Austria, France and Italy.
       In 1980, Horn was invited to Colorado, where he provided race information in his trademark announcing style to Aspen spectators for the next 10 years. While in the U.S., he called World Cup races at Lake Tahoe’s Heavenly Valley, and at Vail/Beaver Creek, including the 1989 World Alpine Ski Championships. In 1988, when Australia celebrated its bicentennial with World Cup races in Thredbo, Horn was the announcer.
       Horn was there in 1964 to call it when Billy Kidd and Jimmie Heuga became the first American men to win Olympic medals in alpine skiing. He also announced the victories of the “Equipe de France” with Jean-Claude Killy, Adrien Duvillard and Guy Perillat. He watched the strong wave of Canadian downhillers Todd Brooker, Ken Read and Steve Podborski, and he announced the wins of Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark and Italy’s Alberto Tomba. Horn also covered the only alpine victory of a Russian skier in 1980, when Valery Tsyganov won the downhill in Aspen; Horn also was there with his microphone when in 1982, American Steve Mahre became world champion in the giant slalom at Schladming. He also witnessed the excited pandemonium of the Austrian crowds when their heroes Karl Schranz, Franz Klammer and Hermann Maier set race records in the Hahnenkamm downhill.
       Through it all, Horn was still the Voice of the Hahnenkamm, acting as chief press officer for 24 years and announcing races from 1963 until 2008. When he retired, the Kitzbüheler Ski Club made him one of only three honorary members.
       Horn has not always held a microphone in his hand. He graduated with a degree in economics in 1965 from the University of Innsbruck, and began his “real” job in 1966 at Kitzbühel’s Aquarena spa, where he was general manager until his retirement in 2001. He also served as vice-mayor of Kitzbühel and did a stint in the state parliament in Vienna. In spare moments, he has announced hockey games and tennis tournaments for Austrian TV and radio.
       Michael Horn and his wife Christl live in Kitzbühel. — Stephanie Boyle Mays

Skade Award

Downhill in Montana: Early Day Skiing in the Treasure State
By Stan Cohen
       The recently released DVD Downhill in Montana: Early Day Skiing in the Treasure State was issued as a companion piece to the book of the same name by author Stan Cohen. Both illustrate the quick rise of skiing in Montana.
       The film uses original footage, stills and interviews to tell the state’s ski story. The tale starts in the 1880s with the first ski trip into Yellowstone, but most of the DVD covers the sport after the introduction of lifts in the 1930s.
       Much of the footage was provided by the heirs of Walter Morris, who owned a ski shop in Missoula from the late 1930s to the early 1970s. Morris shot 16-mm film of seemingly every ski event he ever attended. His footage is combined with filmed interviews and photographic stills to cover a gamut of skiing subjects, including the 1935 Anaconda Winter Carnival, tales of ski trains and the start of areas such as Big Sky, Bridger Bowl and Whitefish.
       The book traces the history of more than 60 ski areas in the state. Pages are laid out like a scrapbook, with accompanying text that relates what has happened from the area’s inception to the present day (or, in some cases, its demise). Included are reproductions of old articles, programs, people profiles, ticket stubs, advertising, photographs and other documentation of each area’s history. —Morten Lund
      
       Downhill in Montana, Early Day Skiing in the Treasure State; DVD (2012) produced by Pictorial Histories and Sunrise Studios, 96 minutes. Book (2010) by author Stan Cohen (Pictorial Histories Publishing Company), paperback, 278 pages with black-and-white vintage photographs and illustrations.

Skade Award

Highway to Heaven
By Peter Southwell-Keely
       Ten resorts, strung from the Thredbo River to the summit of Mt. Kosciuszko in New South Wales, are featured in this lavishly illustrated Australian ski history. Historical descriptions of each resort and approximately 400 photographs, with highly informative maps, are intertwined with chapters on Australia’s first ski troops, ski patrols, ski jumping, cross-country skiing, and the influence of Europeans. Throughout the book, many individuals who made a difference are also profiled.
       The most interesting chapters deal with the development of Perisher, an amalgamation of four towns: Perisher Valley, Smiggin Holes, Guthega and Blue Cow. Starting in 1945 there were three huts in the Perisher-Smiggins area; by 1956, nine more huts had been built. Now Perisher is the largest ski resort in the Southern Hemisphere and boasts 98 lodges, 29 ski lifts and the Ski Tube, a rack railway that includes an 1,805-foot tunnel.
       Six appendices include Winter Olympians and Paralympians, ski club results from the 1950s and 1960s and a list of ski clubs with founding dates (such as the Kiandra Pioneer Ski Club, ca. 1881). Almost 300 references support this well-produced tome that will appeal to anyone interested in Australian skiing. —E. John B. Allen
      
       Highway to Heaven: A History of Perisher and the Ski Resorts Along the Kosciuszko Road by Peter Southwell-Keely; Perisher Historical Society (2013); 400-plus photographs, hardcover, 260 pages.

Skade Award

Ski the Great Potato
By Margaret Fuller, Doug Fuller and Jerry Painter
       Ski The Great Potato provides the histories of all 21 areas and resorts that are still operating in Idaho, as well as stories on 72 areas that no longer exist. 
       Each ski area story has a detailed explanation of how readers could find the area in their travels. The areas are photographed as they appeared when fully operational, or what is left of them today. 
       It opens with a fascinating account of the Eastport-Kingsgate ski jump that was located right on the Idaho-British Columbia border. The jump opened in 1928 and had an in-run in the United States, with the jumpers landing in Canada. It closed in 1940 when the owner decided to start a ski area nearby. 
       Another interesting chapter recounts the founding and development of Lookout Pass, which at one time was the home ski area of Joe Jay Jalbert, one of skiing’s great filmmakers. It started in 1936 when a group of skiers hitched a ride on a Northern Pacific railroad train that took them to the summit of Lookout Mountain. One of the longest chapters details the founding and development of Sun Valley. The authors also include information about prominent people in Idaho ski history, from the Engen brothers to Picabo Street and Muffy Davis, who skied and competed together at Rotarun in Hailey. 
       Margaret Fuller has written and co-authored five books on hiking in Idaho. Her son, Doug Fuller, a former ski coach, and Jerry Painter, an outdoors columnist, worked with her on this project. –Tom West
      
       Ski The Great Potato by Margaret Fuller, Doug Fuller and Jerry Painter; Trail Guide Books (2013), 293 pages with black-and-white photographs.

Skade Award

Tales from Two Valleys: Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows
By Eddy Starr Ancinas
       Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows skiers will delight in reading the familiar and not-so-familiar accounts of how these two leading Sierra resorts got started. Eddy Ancinas’ well-researched book will also appeal to anyone interested in the history of skiing in the 1950s and ’60s, when the sport exploded in popularity. This growth was due in large part to such pioneering visionaries as Wayne Poulsen and Alexander Cushing at Squaw Valley. Lesser known is John Reily, who dreamed of a family-oriented resort at the adjacent valley, which later came to be called Alpine Meadows.
       Eddy Ancinas tells the story of the ongoing conflict between Poulsen, who had the land, and Cushing, who had access to financing. The two strong-willed men disagreed on “just about everything,” she writes. Poulsen was later voted out of the corporation at a stockholder meeting when he was traveling out of the country. 
       Ancinas also describes how Cushing applied for the 1960 Winter Olympics to get publicity for his five-year-old resort, which had only one chairlift at the time. By clever political maneuvering, Cushing succeeded in having the Games awarded to Squaw Valley. After near disaster—first a lack of snow, then almost too much snow—the Games were a great success.
       Ancinas accurately describes the continuing conflict between Cushing and the various state and federal agencies that control safety and conservation issues. She concludes that Cushing’s guiding philosophy was, “It is easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.”
       In 2010 a private equity firm, KSL, bought Squaw Valley and a year later, Alpine Meadows, consolidating the two valleys. Ancinas asks a relevant question: “Will the ski experience defined by Poulsen, Cushing and Reily be forever changed from a way of life to a highly developed form of industrial tourism?”  
       The dedication “To Osvaldo—for getting on the chairlift with me” refers to Ancinas’ husband, who was a member of the 1960 Argentine Olympic team. Eddy and Osvaldo live and have raised their family in a house on the Truckee River, between Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows. —Henrik Bull

Tales from Two Valleys: Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows by Eddy Starr Ancinas; History Press, February 2013; softcover, 160 pages

Film Award

Crash Reel
Produced by Lucy Walker

       Crash Reel by filmmaker Lucy Walker tells the story of Olympic snowboarding hopeful Kevin Pearce and his tragic accident during a training run in Park City, Utah, before the 2010 Winter Games. Pearce slammed his head on the icy wall of the halfpipe and suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). The film positions Pearce as the one guy who could have beaten superstar Shaun White and explores their rivalry in the halfpipe, a sport in which the most elite athletes routinely launch off 22-foot ice walls at 30-plus miles an hour, soaring almost 40 feet in the air. The margin of error is slim to none and injuries happen all of the time, from the professional to the recreational level.
       Crash Reel examines “extreme” athletes and their quest to obtain fame and fortune. It also shines a light on the extreme sports lifestyle and the lack of training methods and coaches. Walker focuses on Pearce’s family and the price they pay for their son’s accident, as well as the pressure that accompanies big sponsorship deals.
       In the last quarter of the film, Walker examines the lack of oversight and the insufficient safety net for extreme athletes who are willing to risk it all. She suggests that the lasting legacy of the industry might be the 173,000 sports- or action-related TBIs that are reported each year for people under the age of 20.
       Walker met Pearce in 2010, not long after his accident. Over time, she became convinced that, as she says: “The world of extreme sports posed questions that I couldn’t answer…When I watch big-wave surfing or halfpipe snowboarding, my eyes are glued to the screen. But half the reason I’m mesmerized is because it’s clear that the stakes are life and death…And Kevin’s story dramatizes just how dramatic the stakes are. It’s an exemplary study of risk and reward.” Walker’s strong writing and incisive storytelling capture the reality of extreme sports, from the glitz of the X Games to the harsh reality of the intensive care unit. (Pearce is now a motivational speaker, TV commentator and advocate for people affected by TBI and Down syndrome.)—Dan Egan
  
       To learn more about the film—and the related Love Your Brain advocacy campaign—go to www.thecrashreel.com.

Film Award

Legend of Aahhh’s
Produced by Greg Stump

       Seldom has a new ski movie been awaited as impatiently as Greg Stump’s Legend of Aahhh’s. Stump is the cinematographer who in 1988 produced Blizzard of Aahhh’s, a stunning work that captivated the emerging freestyle, extreme and snowboard generation, and its hitherto little-known stars. Two more action films followed. Then Stump turned to producing music videos and commercial work. Legend of Aahhh’s marks his return to producing a full-length feature about skiing.
       Stump spent the better part of two years trying different cuts and approaches to redact this film to a running length of 93 minutes. Legend endeavors to tell the history of ski moviemaking, as well as the cultural history of extreme skiing, powerfully visible today on magazine covers and in equipment and resort advertising.
       In Legend of Aahhh’s Stump pays generous tribute to his filmmaking antecedents, beginning in the 1920s with Arnold Fanck, Leni Riefenstahl, and on to John Jay, Dick Durrance, Warren Miller, Dick Barrymore and Roger Brown. Toward the end of the film, Stump shows the outstanding latter-day work of Teton Gravity, and notably of Matchstick Productions, the production quality and visuals of whose 21st century films largely exceed those of Stump, for reasons having a lot to do with advances in cinematographic technology. Stump was not a rival anyway. He withdrew from making films that exposed the actors to risk of death after two of his performers were almost killed in an avalanche in 1995. His was a wise, ethical, calculated decision.
       Much of the visual in Legend of Aahhh’s consists of action-packed series of skiers leaping and streaming down spectacular, precipitous terrain. The viewer gets a full serving of cliff-jumping, steep gully turn sequences, triggering of avalanches, and high-speed straight shots that take the breath away.
       Intermittently throughout Legend, Stump cuts to talking heads (Warren Miller’s appears most often) who offer their perspectives and recollections.
       Stump dedicates Legend to Barrymore, who defined why ski moviemakers have generally been unable to create works attractive to viewers living outside the ski world.
       “With a normal motion picture,” said Barrymore, “you shoot a film about a story. With a ski film, you make a story about the film you’ve shot.” Legend of Aahhh’s is among the best. —John Fry  

Legend of Aahhh's has a running time of 93 minutes. For more information, visit blizzardsnowstore.com.

Ullr Award

American Ski Resort: Architecture, Style, Experience
By Margaret Supplee Smith

       In American Ski Resort, Margaret Smith analyzes the vision, planning and construction that created North America’s winter mountain culture. She tells the story in 300 pages, punctuated by more than 300 well-chosen images of resorts, hotels and restaurants, houses and condominiums in New England, the Rockies, California and British Columbia. Some are renowned, like Idaho's Sun Valley; others are obscure, like Little Sugar Mountain in North Carolina.
    From New England farmhouse inns to million-dollar condos, from a basic Stratton Mountain A-frame to the Mountain Modern style of Snowbird, we learn what has been the driving force for change over the decades, how it was accomplished and with what result for people, landscape and business.
       Subsections are devoted to Historic Preservation and Cultural Aspiration (1930s to 1950s), Alpine in America (1950s to 1960s), and Reimagining the Mountain Resort Village (1970s to 1980s). The epilogue is important; Smith casts her socially alert eye on what is happening at American ski resorts in the 21st century. Some may find it disheartening to discover that Nobody’s Home (a film title) in Aspen. That's because many of its homes, averaging $4.9 million in price, are unoccupied for most of the year. Two appendices list three generations of architects, while the second offers more than 100 mini-biographies of relevant resort and landscape architects. The latter are important since, as one remarked, “We have to create postcard settings.”
       The University of Oklahoma Press is to be congratulated on an excellent production. The book contains outstanding photographs and art, and American Ski Resort is a delight. —E. John B. Allen
      
       American Ski Resort: Architecture, Style, Experience by Margaret Supplee Smith; University of Oklahoma Press (2013); hardcover, 300 pages with more than 300 illustrations.
      

Ullr Award

From Heming the Younger to Hemingway
By Jon Vegard Lunde

       From Heming the Younger to Hemingway by Jon Vegard Lunde is a collection of ski literature that runs from Ernest Hemingway's Cross Country Snow and The Snows of Kilimanjaro to writers such as John Updike, John Cheever, Sylvia Plath, Ian Fleming, Romaine Gary and Vladimir Nabokov. But all of the passages were either written in Norwegian, or have been translated into Norwegian by the author. So why should English-speaking readers care? Because the book’s illustrations are a superb collection of period, modern (and in some cases ancient) skiing art—more than 100 striking examples, including a vivid watercolor by Spanish painter and mountain guide Ricardo Montoro Delgado, which was featured on the September-October 2013 cover of Skiing History.
       The subtitle translates as “Skiing literature through a thousand years,” and its long row of renowned authors cries out for an English edition. Nevertheless, the serious collector will not miss the chance to add the book’s excellent illustrations to a library devoted to ski art. Even reviewers who have seen many collections of ski art will not likely have seen most of these works, let alone have such a great group of excellent, wide-ranging reproductions at hand. It is a beautiful book. —Morten Lund
      
       From Heming The Younger to Hemingway by Jon Vegard Lunde; Jevelaget, 416 pages, hard cover, profusely illustrated in color and black-and-white.

2013 HONORABLE MENTIONS
SKADE AWARD

Ski Pioneers of Stowe, Vermont: The First 25 Years by Patricia L.  Haslam

FILM AWARD

Ski America produced by New England Ski Museum

United We Ski produced by T-Bar Films (Richmond, Vermont)

Click here to see all ISHA Award winners since 1993.

 

A new ski film by Greg Stump attempts to tell the history of the ski film.

Seldom has a new ski movie been awaited as impatiently

as Greg Stump’s Legend of Aahhh’s…at least not since skiers stood eagerly in line in 1949 to view John Jay’s new 16mm annual opus at high school auditoriums around the country. Stump’s film toured North America last fall and winter and is now available on DVD.

A former national junior freestyle champion from Maine, Stump is the cinematographer who in 1988 produced a stunning work that captivated the emerging freestyle, extreme and snowboard generation and its hitherto little-known stars. The movie was Blizzard of Aahhh’s.

Melding ski action hyped with cutting-edge music by Britain’s Trevor Horn, Blizzard is Stump’s best work. Two more action films followed. Then the well ran dry, or Stump feared for the lives of the risk-taking performers, or both. He turned to producing music videos and commercial work. More than 18 years have passed since he last made a significant extreme ski flick. And now we have the historical Legend of Aahhh’s. 

Stump has spent the past couple of years trying different cuts and approaches to redact his film to a running length of 93 minutes. It was a struggle because the director found himself trying to make two films in one. Legend endeavors to tell the history of ski moviemaking, as well as the cultural history of extreme skiing, powerfully visible today on magazine covers and in equipment and resort advertising. 

Extreme skiing—mastering the descents of precipitous couloirs and the world’s highest mountains—was born in the Alps, around Chamonix. The world first learned about “extreme” in the 1960s in the person of the skieur de l’impossible Sylvain Saudan, who made Chamonix his home. Chamonix is where Stump’s film characters—Scot Schmidt, Mike Hattrup and Glen Plake, with his 15-inch-high, bleached-blond Mohawk hair ensemble—established their extreme reputations. So it’s odd that Saudan is ignored in Legend of Aahhh’s. That is just the beginning of the historical omissions and factual errors that mar the film.

Frenchman Patrick Vallençant, who created the pedal-hop turn still used on the steepest terrain, goes unmentioned in Legend. Stump does include Bill Briggs, who made the first ski descent of Grand Teton.

In Legend, Stump suggests that Schmidt’s and Plake’s interview with Greg Gumbel on the Today Show in 1988 first drew mass media attention to extreme skiing. Correction needed. Japan’s 1975 theatrical film The Man who Skied Down Everest was viewed a dozen years earlier by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. 

  What is true is that a new genre of extreme skiing was pioneered 25 years ago by young Americans. That they came to be better known than extreme skiing’s founders is because a young, extraordinarily talented cinematographer—Greg Stump—displayed them in a spectacular, innovating way. Their notoriety is inseparable from Stump and filmmaking. 

In Legend of Aahhh’s Stump pays generous tribute to his filmmaking antecedents, beginning in the 1920s with Arnold Fanck, Leni Riefenstahl, and on to John Jay, Dick Durrance, Warren Miller, Dick Barrymore and Roger Brown. Inexplicably overlooked by Stump, however, is the work of Germany’s Willy Bogner, Jr., whose exotic filming, commencing in the 1960s, visually anticipated the 21st century ski movie. And who other than Bogner has made a ski movie for IMAX?

The apotheosis of the historical ascent of ski cinematography in Stump’s mind is Stump himself, buttressed by scores of admirers who tiresomely iterate that Blizzard of Aahhh’s is “the greatest ski movie ever made.” Added is the claim, made in the Denver Post, that Stump was the first ski moviemaker to cut his film to music. He wasn’t. The first was Barry Corbet who did it in his 1968 editing of Ski the Outer Limits. 

At least half of Legends of Aahhh’s is devoted to Blizzard…rather like Alfred Hitchcock making a flattering movie to establish the claim that Psycho is the greatest suspense film ever made. It’s doubtful Hitch would have so indulged himself.  

Of course, the best ski movie ever made, textured with a real story, was director Michael Ritchie’s Downhill Racer, starring Robert Redford and Gene Hackman, with screenplay by best-selling author James Salter. As much as anything, Downhill Racer owes its primacy over the years to the continued filming of ski flicks having plots, if any, that barely rise above the level of children’s nursery literature.   

To his great credit, Stump proceeds toward the end of Legend to show the outstanding latter-day work of Teton Gravity, and notably of Matchstick Productions, the production quality and visuals of whose 21st century films largely exceed those of Stump, for reasons having a lot to do with advances in cinematographic technology. Stump was not a rival anyway. He withdrew from making films that exposed the actors to risk of death after two of his performers were almost killed in an avalanche in 1995. His was a wise, ethical, calculated decision, worthy of imitation, and partly inspired by his hero Barrymore.  

Much of the visual in Legend of Aahhh’s consists of action-packed series of skiers leaping and streaming down spectacular, precipitous terrain. The viewer gets a full serving of cliff-jumping, steep gully turn sequences, triggering of avalanches, and high-speed straight shots that take the breath away. It reminds us, however, that the downside of ski movie-making over the past 30 years is its repetitive mindless, unlinked sequences of spectacular action accompanied by loud acid rock soundtracks.

Intermittently throughout Legend, Stump cuts to talking heads (Warren Miller’s appears most often) who offer their perspectives and recollections. Miller tells Stump that he would like to see one latter-day ski film “different from the other hundred and ninety-three that are identical.” Typically absent are human-interest stories about the performers themselves.

“You have no idea who they are,” comments former top freestyler John Clendenin. “You can only watch someone throw dirt off the cliff before you tire of watching.” But for the better part of an hour, it’s what Stump gives us in Legend, perhaps not unaware of the self-criticism. The culmination of some 75 years of ski films is going off a cliff. 

But no, it’s not the culmination. The problem with ski filmmaking all along has been absence of story line, or the prevalence of inane, inconsequential plots scorched in negative reviews by critics.  

Stump dedicates Legend to Barrymore, who defined why ski moviemakers have been unable to create works attractive to viewers living outside the ski world.  The absence of intelligent or intelligible plot, Barrymore once told me, is due to the uncertainty of mountain weather. It limits the aspiring ski moviemaker’s ability to plan ahead. Story lines and scripts, thought out in detail in the office, are thrown out after the first week on location. 

“With a normal motion picture,” said Barrymore, “you shoot a film about a story. With a ski film, you make a story about the film you’ve shot.” Legend of Aahhh’s is among the better ones. 

John Fry was chief editor of SKI Magazine between 1965 and 1980, publishing multiple stories about early extreme skiers. His book The Story of Modern Skiing, published in 2006, contains an entire chapter devoted to the history of ski moviemaking and broadcast on television. For more information, go to johnfry.net

Legend Of Aahhh's, with a running time of 93 minutes, is available on DVD for $19.95. To order go to blizzardsnowstore.com and click on “Movies.”

In 1935 Seattle native Al Nydin had the idea for a magazine about skiing. Until that time most ski periodicals and annuals were association-published. In publishing America’s first independent, commercial magazine, Nydin used the title SKI. The first issue appeared in January 1936.

For a long time it was speculated that no surviving copies of the premier issue of SKI Magazine were in existence. But Seattle ski historian Kirby Gilbert has a copy, which he scanned for the International Skiing History Association’s website, www.skiinghistory.org.

SKI was renamed Ski Illlustrated, moved to New York City at the time World War II broke out, and was resuscitated in 1948 in Hanover, NH by publisher William Eldred, who combined Ski Illustrated, Western Skiing, and Ski News under the present title SKI Magazine.

For a nostalgic look back at what a ski magazine looked like 75 years ago, see attachmed below to view all 36 pages of SKI’s premier issue, including the stories and advertisements.

NOTE PLEASE: This is largish .pdf file and may download slowly on some computers.

This website contains an index of all articles in SKI Magazine from 1941 to 1993.

If you’re among the thousands of cross-country skiers who’ve won a Canadian Ski Marathon award during the past 45 years, you’ll find your name printed in this voluminous history of what is billed as the world’s longest ski race. It is also North America’s oldest long-distance Nordic race.

Held annually in the second week of February, the Canadian Ski Marathon runs for 160 kilometers over a trail between Lachute and Gatineau, Quebec, with an overnight stop at the classic Chateau Montebello resort. The two-day event is divided into sections. Participants can ski as few as 12 kilometers, or the maximum of 160 kilometers.

Bill Pollack, a Canadian forestry engineer, has assembled the colorful adventures, fierce weather, mishaps and triumphs of each winter’s competition from 1967 to 2011, as told by participants. The book is in French as well as English, and is colorfully illustrated with photographs.

Canadian Ski Marathon: Its History in Stories and Pictures, by Bill Pollack, 300 pages. 140 short stories. $50 including shipping. To order, send check to Bill Pollack, 7123 Chemin du Lac Noir, Ste.-Agathe-des-Monts, Qc J8C 2Z8, Canada. E-mail: bill@tuckamor.ca

ISHA’s Awards Banquet, held April 12 in Vail, honored the best works on ski history published during 2012.

Billy Kidd

ISHA Lifetime Achievement Award: Broadcasting

Billy Kidd retired from ski racing due to injuries in 1972, after nine years on the U.S. Ski Team and two on the pro circuit. His significant role in presenting the sport on television started with the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, where Kidd provided color commentary for the alpine racing events. He remembers those Games as a career highlight—especially when Barbara Cochran, a fellow Vermonter, won a gold medal in slalom.

Kidd has since covered two additional Winter Olympics, most recently the 1998 Games in Nagano, as well as numerous World Cup alpine events and freestyle competitions, working at various times for all three networks: NBC, CBS and ABC. He skied down several World Cup downhill courses—including Aspen, Wengen and Val d’Isere—while carrying a hand-held camera to show a racer’s-eye view of the terrain, and also headed down an Olympic slalom course on hockey skates to demonstrate for viewers the icy conditions of a well-prepared world-class slalom venue.

Kidd hosted a 30-minute syndicated television show, American Ski Scene, that aired for a decade. With segments taped at ski resorts across the country, he covered the lifestyle, business and sport of skiing, from colorful personalities to travel and ski instruction. He also traveled to Iran in 1978 with Suzy Chaffee, at the invitation of the Shah, to create a promotional film by Dick Barrymore about ski resorts in that country. He hosted a long-running radio show for NBC and appeared in numerous ski-instruction segments for CNN. 

Kidd’s racing results include his well-known silver medal in slalom at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck—the first American man to win an Olympic medal in alpine skiing, an honor he shared with Jimmie Heuga—and a gold and two bronze medals from the FIS World Championships.

Kidd’s wide-ranging media experience includes developing Billy Kidd’s Ski Racing Book, which was also published as a video, as well as numerous magazine articles for SKI and Skiing. Though he has not worked in broadcast journalism for a number of years, he can be found many winter days on the slopes of Steamboat, Colorado, where he serves as director of skiing and leads a free afternoon clinic for guests. He has lived in Steamboat for 43 years.

Skade Award

The Sun Valley Story

By Van Gordon Sauter

Sun Valley’s storied ski history has required a number of books to describe its fascinations. Van Gordon Sauter’s book is fifth in line—and among the finest. The book begins with chapters on the pre-skiing history of the Snake River area, including a marvelous display of old Western prints. The following chapters document and illustrate the excitement that Sun Valley brought to the sport of skiing: It was the first American ski resort to combine a luxurious high-mountain hotel with 3,000-vertical-foot lifts and open slopes ideal for teaching. Instruction was courtesy of the first full Austrian ski school in America.

There were other advantages, knowledgeably pointed out by the author. Sun Valley was the first American resort connected to both coasts by rail, and also the first to establish a powerful public relations campaign. A glittering circle of celebrities—including Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Claudette Colbert and Ernest Hemingway—convened on the Sun Valley slopes.

The Sun Valley Story presents many previously unpublished Sun Valley scenes, with a cascade of photographs and illustrations. It also brings the Sun Valley story up to date. One of the last chapters focuses on an annual intellectual get-together that equals the stature of the famed Aspen Institute: Allen and Company’s most recent Sun Valley Conference was attended by 600 global elite. Event host Herbert Allen summed up the Sun Valley experience by saying, “The whole place is magic.”  The book proves that beyond doubt.

Author Van Gordon Sauter is a former president of CBS News and Fox News who began his journalism career as a reporter for the Detroit Free Press and the Chicago Daily News. The book includes a foreward by Academy Award winning actor, director and producer Clint Eastwood, who first visited Sun Valley in the 1940s with his parents and later purchased a home there. It was published by Mandala Media, publishers of the award-winning Sun Valley Magazine and numerous coffee-table and regional guidebooks. —Morten Lund

The Sun Valley Story by Van Gordon Sauter; Mandala Media LLC; 204 pages in coffee-table format, profusely illustrated with vintage and modern photographs.

Skade Award

Lost Ski Areas of the Southern Adirondacks

By Jeremy Davis

The first U.S ski lift, a rope tow, was built in 1933 in Woodstock, Vermont. Twelve years later, hundreds of ski areas had been built in the Northeast. But within the next decade, quite a few of them closed. This historical fact has allowed Jeremy Davis to write three books about the hills that didn’t make it, previously covering “lost” ski areas of the White Mountains of New Hampshire (2008) and Southern Vermont (2010).

An introductory chapter of his latest book, Lost Ski Areas of the Southern Adirondacks, describes athriving region whose future was boosted the day the first ski train arrived at North Creek Station on March 4, 1934. A vintage photo shows the platform full of skiers, waiting for cars to haul them to nearby Ticonderoga and Old Forge. The next winter, the area’s first rope tow opened at North Creek, and soon there were three operations within walking distance of the station. The race to build was on.

The multiplicity of ski areas in the Southern Adirondacks created the first ski-area bubble—the region overbuilt. Thirty-nine ski areas in the region either quickly or eventually closed, and can now be seen only in the book’s black and white illustrations.

When not prospecting for vanished ski areas, Davis is a dedicated lifetime skier and private weather forecaster, working out of Glens Falls, New York. He counts as “lost” only ski areas that had at least one lift. To locate ruins, he has collected old brochures and researched ads in library magazine collections. He has also had great help from contributors who sign onto his NELSAP Website (“New England Lost Ski Areas Project”) to provide leads. In all, Davis has located the remains of 600 early Northeast ski areas, now extinct. In terms of history, his research indicates that ski areas in the Northeast—both lost and surviving—likely surpassed the impact of ski areas in the rest of the nation in driving the early sport of American skiing to success. —Morten Lund

Lost Ski Areas of the Southern Adirondacks by Jeremy Davis; History Press; softcover, 160 pages with extensive black and white illustrations.

Ullr Award

Fifty Years of Serious Fun

By K2 Sports and Funny Feelings LLC

To mark its 50th anniversary, the K2 company hired Funny Feelings LLC—the talented editorial and design firm that publishes The Ski Journal and two other magazines—to produce a commemorative book. The result is 50 Years of Serious Fun, a rollicking title that traces the company’s evolution from “garage brand to global.”

Led by publisher Jeff Galbraith, the Funny Feelings crew conducted close to 100 interviews and sifted through the company’s extensive archives— including press clippings, photos, brochures, tech manuals and much more—to present this corporate success story.

Organized by decade and packed with photos, the book starts with Bill Kirschner, who in 1962 applied the technology from his family’s veterinary kennel-manufacturing business to create his first ski, featuring a fiberglass-wrapped torsion box. A subsequent section, titled “The Relentless Pursuit of the Strange,” covers the irreverent marketing campaign led by Terry Heckler that established the “cult of K2” in the early 1970s and built the brand’s identity.

The campaign’s most iconic image—the Chew K2 barn, on a highway near Stevens Pass, Washington—is featured on the book’s cover, and the table of contents shows a photo of the K2 “farm,” a spoof that depicted the company’s headquarters as a “motley assortment of trailers and tin-roofed warehouses.”

The book balances commentary from company insiders with the worldclass athletes—from racers to freeskiers—who have established K2 as an American icon, including Spider Sabich, Steve and Phil Mahre, Wayne Wong, Glen Plake and Shane McConkey, and those who continue to define the brand, like Sean Pettit and Seth Morrison. Other sections cover the company’s successful expansion: Based in the SoDo neighborhood of Seattle, K2 Sports is now an international portfolio of 14 brands and more than 40 consumer-product companies, from skis and snowboards to inline skates and apparel.

50 Years of Serious Fun by K2 Sports and Funny Feelings LLC (Jeff Galbraith, publisher); 194 pages, softcover, hardcover and hardcover with case.

Ullr Award

Colorado Powder Keg

By Michael W. Childers

In the frigid early morning hours of October 19, 1998, William Rodgers raced along the snowcovered ridgeline of the Vail ski resort, setting fires. In a matter of minutes, flames had engulfed six buildings across the mountain, including the aging ski patrol headquarters and opulent Two Elk Lodge. The most notorious act of ecoterrorism in American history, causing $12 million in damages to Colorado’s largest ski resort, the Vail arson attack epitomized the divisive political battles over the development of ever-larger corporate-owned ski resorts on America’s public lands in the latter half of the 20th century.

Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environment examines Colorado’s ski industry and the emergence of the new postindustrial West, where mountains have become more valuable as ski resorts than rangelands, causing the transformation of once-rural mountain towns into sprawling resort communities and placing ski resorts at the center of the debate over the region’s future.

Childers’ book covers key milestones in this evolution, such as the development of the Winter Park ski resort by the city of Denver in the late 1930s and the construction of I-70 and the opening of the Eisenhower Tunnel in 1973. It devotes a detailed chapter to the 1972 defeat by Colorado voters of the state’s bid to host the 1976 Winter Olympics, which galvanized a coalition of antigrowth advocates, environmentalists, ranchers and fiscal conservatives under the leadership of Richard Lamm. The final two chapters discuss the controversy surrounding the construction of Beaver Creek, the industry’s consolidation, and the struggle over Vail’s Category III expansion. The book concludes with a look towards the industry’s future and potential looming crises, such climate change and the continued struggle over growth.

Childers, who was raised in the Colorado mountain town of Fraser, is a professor at Northern University of Arizona. A 19th and 20th century historian, he specializes in environmental and cultural history. To research this book—his first—he drew on books, newspaper and magazine articles, ski-resort statistics, U.S. Forest Service documents, real estate and tourism records, wildlife data and additional public records.

Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement by Michael W. Childers; University Press of Kansas; 234 pages, hardcover.

Film Award

Passion for Snow

Produced by Stephen Waterhouse, Lisa Densmore and Rick Moulton

The influence of Dartmouth College on American skiing is deeper, earlier and more widespread than that of any comparable institution. Passion for Snow, an authoritative DVD, is crammed with Dartmouth’s remarkable ski history. Dartmouth skiers organized the first American slalom, giant slalom and downhill. Dartmouth also worked successfully to establish regional and then nationwide alpine racing at a time when established national competitions were solely decided by point scores in ski jumping and cross-country.

In 1909, an undergrad established the successful Dartmouth Outing Club, whose competitors soon became a formidable force in ski history—more than one hundred Dartmouth men and women have played a part in the Winter Olympics. And 37 Dartmouth students and teachers have been elected to the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, from racers and coaches to ski resort founders and winter sport shop pioneers. The film highlights many of these interesting characters. The film also examines Dartmouth’s role in the 10th Mountain Division—with archival footage showing the soldiers training at Camp Hale and battling in Italy—and that group’s leadership in postwar ski resort start-ups.

Passion for Snow has deep and beautiful moments. One is the 1988 sequence showing the late Diana Golden, Dartmouth’s first Olympic gold medal ski champion, executing a flawless descent on a giant slalom course at Calgary, on a single leg, in the adaptive ski competition.

The film is based in part on Stephen Waterhouse’s previously published book Passion for Skiing. Waterhouse served as executive producer for the film, with Lisa Densmore as producer and ISHA director Rick Moulton as associate producer. Dartmouth graduate Buck Henry, an Academy Award-nominated actor and screenwriter, narrated the film. —Morten Lund

Passion for Snow by Stephen Waterhouse, Lisa Densmore and Rick Moulton; 62-minute DVD plus extra footage included.

Film Award

Vail: The Rise of America’s Iconic Ski Resort

By Roger C. Brown

When Vail celebrated its 50th anniversary on December 15, one of the high points was the premiere of a new Roger Brown film, recapping the history of the resort. Brown, who shot promotional films for Vail in the 1960s and ’70s, had access to his own high-quality footage, and also to film shot for the original Vail Associates fundraising campaign between 1959 and 1962. He also had solid interviews with key Vail personnel, filmed recently and decades ago. The result—titled Vail: The Rise of America’s Iconic Ski Resort—is a great promotion for Vail, but it’s also a valuable oral history of the great ski boom of America’s midcentury. The script highlights the biography of Pete Seibert, but it also makes clear the critical role of Earl Eaton in finding, founding and building the resort.

Eaton is the unsung hero of Vail’s story, and it’s wonderful to see him age gracefully through the hour-long production, with something meaningful to say in each decade of his long life. The same can be said of Bob Parker, Morrie Shepard and Sarge Brown, whose lives intersected the invention of Vail. The shots of Pete and Earl skiing deep powder (on 1950s-era skis and boots) are worth the price of admission. So are the high-quality scenes of Camp Hale, with a couple of tantalizing glimpses of Cooper Hill. Interviews with many of the early backers—Jack Tweedy, George and Ellie Caulkins, Christie Blanche Hauserman Hill, among others—make clear the precarious, not to say miraculous, financing of Vail Associates. The script also details the setbacks (and the gondola disaster) that led to the corporation’s failure, and examines the 1998 arson fire. Mostly, though, the movie is great fun, with shots of Serge Couttet, Roger Staub, the sexually-charged club scene, the hairball gelandesprung contests of the late 1960s and the FIS Championships of 1989.

Roger Cotton Brown is a filmmaker based in Gypsum, Colorado; he was the principal cinematographer at Vail from 1962, when the resort opened, until 1989. He has continued to film in and around the Vail Valley and Colorado since then. —Seth Masia

Vail: The Rise of America’s Iconic Ski Resort, by Roger Cotton Brown; Summit Films, Inc.; 60-minute DVD.

2012 Honorable Mentions

Skade Award

The History of Cranmore Mountain by Tom Eastman

Never a Bad Year For Snow! by Henry M. Yaple

Women of Vail by Elaine Kelton and Carolyn Pope

Ullr Award

Historical Dictionary of Skiing by E. John B. Allen

The Straight Course by Dick Dorworth

Shut Up and Ski by Edie Thys Morgan

 

 

The recorded history of skiing is found in academic papers, books, filmed documentaries, and skiing history web sites that have been created by a worldwide community of dedicated researchers, historians, writers, and videographers who have focused their time and expertise on a wide range of historical topics.

 

Since 1994, ISHA has annually recognized the very best of skiing history that results from these efforts.

 

Through 2009, ISHA has given 107 awards to the individuals who, in aggregate, are responsible for documenting and communicating the history of the sport. The individuals and their output are, within the world of skiing history, akin to Oscar, Emmy, or Pulitzer winners who are honored in the film, television, and print worlds.

 

ISHA’s Annual Awards Gala – - – which is held during the annual Skiing Heritage Week – - – is the event where these prestigious awards are presented.

 

ISHA Awards have been given in the following categories:

 

Lifetime Achievement Award: given for career contributions over a substantial period of time to ski history, ski journalism, ski photography or ski film including digital formats.

 

Ullr Award: given for a single outstanding contribution or several contributions to the historical record in book form.

 

Skade Award: given for one outstanding book on regional ski history or for an outstanding work focused only in part on ski history.

 

Film Award: given for one outstanding contribution to the historical record in filmmaking including digital formats such as Video, CD or DVD.

 

Photography Award: given for an outstanding contribution to the historical record in photography, in film or digital form.

 

Curatorial Award: given for an outstanding work in mounting excellent exhibitions on the history of skiing for a nationally recognized museum.

 

Special Award: given for outstanding contribution to the historical record outside the above categories. Special Awards have been given in traditional ski song and in ski book publishing.

 

Cyber Award: given for designing and maintaining a website that contributes substantially to the preservation, spread, and expansion of the ski history record.

 

Beginning in 1994, ISHA has given awards to 120 recipients.

 

1992 First Annual Gathering Whistler BC

No awards given

 

1993 Second Annual Gathering Sun Valley. Idaho

Sir Arnold Lunn Lifetime Achievement Award for History

John Henry Auran Lifetime Achievement Award for Journalism

 

1994 Third Annual Gathering Park City, Utah

William Banks Berry Lifetime Achievement Award for Journalism

James Laughlin Lifetime Achievement Award for Journalism

Peter Miller Lifetime Achievement Award for Journalism

John B. Allen Ullr Award for From Skisport to Skiing

David Goodman Ullr Award for Classic Backcountry Skiing

Rick Richards Ullr Award for Ski Pioneers

 

1995 Fourth Annual Gathering Aspen, Colorado

Bill Dunaway Lifetime Achievement Award for Journalism

Dr. Jacob Vaage Lifetime Achievement Award for History

James Sloan Allen Ullr Award for Romance of Commerce and Culture

Dolores LaChapelle Ullr Award for Deep Powder Snow

Friedl Pfeifer Ullr Award for Nice Goin’, My Life on Skis

Marty Sterling Ullr Award for Days of Stein and Roses

 

1996 Fifth Annual Gathering Stowe, Vermont

John Fry Lifetime Achievement Award for Journalism

Roland Palmedo Lifetime Achievement Award for Journalism

Allen Adler Ullr Award for New England and Thereabouts—A Ski Tracing

Miggs and Dick Durrance Ullr Award for The Man on the Medal

Beth and George Gage Ullr Award for Fire on the Mountain

Otto Lang Ullr Award for A Bird of Passage

Glenn Parkinson Ullr Award for First Tracks

 

1997 Sixth Annual Gathering Aspen, Colorado

John C. Jay Lifetime Achievement Award for Film Making

Gretchen Besser Ullr Award for The National Ski Patrol, Samaritans of the Snow

Mary E. Hayes Ullr Award for The Story of Aspen

Luanne Pfeiffer Ullr Award for Gretchan’s Gold

Dick Barrymore Lifetime Achievement Award for Film Making

 

1998 Seventh Annual Gathering Squaw Valley, California

Roger Brown Lifetime Achievement Award for Film Making

Barry Corbet Lifetime Achievement Award for Film Making

Bill Tanler Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism

Louis Dawson Ullr Award for Wild Snow

Robert Frohlich Ullr Ward for Mountain Dreamers

Edna Berg & Anna Cicale Skade Award for Cold Smoke

Joy Lucas Skade Award for It Started in the Mountains

 

1999 Eighth Annual Gathering Mont Tremblant, Quebec

David Rowan Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism

Doug Pfeiffer Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism

Frankie O’Rear Ullr Award for Chateau Bon Vivant, The Aspen Story, The Mont Tremblant Story

W endolyn Holland Ullr Award for Sun Valley, An Extraordinary History

Danielle Soucy Skade Award for La Vallée de la Diable (The Devil’s River Valley)

Blais Arbique and Marc Blais Skade Award for Mont Tremblant: Following the Dream

 

2000 Ninth Annual Gathering Banff, Alberta

William Oscar Johnson Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism

Morten Lund Lifetime Achievement Award In Journalism

Gene Rose Ullr Award for Magic Yosemite Winters

Alan Engen Ullr Award for For the Love of Skiing

Stan Cohen Ullr Award for Downhill Skiing; The Games of ’36

Rodney Touche Skade Award for Brown Cows, Sacred Cows

 

2001 Tenth Annual Gathering Sun Valley, Idaho

Dick Dorworth Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism

Peter Seibert Ullr Award for Vail, Triumph of a Dream

Dick Hauserman Ullr Award for The Inventors of Vail

Dan Wendkin and Ellie Huggins Special Award for Publishing

Bill Wilson Skade Award for Challenging the Mountain, The Life and Times of Wendell Robie

 

2002 Eleventh Annual Gathering Vail, Colorado

Charley Meyers Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism

Mary Hayes Ullr Award for The Aspen Story

The Red Birds Ski Club Ullr Award for The Trail Breakers

Bernard Mergen Skade Award for Snow In America

Catharine McKenty and George Neil Skade Award for Skiing Legends and the Laurentian Ski Club

 

2003 Twelfth Annual Gathering Deer Valley, Utah

Bill Grout Lifetime Achievement Award in Publishing

Mike Korologos Lifetime Achievement Award for Journalism

Alf Engen and Ullr Award for First Tracks: 100 Years of Utah Greg Thompson Ski History

Alex Kelner Ullr Award for Skiing in Utah

Michel Beaudry Ullr Award for Against All Odds: Whistler

David Gonzales Ullr Award for Jackson Hole: On a Grand Scale

Tom Bie Ullr Award for Steamboat Springs: Ski Town USA

Ingrid Wicken Skade Award for Pray for Snow

 

2004 Thirteenth Gathering Mammoth Mt., California

Warren Miller Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism

Carson White Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism

Martin Forstnzer Ullr Award for Mammoth, the Sierra Legend

Gary Schwartz Ullr Award for Skiing Literature and The Art of Skiing.

Sonja Stallions Ullr Award for A Rough Way to Ride Between Sky and Earth

Peter Shelton Ullr Award for Climb to Conquer

Seth Masia Cyber Award for skiinghistory.org

 

2005 Fourteenth Gathering Stowe, Vermont

Dick Needham Lifetime Achievement Award

Henry Yaple Ullr Award for Ski Bibliography

Peter Oliver Ullr Award for Stowe: A New England Classic

Charles Sanders Ullr Award for The Boys of Winter

Irv Naylor Skade Award for Ski Roundtop—40 Years of Excellence

Rick Moulton and Ian Scully Film Award for Legacy: Austrian Ambassadors

 

 

2006 Fifteenth Skiing Heritage Week Vail, Colorado

Nick Howe Lifetime Achievement in Ski Journalism

Karen Lorentz Lifetime Achievement Award in Ski Journalism

Bill Briggs Special Award in Traditional Ski Song

Bob Parker Ullr Award for “What Did You Do in the War. Dad?”

Roger Brown Ullr Award for Requiem for the West

Jack McEnany Ullr Award for Ski Fast, Be Good, Have Fun

David Rowan ISHA Service Award

Lisa Olken Film Award for Ski! A Century of Colorado Skiing

 

2007 Sixteenth Skiing Heritage Week Vail. Colorado

Joe Jay Jalbert Lifetime Achievement Award in Film

John Fry Ullr Award The Story of Modern Skiing

Cal Conniff Skade Award Skiing In Massachusetts

Jeff Leich Curatorial Award New England Ski Museum

Morten Lund ISHA Service Award

 

2008 Seventeenth Skiing Heritage Week, Aspen, Colorado

E. John B. Allen Ullr Award for The Culture and Sport of Skiing From Antiquity to World War II

Byron Rempel Ullr Award for No Limits: the Amazing Life of Rhoda and Rhona Wurtele, Canada’s Olympian Skiing Pioneers

Rick Moulton ISHA Film Award for Ski Sentinels: the Story of the National Ski Patrol

Ingrid Wicken Skade Award for Skiing in Southern California

FIS/Gunter Witt ISHA Service Award for Skiing in the Fine Arts

Bill Kerig ISHA Film Award for Steep

Greg Stump ISHA Film Award, Lifetime Achievement

John Christie Skade Award for The Story of Sugarloaf

 

2009 Eighteenth Annual Skiing Heritage Week, Mammoth, California

E. John B Allen Lifetime Achievement Award for Ski History

Dick Barrymore Lifetime Achievement Award for Film

Paul Ryan Lifetime Achievement Award for Film and Photography

Mary Kerr Skade Award for A Mountain Love Affair; The Story of Mad River Glen.

Nils Larsen ISHA Film Award for Skiing in the Shadow of Genghis Kahn

Robin Morning Skade Award for Tracks of Passion: Eastern Sierra Skiing,

Dave McCoy, and Mammoth Mountain.

Jeremy Davis Cyber Award for The New England Lost Ski Areas Project

Roland Huntford Ullr Award for Two Planks and a Passion

 

2010 Nineteenth Annual Skiing Heritage Week, Park City, Utah

Steinar Hybertsen, ISHA Film Award for Norwegian Ski Legends

Henry Purcell, Skade Award for Portillo, Spirit of the Andes

David Antonucci, Ullr Award for Snowball’s Chance, the Story of the 1960 Winter Games

Chic Scott, Skade Award for Deep Powder and Steep Rock: The Life of Mountain Guide Hans Gmoser

Karin Rase, Ullr Award for Skiing in Art and Design

Lowell Skoog, ISHA Cyber Award for alpenglow.org

 

2011 Twentieth Annual Skiing Heritage Week, Sun Valley, Idaho

Tim Ryan, Lifetime Achievement Award for Broadcast Journalism

Dick Dorworth, Ullr Award for The Perfect Turn — And Other Tales of Skiing and Skiers

Stephen L. Waterhouse, Ullr Award for Passion for Skiing

Kitzbühel Ski Club, Ullr Award for Hahnenkamm: The Chronicle of a Myth

E. John B. Allen and Egon Theiner, Ullr Award for 100 Years of International Skiing

European Broadcasting Union, Film Award for 100 Years FIS

Dave Irons, Skade Award for Sunday River

James Benelli, Skade Award for Ski Tales: The History of China Peak and Sierra Summit

ISHA SKIING PIONEER AWARD

ISHA established this award program to posthumously honor 1-2 individuals per year.

Honoree are intended to be significant, long-time ski industry persons who had a deep commitment to and made contributions to the sport over many years of industry service. Further, a Pioneer awardee is intended to be someone whose great spirit and presence caused them to have industry wide friendships which embody the “comaraderie” and spirit that Mason Beekley felt should be an essential element of ISHA. The honoree should be a person whose “life story” is an inspiration to skiers and historians, and whose personality is a significant element of the very colorful backdrop of the sport.

ISHA has made two Skiing Pioneer awards:

George Bauer (2008) – George Bauer, the late publisher of Ski Magazine (Remembering, September issue), personified what was exciting and fun about skiing. George organized the annual Streeter Cup, which brought together past Olympic, World Cup, and U.S. Ski Team racers. He was also responsible for the creation of Ski Industry Week, the Ski Business Hall of Fame, and the Sun Valley/Ski Magazine 50th Anniversary Celebration. And he kept the Legends of American Skiing alive and thriving.

Stu Campbell (2009) – Stu Campbell ranks as one of America’s most influential ski teachers. He was a profound thinker about technique and ski equipment testing. He was a terrific teacher and innovator, a patient mentor, a man of wisdom and humility, generous a kind hearted , and because of his passion for the sport, had a legion of like minded friends, colleagues and admirers in the sport. His spirit is captured in a quote attributed to him, “Every turn you make is good for the soul.”

The North American Snowsports Journalists Association is celebrating 50 years.
By Phil Johnson

When the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA) gathers for its annual meeting in April 2013 at Mammoth Mountain, California, it will mark the 50th anniversary of the only coast-to-coast media organization dedicated to covering skiing and snowboarding.

The U.S. Ski Writers Association—now NASJA—was founded in 1963. The first meeting was held at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco, and Carson White of the San Francisco Examiner was elected president. From that handful of journalists who gathered around an L-shaped table five decades ago came today’s NASJA, with 200 members from 31 states and two Canadian provinces.
In the beginning, almost every member was a newspaper writer, with early radio and television reporters, like Reno’s Snoshu Thompson, an exception. Today the membership is diverse: It includes traditional newspaper reporters and columnists, but also plenty of ph0to-journalists, broadcasters, authors, editors and Internet bloggers. As the definition of media has expanded in 50 years, so have the boundaries of ski coverage and NASJA membership. But the idea remains the same.

Organizations for ski writers had been operating in California and the Midwest since the 1950s, and in the fall of 1962, a group of writers met at the Eastern Slope Inn in North Conway, New Hampshire, to organize the Eastern Ski Writers Association. Europe had formed a ski writers’ association the previous year. So for groups across the United States with similar purpose, it made sense to consolidate into one—presumably greater, presumably grander—national organization.

Sounds simple, right? But as outlined in From Liftline to Byline, an informative history published by the Eastern Ski Writers Association in 2003, there were issues between the regions right from the start. For example: Who could join this organization? What were the standards of membership? And what about regional autonomy?
The East wanted a strong, formal set of standards, while a letter sent in March 1963 by a member from the Far West suggested something different in his realm. “We are a very informal organization with no rules, regulations, incorporation, constitution, or bylaws to hinder or help us,” he wrote. “Rather than be bound to strict conformity, we find that we operate best as we meet each situation and let policy be our guide.”

Compare that to the view expressed by newspaper writer Jay Hanlon of the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leader: “We tried to establish a group of professional ski reporters, weeding out the fringe writers. And in so far as national [goes], we tried to lift their standards to meet Eastern’s. We were a bunch of hard-nosed ski writers, not given to industry puff or presentation.”

Forming a national organization was turning out to be a difficult proposition. The first Eastern president, Mike Beatrice of the Boston Globe, went so far at first to recommend that his members not join.

A second U.S. Ski Writers Association meeting was held in Chicago in June 1964, but it was not until 1965 that all regions voted to affiliate with USSWA. What finally led to the agreement was a concession to the East that it could define its own standards, especially regarding membership eligibility, and that the national organization would be a “coordinating” group, with the regions as members, instead of individuals. Also behind the East’s willingness to join was the fear that if ESWA turned down the affiliation, the national group would simply solicit members in the East directly, which could create a competing group.

The ski industry welcomed the new organization. In requesting a listing of members, Eastern Ski Operators Association secretary William Norton wrote: “As you know, area operators are constantly confronted by persons looking for a free ride…It is our thought, if we had your membership list, we could separate the wheat from the chaff. At least we would know who your bona fide members are and could be better guided in our decisions to issue privileges to those who should have them, rather than some fly-by-nights who are only sponging.”

By 1965, the USSWA voted to organize into six regions: East, Central, Southern California, Northern California/Nevada, Rocky Mountain and Pacific Northwest. Journalists who wanted to be members of the national organization would have to join through their region, and voting on national matters would be accomplished by region, with the ballots weighted to reflect the percentage of the overall membership.

At first, the USSWA was primarily a writers group, featuring well-known journalists like Burt Sims of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Dana Gatlin of the Christian Science Monitor, Dave Knickerbocker of Newsday, Bill Keil of the Portland Journal, Ralph Thornton of the Minneapolis Star, Alex Katz of the Chicago Sun Times, Mike Madigan of the Rocky Mountain News, Luanne Pfeifer of the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, Henry Moore of the Boston Herald Traveler and Jerry Kenney of the New York Daily News. Influential print journalists like I. William Berry of the Long Island Press and Charlie Meyers of the Denver Post would join later.

But the organization was not just for representatives of major newspapers. Mike Strauss was already a well-known sports writer for the New York Times when he added ski writing to his reporting repertoire in the late 1950s. Given his affiliation—and his personality—Strauss didn’t need an organization to advance his writing efforts. But he realized that many of those who worked for small press outlets needed help to gain access to events and places. He led the way for acceptance of those from smaller publications to be equal members, so long as they met credentials requirements. “It put us all on a level playing field” he said.

While most members at first were print journalists, there were broadcasters, too. One of them, the widely known radio ski reporter Roxy Rothafel, became the central figure in a cause célèbre in the early 1970s. It seems that Killington president Preston Leete Smith objected to Rothafel’s description of the less-than-ideal conditions that he experienced at the mountain one day. Smith tried to blackball the ski reporter. Word got out and ESWA quickly came to Roxy’s defense, perhaps marking the only time ski writers have marched under the banner of the First Amendment.

By the end of its first decade, the USSWA had a constitution and bylaws. The organization also met annually and handed out awards. The first writing award went to Bill Berry of the Sacramento Bee, while the first Golden Quill award for contributions to the advancement of skiing went to Merritt Stiles of the U.S. Ski Association. In 1967, Olympic medalist Jimmie Heuga was the first Competitor of the Year.
Establishing common ground did not rule out controversy. This was a national organization, but the 3,000-mile-wide commitment sometimes seemed to require too much effort. In 1982, an Eastern delegation at the national meeting, believing that USSWA was on the verge of coming apart, voted against incumbent president Janet Nelson, a prominent writer and editor from the East who was seeking a second year in office. Instead, they backed Ben Rinaldo from Southern California, a former USSWA president, who, they would argue, was committed to maintaining the national organization. The apparent purge of Nelson infuriated some members. But USSWA survived: Its visibility grew, helped by a nationally broadcast news conference in 1984, and the membership increased during the decade, eventually growing to more than 300 full press members. The former associate membership category with a lower requirement for eligibility was eliminated in 1983.

One of the reasons for the organization’s growth was the increasing appeal of the annual meetings. In the early days, these were small events. By the 1980s they had become much larger, capped off by the gathering at Vermont’s Stratton Mountain in 1988 that is talked about still by those who attended. The event was organized by Craig Altschul, a past USSWA president who by then was Stratton’s PR chief. Multiple gifts were handed out to all who attended, and guests included the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, America’s Cup sailing champion Dennis Connor and the actress Jill Clayburgh. It was all capped off by a dinner dance on the final evening, featuring the popular band America, with a smoke and laser show to introduce the area’s new Starship gondola. Altschul arranged rental tuxedos for all the men who attended.

By this time, members from Canada had formed their own chapter. The name U.S. Ski Writers Association no longer seemed appropriate, so in 1989, it was changed to the North American Ski Journalists Association. Two years later it was changed again. Some members were concerned that keeping “Ski” in the name would send the wrong message to younger writers who worked with snowboarders. So the current North American Snowsports Journalists Association was born … and the acronym NASJA, created two years earlier, did not have to be changed. Several years later, the Canadian region collapsed. It seems their members found a cross-nation organization unwieldy, preferring instead to merge on an East, Central, West basis across borders. But the new name remained.
Despite attractive annual meetings, a timely annual membership directory, and a growing awards program that now also recognized excellence in photography, broadcasting and book publishing, there remained undercurrents of unhappiness at the regional levels. With weighted voting, the East, because of the size of its membership, could veto initiatives popular with the other regions. And Eastern delegates were often blunt in making that point.

To address this and other general concerns, in 1995 NASJA president John Hamilton, a well-known San Francisco-based broadcaster, organized a session at Snowbird, Utah, at which representatives of all the regions sat down in one room to talk out issues facing the organization. Philadelphia attorney and mediator Ed Blumstein, who as a freelance ski columnist was also a member of the organization, directed the daylong session. It was classic mediation: Discussion groups were mixed and all options, including dissolving the organization, were on the table. But as people began to discuss their needs and interests, it turned out everyone had the same goals, recalls Blumstein. “We just had to figure out how to do it.”

In addition to a newly discovered appreciation among regions, the major thing to come out of that meeting was a decision shortly thereafter by the four regions in the West to consolidate. The four (Rocky Mountain, Southern California, Northern California/Nevada and Pacific Northwest) individually had small memberships and there was some feeling that a merged West Region would create a more level playing field at National meetings. “And we were running out of volunteers to lead the organizations,” recalls John Naye, a long time West and NASJA leader. While it did streamline the organization, some distinctly regional activities, like the Charlie Proctor Annual Awards dinner in San Francisco, and the Rocky Mountain Trade Fair in Denver, fell by the wayside.

The Midwest voted to remain independent. That left NASJA with the three regions it has today: NASJA West, NASJA Midwest, and the Eastern Ski Writers Association. Two votes have been held in the region to change the ESWA name to NASJA East but both have failed to get a required 60 percent.

While the behind-the-scenes politics and maneuvering continued, NASJA president Dave Irons, a long time writer/broadcaster from Maine, seemed to put a punctuation mark on the “them versus us” issue in 2000, declaring, “we are them, and they are us.”

Over the years, ethics occasionally came up. What was the relationship between the journalist and the industry? There were instances reported when a writer’s plans for the weekend were based on who was offering the best deal; or a request was made to host six people in return for a story; or a new pair of skis was delivered to a newsroom.
Sometimes a PR person was forced to make a quick decision. One well-known PR director recalls being asked to give up his seat at dinner to babysit the son of a well-known writer. The PR guy and his wife ate pizza in their room with the child that evening.

In the mid-1980s the organization, acting on recommendations by a committee headed by the late Bob Gillen, who had been both a ski journalist and a ski area marketing director, adopted a more formal set of ethics standards. As those were developed and still stand, no member of the organization shall attempt “to seek special considerations or courtesies from any segment of the snowsports industry in exchange for a favorable comment or review.”

Once primarily comprising full-time newspaper writers, the group now reflects the people who produce most ski copy today: freelancers, many of whom initially joined to establish legitimacy. While once most of the writers covered competitions, members today are much more likely to focus on ski areas and travel. While the early members were almost all male, a significant number of women are now involved.

That membership is growing older. Ski journalists don’t retire, it seems. Craig Altschul, the former USSWA president, proposed at one time that all members over a certain age step aside, and—perhaps jokingly, perhaps not—he also suggested that the ski industry provide some kind of a ski pass incentive to send them on their way.

Probably the biggest challenge to the organization is the emergence of the Internet and social media. With the ability to update everyone about everything as often as you want, many journalists don’t look to an organization to stay in touch. The industry also relies less on organizations. Where the NASJA credential was once the prime way to be certain a journalist was genuine, online checking can be a quicker and more comprehensive method of validation.

As the North American Snowsports Journalism Association enters its second half-century, it seems to have reached a maturity level where issues between regions no longer dominate the discussion. The challenge today is to attract new, younger members who not only have the talent to be successful but also want to sustain an organization that appeals to others with the same goals. As has been the case from the start, NASJA still is the only organization organized exclusively for those who cover the sliding sports.

Author Phil Johnson is the current president of NASJA.

Didier Cuche, 37, who retired in 2012 after 17 years on the World Cup circuit, made a farewell run in 1930s-era gear, including leather boots and wooden skis with pre-Kandahar bindings.

View: Universal Sports video.

The 2011-12 ski season marked a half century for Sun Peaks Resort (formerly Tod Mountain), offering some of British Columbia’s most challenging inbounds skiing. The 3,678-acre ski area is 30 miles to the northeast of Kamloops, B.C.

For a detailed history of Sun Peaks, see Robert Koopmans two-part article in the Kamloops Daily News:

Part One: Sun Peaks at 50: Burfield lift sowed seeds for great ski culture

Part Two: Foreign Exchange: Sun Peaks investment part of a maturing city economy

 

More skiing is on TV than ever before, so why do most people think there’s less? Look to history for the answer.

By John Fry (September 2008 issue of Skiing Heritage)

While television viewing and the sport of skiing have each grown immensely over the last 50 years, one thing has not: the viewing of ski racing   on television.

Competitive skiing once appeared regularly during the winter months on home TV screens -- free to viewers, thanks to the big networks. Today, apart from the Winter Olympics, you have to be a cable subscriber to watch taped or delayed-transmission alpine races, such as the FIS World Alpine Ski Championships held in odd-numbered years, and the annual Hahnenkamm downhill, which has a world-wide audience of five hundred million. 

But even cable coverage has waned. If you want to watch World Cup races live, last year you had to pay to view them on your computer monitor.

So, within half a lifetime of most of the folks reading this article, ski racing on television has evolved from being free on broadcast network stations, to part of a paid cable package, to an on-line subscription service.

To be fair, that’s only part of the story. There are probably as many hours of skiing and snowboarding and extreme skiing as there’ve ever been on television. But, spread over more and more channels, each viewed by ever smaller numbers, skiing on television gives the appearance of having shrunk dramatically.

Moreover, the sport’s low ratings – the number of people watching it -- have left it with fewer of the advertisers whose money is needed to pay for the programming. The U.S. Ski Team has to buy television time to ensure that the World Championships can be viewed in the U.S. The cost is not small. Compared to other sports – for example, a tennis tournament -- ski competitions, conducted in the freezing outdoors in remote locations on steep mountainsides, are logistically difficult and expensive to produce.

Why has skiing on television not fared as well as golf and tennis tournaments? After all, an estimated ten million Americans ski and snowboard in a given winter, and millions more may be retired or temporarily inactive skiers who still love the sport. Surely, they comprise a viable potential audience. Yet during half-a-century of explosive growth in mass viewing of football, baseball and basketball, ski racing has been drawn down into narrower holes bored by changes in video technology.  How did it happen?

AT THE BEGINNING

The earliest television coverage of competitive skiing – flickering images on a screen – was at the 1936 Olympic Winter Games held at Garmisch Partenkirchen, Germany.  Twenty years and one world war later, in 1956, Italian television carried some live coverage of the Olympics at Cortina d’Ampezzo.    

The first Winter Olympics seen live on American television were the 1960 Squaw Valley Games. Not that the television networks were vying for the privilege of covering Squaw Valley. ABC Television actually withdrew its bid of $50,000. Walt Disney, who was orchestrating the Games, worried anxiously that Squaw Valley might not attract any live TV coverage. CBS finally took it on. The network’s owner Bill Paley did it, according to the late Roone Arledge, “not out of any love for the Olympics, but as a favor to Disney.”

Arledge, for his part, liked what he saw of the 1960 Games and so, after joining ABC, he convinced the network to pursue the right to televise the next Winter Olympics at Innsbruck. ABC won, paying $500,000, or ten times as much as the rights for Squaw Valley. 

Arledge wrote a special article for SKI Magazine readers about the complex preparations for televising the ’64 Games, with competition sites scattered around the city of Innsbruck at Igls, Lizum, Seefeld.

“Compared to Innsbruck, Squaw Valley was child’s play,” wrote Arledge, who is generally acknowledged today as the pioneering genius of early sports television. It is significant that he regarded heavily involved skiers, readers of a ski magazine, as an important, influential core of viewers. In later years, television executives came to regard skiers as less important to success than making ski races appealing to millions more of non-skiers --  a mission in which they arguably failed.

The cost of televising Olympic skiing escalated rapidly. For the 1964 Games, the videotape of the competitions had to be trucked to Munich and flown to London, whence it was satellite-fed (a first) to New York. Innsbruck was a ratings winner, and the IOC was able to sell TV rights to the Grenoble 1968 Winter Games world-wide for five times more than it got for Innsbruck four years earlier.

The Winter Olympics weren’t the sole source of growth for televised ski racing in the 1960s. ABC introduced its Wide World of Sports program in April, 1961, and the following winter Wide World taped and showed the first televised pro ski race, with cash prizes, run by Friedl Pfeifer’s International Professional Ski Racing Association (IPSRA). Wide World of Sports also televised Dick Barrymore’s filming of the 1966 World Alpine Ski Championships at Portillo, Chile -- used by ABC to win itself an Emmy Award.

Later, ABC came to introduce the Saturday-afternoon Wide World of Sports program with a shot of Yugoslav jumper Vinko Bogataj careening sideways off the in-run trestle into a series of horrifying, ground-slamming, bone-crunching cartwheels. At first, when Bogataj soared into the air, the announcer cried, “The thrill of victory,” then as the unfortunate fellow crumpled into a fence, unconscious, the voice intoned, “the agony of defeat.”

THE 1970s: A GOLDEN AGE OF TELEVISED SKIING?

The 1968 Winter Olympics, and the rocketing fame of Jean-Claude Killy,  propelled broadcasters into televising World Cup classics, like the Hahnenkamm and the Lauberhorn, as well as international races in the U.S. The 1970s became the golden age of skiing on television. To the increasing  hours of Olympics and World Alpine Ski Championship coverage increase was added the new sport of freestyle, with bump skiing, aerials and ballet. TV executives also discovered the popularity of ski jumping among viewers who otherwise had little interest in skiing. (Internationally, ski jumping attracts as many, or more, viewers than World Cup racing -- albeit older viewers.)

Because of his excellent connections in the television industry, Bob Beattie in the 1970s was able to obtain broadcaster coverage of his professional, head-to-head, cash-prize races, involving famous ex-Olympians like Jean-Claude Killy, Billy Kidd, Spider Sabich and Hank Kashiwa. In parallel-course pro racing, the TV viewer could see who was moving faster, an experience not possible with one-racer-at-a-time FIS slaloms and giant slaloms. At the event itself, the air crackled with the voice of commentator Greg Lewis, in contrast to the dull, staid FIS races.

“Beattie was on the leading edge of change that took sports from being sports to being entertainment,” says Lewis.

Prime-time coverage in the U.S.  of ski racing at the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games ski races was helped by the time difference with Japan, which made it possible to show live action. Many, however, regarded ABC’s coverage, hosted by baseball and fishing show announcer Curt Gowdy, as lackluster. Sapporo would not be the last occasion on which TV executives fumbled the choice of a host announcer for the Winter Games, given their blind belief in the idea that the intrinsic athleticism and skills of the competitions are of so little interest to viewers that the anchorman need have no prior knowledge of winter sports.

In the 1970s, too, ABC introduced its famous – or infamous, depending on your point of view—mini-profiles with athletes, Up Close And Personal. As often as not, Up Close and Personal consisted of a cloying interview with ski star Franz or Rosi seated in their gasthof struggling to find the English words to answer questions posed by an interviewer whose knowledge of German perhaps extended to the meaning of the word schuss.

The 1976 Winter Olympics at Innsbruck shone, highlighted by Franz Klammer’s gold-medal-winning downhill run. In the words of veteran TV ski commentator Greg Lewis, Klammer’s run was “a frantic, on-and-over-the-edge, airborne, slashing, no-tomorrow plunge down a terrifying chute of ice, risking everything to win, yet still trailing Switzerland’s Bernhard Russi by a fifth of a second with only 1,000 meters to go.” Football Hall of Famer and ski enthusiast Frank Gifford called it, “the most exciting two minutes in sports,” and the taped voice-over of Gifford and Bob Beattie calling the race was the best the duo ever made.

After witnessing Klammer’s spectacular run, ABC Sports President Roone Arledge ordered his people to “buy every downhill we can get our hands on.” His judgment wasn’t far wrong. Ski racing generated decent viewer ratings, partly because it didn’t have to compete yet against the football and college basketball games that later came to invade television’s January schedules. 

CABLE TV: BOTH MORE AND LESS OF SKIING

A momentous change occurred in 1979 with the advent of cable television and the fledgling sports channel, ESPN.  For a while, more skiing appeared on television than ever before – alpine racing, freestyle events, celebrity races, Warren Miller movies, and more. Cable had a voracious need for programming. On-air work was plentiful for the likes of Bob Beattie and Greg Lewis, and for ex-racers like Billy Kidd and Hank Kashiwa, who would later be joined by articulate, photogenic retired competitors such as Christin Cooper, Andy Mill, Lisa Densmore, and Pam Fletcher.

While the amount of skiing on television increased with cable, paradoxically it served to make the sport less successful commercially. The number of people watching each show grew smaller as the number of cable channels multiplied. The audience ratings for alpine ski races were now perceived as comparatively weak.

The exception, of course, was the Olympics. When Antonio Samaranch became President of the IOC in 1980, he and vice-president Dick Pound increasingly exploited the competition among U.S. networks to televise the Olympics.  The TV bidding frenzy was not only propelled by ice skating and hockey, but also, ironically, by the alpine ski racing once so despised by the IOC’s former president, Avery Brundage. The IOC’s revenues mushroomed, along with the commercial advertising time needed to pay for it.

Television coverage in the 1980s reflected the growing diversity of what was happening on snow. Freestyle aerials and mogul skiing competitions were on their way to becoming Olympic sports. ABC broadcast a television show of the world snowboarding championships at Breckenridge in 1987. Women’s professional ski racing blossomed briefly. Famous ex-racers competed on teams with celebrities.

To reach vacationing viewers, Rory Strunk in 1985 began producing a show beamed into tens of thousands of television sets in resort condos and hotel rooms. Today, more than 20 years later, Resort Sports Network (RSN) annually creates seven shows, one for each day of the week, repeated throughout the winter. The resort channel adds local weather weather and snow conditions and, of course, there are time slots for commercials.

Entering the 1990s, Beattie, the mainstay of televised skiing, came to be joined by ex-downhiller Todd Brooker, who turned to television after suffering an horrendous, career-ending crash in the 1987 Hahnenkamm downhill.

More and more of the ski racing at the Olympics (Sarajevo and Calgary) was presented as delayed-action coverage – edited to focus on the winners and the most exciting spills. Increasingly, shows were packaged, or syndicated, allowing time slots for commercials. The master of the business became ex-racer Joe Jay Jalbert. Under an agreement with the U.S. Ski Team, Jalbert Productions filmed races during the winter, and edited the raw material into a show of highlights. The show was given to TV stations in return for half of the commercial time, in this way generating a profit for  Jalbert.

As the pro racing circuit collapsed in the late 1990s, it was supplanted by Jeep King of the Mountain races. Little known ex-World Cup racers winning a lot of money were replaced by well-known ex-World Cup racers winning less money.

SKIING’S LIMITATIONS AS A TV SPORT

After promising beginnings in the 1960s, televised skiing steadily lost ground to other sports. As the years passed, it turned out that the reasons for the sport’s limitations on TV in America were not a whole lot different from the reasons that ski racing has seldom attracted large throngs of spectators on the hill. Long-time announcer Greg Lewis pinpoints them. 

“It’s difficult to see where one racer may have lost a tenth of a second to another racer,” says Lewis, rarely making it possible for the spectator to know where and when the winner won.

“It’s a lot less attractive to viewers than is figure skating, which is sexy, graceful, poetic. You can see the skater’s face, whereas a ski racer’s face and the emotions it expresses are hidden by a helmet and giant goggles. The racer looks like an object. It doesn’t help that the camera, which is usually directed up and down the hill, flattens the terrain, making it looking less threatening or steep,

“Live coverage of ski racing,” continues Lewis, “presents all kinds of difficulties. The action goes too fast, and the announcer is always behind. The intervals between starts are abbreviated.

“Football is the perfect TV sport: 10 seconds of action, and 30 seconds to comment on it and show slo-mo replay. A basketball, football or baseball games typically lasts three hours. The elite downhill racers essentially are finished competing after only a half-hour. The only interest in two-run slalom and giant slalom is the second run.”

In America, ski racing is a second or third-tier sport, not a national sport as it is in central European countries like Austria, Switzerland and Slovenia. For American TV watchers, says Lewis, the preponderance of European competitors and competitions is a turnoff. . .”a bunch of people I’ve never heard of doing something I don’t understand in a place I’ll never go to.”

Ski racing was unlikely ever to attract viewers in the southern, football-loving, non-snow U.S. states, according to Jim Bukata of Mark McCormack’s Trans World International, which produces and markets TV shows.

“It didn’t help either that the sport’s season was short,” says Bukata, “and that the competitions never appeared on the regular, familiar schedule that builds audience numbers.” Skiers, who might have comprised the largest audience, were typically on the slopes when weekend shows aired.

U.S. television, instead of drawing on TV’s unique strength as a live medium, came to treat skiing in the manner of an evening newspaper -- full of background features and taped, edited coverage carried a day or more after the event. In the 1950s, for the first time, people were excited by seeing events live, as they happened. . .football,  baseball, tennis and golf. With skiing, television went backwards, from live to seeing it after the results have appeared in the newspapers.

A popular explanation for skiing’s weakness on television is that it is a minor sport. But wrestling, too, is a minor sport. What caused wrestling to become an almost daily occurrence on TV is that the athletes became actors in a play. It is a show. Organized skiing, especially the FIS, which is governed by officials having little or no media experience, has opposed showmanship in racing.

“Lang and FIS officials were shocked,” recalls Lewis, “when they saw their first major moguls competition at Tignes in 1982. . .rock music blaring, thousands of spectators, competitors hitting bumps, people yelling and screaming.” The FIS already viewed head-to-head pro racing as a sellout, a carnival.

Olympic 1984 silver medalist Christin Cooper who, after retiring from racing, successfully turned to serving as a ski expert analyst for CBS and NBC over a span of 18 years, is baffled by the FIS’s persistent lack of initiative in combating ski racing’s television decline.

“You’d think they would act after seeing the rise of the Winter X-Games on American television at the expense of alpine racing,” says Cooper. “The X Games swooped in and ran with an opportunity that the FIS had, and still has if it wants any chance to remain relevant and attract sponsors and viewers. Stage concerts. Do more events at night. Have competitors interact with spectators. Have a Dancing with the Skiers competition.

“ESPN saw what kids and lazy viewers want,” argues Cooper, “to be entertained in a 21st century way. The X Games took a bunch of pretty obscure and random snow sliding events, packaged them for full entertainment value, and drew sponsors and enthusiastic viewers. But the FIS seems unwilling even to try.”

AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

In the Winter X Games, snowboarders perform tricks in halfpipes. aerialists flip, skiers compete in simultaneous-start races, fighting for position down the course. Forbes Magazine noted the cost efficiency of the X Games. ESPN, which owns them, gave out a mere $576,000 in prizes to 250 athletes in 2004, the cost of one backup NFL quarterback.

ESPN, which had featured commentary by Bob Beattie and Todd Brooker, backed up by Steve Porino, began to phase out its coverage of alpine racing in 2003, turning it over to the Outdoor Life Network (now re-named Versus) cable channel. New owner Comcast virtually saw little value in covering skiing.

Historically, ski racing has largely gone from a sport that the television industry wanted to show to viewers, to one that has to pay television to get on the air or on cable. The U.S. Ski Team, for example, budgets as much as $4 million annually to buy television time. The Team recoups the money by finding sponsors to buy commercial time. In this way, Americans have been able to see the World Ski Championships every three out of four years. But the air time keeps spiraling in cost, with sponsors harder to find.

Perhaps the future will be less bleak. In the winter of 2007, by going on line to www.wcsn.com and paying a fee of $4.95 a month, you could watch World Cup races live on your computer monitor, with ex-racer and journalist Steve Porino calling the action. This the summer of 2008, WCSN, which stands for World Championships Sports Network, entered into a partnership with NBC Sports. The new enterprise will continue to offer subscribers live World Cup races via the Internet. To subscribe, go to www.universalsports.com.

For racing enthusiasts, WCSN’s partnership with NBC is a ray of hope. With NBC’s strengths, the enterprise is moving swiftly to multi-cast ski competition on channels in the largest metropolitan markets, like New York and Los Angeles. Consequently, as more channels open up, more and more skiers will be able to watch World Cup races – maybe even the 2009 World Alpine Ski Championships at Val d’Isere – live on home television at no extra cost. The shows would be sponsored.

*            *              *

In Aspen, the 2005 Winter X Games attracted 68,000 spectators. Four months earlier, about 3,500 people had shown up over three days to watch World Cup alpine races. The contrast was astonishing and, for some, saddening. Fifty-five years after Aspen hosted the first World Alpine Ski Championships ever held in the Western hemisphere, traditional alpine racing was unable to attract a large crowd of spectators, or viewers in sufficient numbers to make it profitable to show on television.

The author is grateful to Lisa Feinberg Densmore, Steve Porino, Christin Cooper, Greg Lewis, Joe Jay Jalbert, Tom Kelly and others for their help in researching this article. A history of ski film-making and television is in John Fry’s The Story of Modern Skiing. Signed copies of the book are available by calling 914.232.5516.