Nordic

The Forgotten Era of Ski Jumping

Sun Valley opened in December 1936, and the next spring it hosted America’s first international Alpine competition, the combined event that became known as the Harriman Cup. Dartmouth’s Dick Durrance made national headlines by beating the top European racers.

Photo top of page: From left, Olav Ulland, Gustav Raaum, Alf Engen and Kjell Stordalen in formation at Ruud Mountain, 1948. Ulland and Engen were at the end of their jumping careers; Raaum and Stordalen, Norwegian exchange students, were newcomers.  National Nordic Museum photo

Alpine skiing was a fledgling sport. For most Americans of the era, ski competition meant jumping. Norwegian immigrants had made ski jumping into a popular spectator sport, with a successful professional circuit. The best-respected racers were Skimeisters—men who could compete in four-way events featuring jumping, cross-country, downhill and slalom. Sun Valley founder Averell Harriman knew that to make Sun Valley the country’s center of skiing, he needed a ski jumping hill.

Two famous Norwegian ski jumpers competed in the first Harriman Cup: Sigmund Ruud (1928 Olympic silver medalist) and Alf Engen (Professional Ski Jumping Champion 1931­–1935 and holder of five world professional distance records). Harriman asked Engen (whom he later hired as a sports consultant) and Ruud to locate a ski jumping hill on Sun Valley property. They selected a site between Dollar and Proctor mountains, with an elevation of 6,600 feet and a 600-foot vertical drop. Taking advantage of the hill’s natural slope, they helped design a 40-meter jump, intended for distances of up to 131 feet, For major jumping competitions, an 80- or 90-meter jump would have been necessary, but the 40-meter hill offered “splendid competition for all classes of competitors” and was particularly suited for four-way competitions. Named for Sigmund, Ruud Mountain became the resort’s center for jumping and slalom events and was used for freeskiing. Sun Valley was the country’s only ski area eligible to host FIS-sanctioned four-way competitions.

The term J-bar didn’t yet exist, but Sun Valley had one built in 1936, called a drag lift, to take skiers over level ground from near the Sun Valley Lodge to the Proctor Mountain chair. This was converted into a rudimentary chairlift for Ruud Mountain, without so much as a backrest or a place to rest one’s skis. This gave Sun Valley one of the first lift-serviced slalom courses on the continent.

Ruud Mountain was inaugurated during Christmas 1937 at Sun Valley’s first intercollegiate ski tournament, between Dartmouth (Eastern champions) and the University of Washington (West Coast champions). During a jumping exhibition, Walter Prager (Dartmouth’s coach), Alf Engen and Otto Lang (Washington’s coach) each jumped more than 40 meters, exceeding the hill’s design limit. Prager said the hill offered “one of the finest and toughest slalom courses he had ever seen.” Engen said Sun Valley’s jump “for its size comes nearer to perfection than any yet developed.” And Lang said the jump was “impeccably engineered and groomed... virtually fall-proof… the neatest layout I had ever seen” (The Valley Sun, January 11, 1938) .

In 1938, women were invited to compete in the Harriman Cup for the first time. Grace Carter Lindley from Seattle, a 1936 Olympian, won the women’s Harriman Cup. She said “Ruud Mountain is the perfect slalom hill. Having the tow available for unlimited rides, one can become thoroughly familiar with the contours of the hill, the general layout of the slalom, and most important, one can gauge the conservative speed one can hold without tiring...”

The 1938 Open Jumping Tournament attracted some of the best jumpers in the world, including the famous Ruud brothers from Kongsberg, Norway: Birger (the 1932 and 1936 Olympic gold medalist) and Sigmund. The hill, with its lift, delighted the competitors, “who had been climbing for their skiing all season or jumping off rickety scaffolds on artificial snow” (American Ski Annual, 1938–39).

Before the event kicked off, Engen jumped 50.5 meters. It didn’t count for the competition but stood as the official hill record. Birger Ruud jumped 48 meters to win, and seven jumpers exceeded 40 meters. Norway’s Nils Eie (world intercollegiate champion) placed second “in beautiful form,” Sigurd Ulland (1938 National Ski Jumping Champion) was third, and Alpine ace Dick Durrance finished fourth.

In 1939, Sun Valley hosted the nation’s first National Four-Way Open Tournament. Based on his downhill and slalom results, local ski instructor Peter Radacher won both the Harriman Cup and the Four-Way Open. Engen won the jumping event and finished fourth in the open.

In 1940, an invitational meet attracted 18 jumpers from 10 clubs. Engen made two flawless leaps to win. He turned aside the “keen challenge” of 21-year-old Gordie Wren of Steamboat Springs, who would go on to be a star of the 1948 U.S. Olympic jumping team and become the 1950 National Nordic Combined Champion. “Following the regular competition, the spectators were thrilled by double jumps, particularly the pair leap by Engen and Wren. ... The tournament was unlike others, where the contestants must make laborious climbs uphill to the scaffold, the chair-lift eliminating such strenuous going” (Sun Valley Ski Club Annual, 1939). In 1941, Engen beat Wren again in the third National Four-Way Open Tournament. Engen “displayed his supremacy in the air overwhelmingly” and “demonstrated his all-around skiing proficiency today by soaring to first place in jumping and winning the national four-event combined championship for the second consecutive year” (Sun Valley Ski Club Annual, 1941).

Alf Engen’s Legendary Battles with Torger Tokle

Torger Tokle emigrated from Norway in 1939. Before World War II he won 42 out of 48 tournaments and set three American distance records. Tokle was a power jumper. According to Harold Anson in Jumping Through Time, “his powerful, and precisely timed takeoffs provided him with a sufficient distance point to capture victories over more stylish jumpers.”

Engen won the 1940 National Ski Jumping Championships, while Tokle finished fourth. At the 1940 National Four-Way Championships at the Milwaukee Ski Bowl, east of Seattle, Engen competed in all four disciplines, while Tokle competed only in jumping, where he made the longest distance. Engen won the jumping event on form points and the four-way title.

In 1941, at Iron Mountain, Michigan, Engen jumped 267 feet to break the North American distance record. Two hours later, at Leavenworth, Washington, Tokle set a new record of 273 feet. At the 1941 National Jumping Championships at Milwaukee Ski Bowl, Tokle jumped 288 feet to set his second North American distance record in less than a month. Engen was second. In 1942, Tokle bumped the record up to 289 feet at Iron Mountain.

The 1942 Harriman Cup/International Downhill and Slalom Tournament was won by Barney McLean “after a stiff battle with Alf Engen.” They tied at 268 points, but under Harriman Cup rules, the winner in case of a tie was the downhill victor. Dick Durrance was third, and Tokle did not enter.

Sun Valley’s jumping event that spring showed the skills of Tokle, Engen and a rising new star, Art Devlin of Lake Placid, New York. Devlin went on to become one of the country’s elite jumpers as a member of three U.S. Olympic teams (1948, 1952 and 1956) and the 1946 National Ski Jumping Champion.

Ruud Mountain’s jumping hill was designed for 131-foot jumps, but in 1942 the takeoff was moved back 25 feet to allow for longer distances. Tokle’s “prodigious drive” set a new hill record of 188 feet, leaving “far behind the mark of 164 feet set by Engen, who reeled off a 175-foot jump.” Tokle “is a most powerful jumper and is constantly improving. Undoubtedly he has not yet reached his ultimate peak. ...” Afterwards, the competitors jumped in group formations, from two to eight in the air at one time. The Sun Valley Ski Club Annual, 1942, contained pictures of Engen, Tokle and Devlin demonstrating their skills.

On May 3, 1945, Sgt. Torger Tokle of the 10th Mountain Division was killed in Italy by an artillery shell.

Ruud Mountain after WWII

During WWII, Sun Valley served as a Naval Rehabilitation Hospital, where 6,578 Navy, Marine and Coast Guard patients were treated. The resort reopened in December 1946. Ruud Mountain saw less ski jumping, although it continued to be Sun Valley’s primary site for slalom events until 1961, often featuring side-by-side slalom courses for men and women.

In 1947, final tryouts for the 1948 U.S. Olympic Alpine teams for the St. Moritz Games were held at Sun Valley. Friedl Pfeifer’s slalom course on Ruud Mountain was “a championship course, typical of those in European competition.” Walter Prager and Engen were named co- coaches of the 1948 U.S. Olympic Ski Team. A ski jumping exhibition featured visiting Norwegian skiers Arnholdt Kongsgaard (1947 National Ski Jumping Champion), Fagnar Raklid, Harold Hauge and Gustav Raaum (an exchange student at the University of Washington), as well as established stars Engen, Durrance and Wren. The U.S. Olympic Jumping Team was selected at the Milwaukee Ski Bowl. The team then went to Sun Valley for two weeks of intensive training on Ruud Mountain.

The following year the jumping hill hosted intercollegiate meets and regional interstate meets, plus a junior championship and a Christmas jumping exhibition.

After the 1950 FIS World Alpine Championships at Aspen, racers came to Sun Valley for the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Otto Lang set two side-by-side slalom courses on Ruud Mountain. A crowd of 400 turned out for a jumping exhibition, featuring University of Washington exchange students Raaum, Gunnar Sunde and Jan Kaier.

In 1951, Sun Valley hosted the final tryouts for the U.S. Olympic Alpine team for the 1952 Winter Games in Oslo, Norway. Side-by-side courses for the slalom events on Ruud Mountain had 32 gates for women and 40 for men. Chris Mohn and Sunde each jumped more than 150 feet in another exhibition of exchange student talent.

By this time, jumping had faded as a spectator draw, and the Ruud Mountain jump was used only for the annual American Legion Junior Three-Way Championships. The last jumping competition there came in 1956.

The 1961 Harriman Cup slalom race was the last held on Ruud Mountain, and it had special significance. Seventeen-year-old Billy Kidd won the slalom when Buddy Werner, winner of the downhill, fell but scrambled up to finish. Jimmie Heuga, also 17, won the Harriman Cup, with Kidd second and Werner third. Dick Dorworth said the 1961 Harriman Cup “will go down in history as the tournament in which youth manifested its right to compete on even terms with the elite of ski racing, as young American racers dominated the events.”

Ski Jumping at Ruud Mountain Ends with a Movie

In 1965, "Ski Party" was filmed at Sun Valley. A lightweight musical-comedy knock-off of beach party films, it starred Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman, with an appearance by Annette Funicello, and musical appearances by Leslie Gore and James Brown. The absurd plot included Frankie Avalon going off the Ruud Mountain jump wearing an inflated clown suit and soaring like a helium balloon. This was the last recorded use of the ski jump. Maintenance records show the Ruud Mountain chairlift was last serviced in 1965, likely for the movie. 

John W. Lundin has won four ISHA Skade Awards for books on the history of Pacific Northwest skiing and Sun Valley.

In Brattleboro, Vermont, ski jumping remains a popular tradition.

In 1909, Dartmouth junior Fred Harris, of Brattleboro, Vermont, founded the Dartmouth Outing Club. That same winter he leaped from a primitive ski jump for the first time, according to the new book Harris Hill Ski Jump, the First 100 years.

Photo above: Some 10,000 spectators encouraged 160 athletes at the 1951 National Championships.

“Broke my skis to pieces,” Harris wrote in his diary. He grabbed another pair and tried again. “Fell twice,” he recorded. “Tried several times, and at last made it. Hurrah! Twice. Oh, ye Gods!”

That tenacity led to the construction of the Brattleboro Ski Jump, which Harris organized (and paid for) in 1922. The jump cost $2,200 to construct and was completed one week before its first competition, during which Bing Anderson, of Berlin, New Hampshire, set a New England distance record, at 48.5 meters (158 feet). Later that year, the hill hosted the Vermont State Ski Jumping Championships, followed by the National Championships in 1923. Over the century, the hill has hosted 18 national and regional championships.

In 1924 the wood-trestle inrun was increased in height and Henry Hall raised the hill record to 55 meters. Improvements in 1941 brought the hill up to the 90-meter standard, and Torger Tokle jumped 68 meters. Structural improvements, including a steel tower, followed in the post-war years.

The jump was rechristened the Harris Hill Ski Jump during the 1951 National Ski Jumping Championships, which drew a crowd of 10,000 spectators cheering more than 160 jumpers. In 1985, Mike Holland jumped 186 meters for a new world record. The following year, with the help of Mt. Snow, the hill got a snowmaking system.

By 2005, the hill no longer met international standards for profile or structural integrity and shut down. Over the next three years the community raised $600,000 to upgrade and meet FIS requirements for 90-meter Continental Cup events. In 2011, Harris Hill hosted the first FIS ski jumping tournament in the United States.

Over its long history, Harris Hill has considered itself a progressive operation, looking to promote ski jumping for everyone. For instance, it took the International Olympic Committee until the 2014 Sochi Games to allow female jumpers. The Brattleboro-based jump beat that by 66 years; Dorothy Graves competed there in 1948.

The hill record stands at 104 meters (341 feet), set by Slovenian Blaz Pavlic in 2017. The centennial competition is scheduled for February 19-20.

“The jump provided heroics for all to see,” winter sports historian and Skiing History contributor John B. Allen notes in the 100th anniversary book. “It really did seem that a man could fly.” 

Skiing predates establishment of the first national park, in 1872.

The unique spectacles of Yellowstone National Park are as engraved on the collective American consciousness as Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon and West Coast redwoods. Incredibly, the park’s sights in winter are even more rare and evocative.

Photo above: Skiers from the Haynes Mid-Winter Expedition break trail, circa 1887-1901, in the Obsidian Cliff area, with
several hardy souls pulling fully loaded supply sleds.

Geyser plumes and steam rise through the brittle-cold air like smoke from hundreds of scattered campfires. Ice-rimed bison look impossibly stoic and noble. Eagles and ravens glide just above rivers warmed by hot springs and floated by trumpeter swans. Elk and moose plow through chest-high drifts, mountain goats the color of the snow roost on sunburned cliffs, and scattered bear paw prints start appearing in the early spring. The rumble of myriad waterfalls are muted when they freeze into stunning ice stalactites, domes and walls. And the visibility stretches across half a dozen mountain ranges and three states.

It’s a big slice of the classic Wild West, literally frozen in time about six months out of every year. In Paul Schullery’s excellent book Yellowstone’s Ski Pioneers, he says that people were probably skiing in the area before it became the world’s first national park in March 1872. The earliest written reference is from a journal by A. Barr Henderson, a miner who started prospecting in the Yellowstone Valley in 1866.

Around Christmas of 1871 Henderson left his camp near present-day Emigrant, Montana, and “went to Bozeman on a pair of 15-foot snow shoes.” At that time his route should have taken him near or through the northern reaches of what would become the park a few months later.

Another likely early skier was Henry Maguire, author of The Coming Empire: A Complete and Reliable Treatise on the Black Hills, Yellowstone and Big Horn Regions (1878). He made numerous winter trips into the park starting in 1873, and while his book makes no mention of skis or skiing, Schullery feels that Maguire would have had to ski, at least sometimes, in order to see what he wrote about.

On an attempt to get to Yellowstone Falls and the geyser basins in December 1873, Maguire was turned back by deep snows and avalanche conditions. Upon reaching Mammoth Hot Springs, he wrote, “I felt amply repaid, however, for making the trip that far. It seemed as though the torrid and frigid zones had met at the spot, and flung together the phenomena peculiar to each. Bright-green ferns, and other water-plants, grew in rank profusion, along the rims of the myriads of perpetually boiling springs, in

the hot breath of which descending snowflakes were converted into water before they reached the earth; while hard by were colossal icicles and trees thickly encased in frost, the surrounding landscape being deeply buried in snow.”

Poachers invade

Unfortunately, most of Yellowstone’s early skiing didn’t center on exploration and sightseeing, but on wholesale wildlife poaching and efforts to prevent it. The harsh winters forced bison, elk and deer into valleys where they could become trapped in deep snow. Hunters on skis had been overwhelming them for years, and that didn’t end when the area became a national park.

“The 1870's was a time of incredible waste and destruction among western wildlife populations, and Yellowstone Park was no exception,” writes Schullery.

General W.E. Strong, who explored Yellowstone on an expedition in 1872, wrote, “In 1870, when Lieutenant Doane first entered the Yellowstone Basin, it was without a doubt unsurpassed on this continent for big game… During the past five years the large game has been slaughtered here by professional hunters by thousands, and for their hides alone.” The meat was left to rot.

Ten years late in coming, an 1883 change in the park regulations prohibited “absolutely” the killing of most wildlife. Yellowstone ski patrols became a big part of the anti-poaching efforts, since the bulk of the damage was done in winter.

Between the poachers, army ski patrols, various expeditions, the mail delivery system, a growing string of small lodges and ranger stations that were inhabited year-round and increasing numbers of skiing tourists at Mammoth Hot Springs, early Yellowstone was one of the most active ski sites in the country.

Schwatka-Haynes expedition

When a much-ballyhooed 1886–87 winter expedition was launched by the Arctic explorer Lt. Frederick Schwatka and newly-appointed official Yellowstone photographer F. Jay Haynes to catalog the “mysteries” of that season, locals scoffed that it was no new thing to ski around the park in the winter.

“As well talk of ‘exploring’ Central Park, New York, as the National Park. The National Park is a well known country, everything worth seeing is mapped out,” declared seasoned Yellowstone skier Thomas Elwood (“Uncle Billy”) Hofer in a series of stories for Forest and Stream magazine titled “Winter in Wonderland, through the Yellowstone Park on snowshoes.”

No one minimized the risks of a deep dive into winter in country where nighttime temperatures could plunge to -50 Fahrenheit, and the days weren’t always much warmer. Blizzards could strike any time, it was easy to become disoriented and lost, and you had to carry enough food and warm weather gear to survive if that happened. The list of hazards was long, and some seriously hardcore Revenant-style hardships were regularly endured when any untimely mishaps could quickly become life threatening.

Consider the well-documented story of the biggest poacher bust in the park’s history. Edgar Howell was one of the region’s most notorious and rugged wildlife killers and in 1893 still operated with impunity. But army scout Felix Burgess managed to arrest him on March 12, in the Pelican Valley, for killing some of the last bison in the park. Catching Howell in the act was daring and difficult. But getting him back over the course of two days to Fort Yellowstone at Mammoth Hot Springs was Jack London material. Transporting a dangerous criminal through harsh conditions cost Burgess parts of one foot to frostbite.

As Schullery notes, it would be hard to say when skiing in the park became less about this kind of daunting work and more about recreation. “Indeed it probably always was,” he writes. “Skiing was certainly a popular local activity by the time Fort Yellowstone was built in 1891.” Accounts in 1894 mentioned children skiing at the fort regularly, with skis of all sizes stacked outside many houses, “just as in the park today,” observes Schullery.

In April 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt, who had been instrumental in the park’s creation, went skiing out of Mammoth with nature writer John Burroughs.

Alpine skiing, 1941

By 1941, according to Stan Cohen’s comprehensive book Downhill in Montana, a Yellowstone Winter Sports Association was founded “for the purpose of purchasing a ski lift for the use of Yellowstone Park residents and for the promotion of other winter sports activities.” That winter a rope tow was installed on the north side of Mount Washburn. The next season a thousand-foot tow, rising 250 feet, operated east of Mammoth Hot Springs near Undine Falls.

For 50 years the tow furnished regular recreation for park employees and Gardiner and Mammoth residents. Lessons became part of the curriculum at local schools. Then, in 1994, several public controversies over safety issues and possible ski area expansion erupted, and the National Park Service pulled the plug on the ski area. In the meantime, lift-served skiing had sprung up all around the park, in Cody, Jackson Hole, Grand Targhee and Big Sky.

Today cross-country skiing within Yellowstone and Grand Teton is flourishing to the point where conflicts have arisen with snowmobilers and snowcoaches—not to mention concerns about the effect of traffic on the delicate winter ecosystem.

Yellowstone under snow poses a harsh enough challenge to flora and fauna without adding increasingly high levels of human interaction to the mix. The average frost-free period is barely more than a month. Annual plants, and even perennials, have a tough time some years, and that directly affects wildlife populations that are already under stress.

Winter can be deadly for many of the park’s species, especially bison, which get scalded by geysers and hot springs and mired in thermal bogs, and sometimes fall through the ice on rivers. One winter, 39 bison broke through on the Yellowstone River and drowned.

Over-winter survival rates among the newborn of most large fauna are often less than 50 percent. Moose calves spend their first two years with their mothers, who protect them from predators and guide them to foraging areas. Deer, elk, moose and bison sometimes team up to take turns breaking trail.

The geothermal areas offer oases of green and blooming plants in midwinter, so temperate that they maintain insect populations. Mosquitoes in January may be annoying, but they’re a small price to pay for making it through another bitter winter.

With all of its brutal challenges for flora, fauna and humans, Yellowstone in winter remains a place of exceptional beauty and wonder that can verge on the spiritual. As all 139 square miles of Yellowstone Lake freeze over, the transformation of water to ice produces “music,” sometimes described as sounding like a great pipe organ or the ringing of telegraph wires. “Sometimes the music plays throughout the night—melodious, vast and harmonious. It stops within a few days when snow begins to accumulate on the ice,” writes Steve Fuller in Snow Country: Autumn, Winter & Spring in Yellowstone. Add to that a full-moon night with a chorus of wolves and coyotes joining in, and the experience can be fully transcendent. 

Frequent contributor Jay Cowan wrote about North American snowfall records in the July–August issue of Skiing History.

Yellowstone: Few Set Tracks, But Lots of Space to Wander

Though tracks are only set on a few trails, nearly all unplowed roads and trails in Yellowstone are open to cross-country skiing and snowshoeing. You may find yourself sharing the road with snowmobilers, and there’s always a possibility of wildlife encounters. Some visitors prefer to take a snowcoach from the town of West Yellowstone into Old Faithful or the Upper Geyser Basin and ski on marked trails from there. You can also drive through Grand Teton National Park from the Jackson side, then ski to Yellowstone from there. Mammoth Hot Springs is one of the park’s biggest winter centers. The road is plowed and open all winter to Cooke City, at the park’s far northeastern corner. —J.C.

Top: Early trail prep was achieved by snowshoeing first, then skiers next. Elizabeth Paepcke follows that format in 1956 in Colorado’s Ashcroft Valley. (Aspen Historical Society, Durrance Collection)

For any sport, the condition of the playing surface is vital to success. For that reason, ski-touring centers strive to provide guests with well-designed trails groomed to perfection. Over the last half-century, setting and maintaining cross-country tracks has progressed from an arduous process requiring many workers to an efficient, machine-reliant method that uses just one person to operate the levers, buttons and switches.

Before the 1960s, trail preparation required significant effort. Trails could be created simply by snowshoeing, then skiing over the route. But prepping for major events or competitions required trail crews to shovel, rake, pack—and then set parallel ski tracks. It took a lot of time and effort. Consider the early staging of the annual 50-km Holmenkollen race in Oslo, which first started in 1888. Two 25-km laps translated into roughly 15 miles of snow that needed to be shoveled, packed and prepped.

Leading up to the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, two young American Nordic coaches, Al Merrill and Chummy Broomhall, started experimenting with a new grooming method. Both New Englanders with farming backgrounds and a Yankee knack for problem solving, they were familiar with the fine-toothed rotary tillers used to grade soil, leaving it soft and workable. Attaching a rototiller behind a Tucker snowcat, they realized, did the same for snow. Just one person operating a tiller could roll out
kilometer after kilometer of smooth, snow-carpeted trails.

Although the gyro-groomer, as it came to be known, was a major advance, other work was still required; skiers had to follow the groomer to stamp in a ski track. At Squaw Valley that job was done by the race forerunners and post-runners—skiers who had just missed the Olympic team cut.

But help was not far off. Enter Sven Johansson, who raced for the United States at the Squaw Valley Games, then took the job of US biathlon head coach. Starting in 1961, the team was stationed in Fort Richardson, Alaska, which regularly received snowfall that filled in the ski tracks. Partly out of desperation, Johansson devised a remarkably easy and effective solution to track setting: a 28-inch by 36-inch wooden box with two runners on the bottom that simulated skis. When pulled behind a snowcat, with a cinder block or two added for weight, the sled created parallel ski tracks for the afternoon’s training session—likely one of the first mechanical track setters.

Thanks to this breakthrough, the days of strenuous and time-consuming snow shoveling, snowshoe packing and stamping in ski tracks were on their way out.

Johansson sent me a hand-drawn copy of the track-sled building plans. (We had become good friends during a three-week Olympic training camp in Idaho, where I was a coach.) At the time, I was working with the Lyndon Outing Club in Vermont, and we built a prototype sled to set tracks for a race in December 1963. Afterward, a group of high school and college coaches swarmed around the sled, asking for plans, which I later mailed out.

A similar scenario was unfolding in southern Vermont. John Caldwell, a former Olympic skier and a coach at the Putney School, had recruited a skilled carpenter to help him invent a comparable track-setting sled. Just as in Lyndonville, at the end of each race, coaches gathered around the new contraption, asking questions and taking measurements. Mechanical track-setters began cropping up at other schools and colleges, and at Eastern-sanctioned races.

Around this time, Ski-Doo snowmobiles became popular, and these machines turned out to be perfect for pulling a track setter. A typical Nordic setup in the mid-1960s consisted of a Ski-Doo pulling a homemade box sled with a clothesline. It got the job done, but it was still a far cry from what we use today.

Soon, modifications improved the design of track-setting equipment. Wooden sleds

were outfitted with metal blades to cut ski tracks in frozen show, and then polycarbonate bottoms were added to the sleds to reduce friction. Side runners could raise the frame in places where tracks were not wanted or for road crossings. Metal sleds replaced the wooden ones.

As commercial versions of the devices became available, the whole cross-country scene took on a new look and feel. Ski-touring areas could now offer wide, smooth trails with perfectly straight, machine-set tracks, and their guests loved these beautifully prepared surfaces.

In Scandinavia and the rest of Europe, the evolution of trail preparation seems to have progressed much more slowly. According to Caldwell, the Norwegians were still shoveling snow to prepare the tracks at the 1966 FIS Nordic World Championships in Oslo. He recalls skiing behind a large snow machine at the 1968 Olympics in France—eight years after the more efficient methods of trail preparation had been used at the Squaw Valley Winter Games. But eventually, the Europeans caught up. In 1971, for example, Harry Brown imported an all-metal heavy frame sled from Sweden that produced good tracks in hard-packed and frozen snow.

Want to see what enables a modern ski-touring center to weave its trail magic? Next time you are at Craftsbury Outdoor Center, the Trapp Family Lodge or any other major cross-country operation, take a look through the window of the maintenance shop. You will probably see a wide-track Pisten Bully with a hydraulically controlled snowplow up front and a multi-purpose groomer/grader/track setter behind. This rig can lay down kilometer after kilometer of corduroy, with twin tracks for classic skiers.

Picture the modern-day trail worker who drives the machine. Replacing dozens of workers on snowshoes, he or she simply hops into the cab, turns on the heater, and switches on the stereo. A press on the ignition switch, and the 250-horsepower engine roars to life. Hit the horn twice, slip into first gear, and roll out into the winter to begin an hour or two of grooming. 

Rick Eliot is a former collegiate racer and coach who lives in Massachusetts. Thanks to John Caldwell for his help with this article.

courtesy Pisten Bully

courtesy Pisten bully

A typical track-setting rig in the mid-1960s consisted of a Ski-Doo pulling a homemade box with a clothesline.

Modern groomers are high-tech, multi-use masters that can pack, smooth and create tracks in one pass. Groomers can now customize trail prep, for instances by varying the number of tracks and the width between tracks.

Top: Improved grooming provides classic tracks and skate-ski options on the same trail. Left: A snowmobile pulling a roller remains a low-cost constant at many cross-country centers.

The first American to win a World Cup cross-country race, this pioneer has remained an advocate for women for five decades.

Photo above: Alison at the U.S. Nationals in 1977. Courtesy Alison Owen Bradley.

Trivia question: Who is the first U.S. racer to win a FIS cross-country World Cup?

Kikkan Randall, or maybe Jessie Diggins? Nope. The answer is Alison Bradley (née Owen), who won the first-ever women’s FIS World Cup in December 1978. A member of the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame Class of 2020—to be officially inducted at some point in a post-pandemic world—Bradley is only the second female cross-country skier to be inducted into the Hall of Fame (her former teammate Martha Rockwell was in the HOF Class of 1986).

“Having spent so much of my life devoted to excellence in the sport of cross-country skiing, and then to be recognized and honored for it by the Hall of Fame, is icing on the cake!” Bradley said by phone from her winter home in Bozeman, Montana. She lives with her husband, Phil Bradley, on a small hobby farm near Boise, Idaho, during the summer months.

It’s been a long time coming for Bradley, a pioneer of women’s cross-country skiing in the United States. Since retiring from competition in 1981, Bradley has coached and promoted women’s cross-country skiing. Most recently, Bradley, Randall, and 1984 Olympian Sue Wemyss started U.S. NOW—U.S. Nordic Olympic Women—a group of all the American women who have competed in cross-country skiing at an Olympic Winter Games.

“There are 53 of us, and we’re all still alive,” Bradley, 68, said. “How can we pass on what we learned to upcoming skiers?”

As a way to support current skiers, U.S. NOW has a “grit and grace” award.

First called the Inga Award—named after the unheralded mother of Crown Prince Haakon Haakonsson who was carried to safety by Norwegian Birkebeiners in 1206—Bradley presented it to Rosie Brennan at U.S. NOW’s first reunion in 2019.

“You always see the two Viking guys carrying the prince,” said Bradley, explaining the birth of the award. “You never hear about the boy’s mother. That’s kind of like women’s skiing. It really spoke to me that she would be a good example for us to persevere and be strong.”

Bradley’s aim is that U.S. NOW continues to inspire upcoming generations of female cross-country skiers. “We have a lot of passion for skiing and ski racing, but there hasn’t been a real big way to put ourselves back in,” she said. “Now we have a structure to work within.”

The Early Days

Bradley had no female role models when she began cross-country skiing in the mid-1960s. Born in Kalispell, Montana, and raised in Wenatchee, Washington, Bradley was the second of five children in the Owen family, and like her father, she loved the outdoors.

One day, her father saw an ad in the Wenatchee World newspaper for a cross-country ski club. Herb Thomas, a Middlebury graduate and biathlete, had moved back to Wenatchee to work in his family’s apple business and wanted to teach area youth how to cross-country ski. Bradley, the only girl on the team, loved it. The next year, she beat several boys and qualified for a meet in Minnesota. But she was not allowed to compete.

“I couldn’t go because I was a girl,” she recalled, recounting an era in which female athletes were often ridiculed for competing, which was considered unattractive and even dangerous. “I was devastated.”

The next year, when she was 13, Bradley was one of nine Pacific Northwest Division skiers to qualify for the 1966 junior nationals in Winter Park, Colorado. This time, they let her go. But once she arrived, officials were not sure what to do with her. They finally allowed her to compete, but an ambulance was ready in case she succumbed to the effort (she didn’t).

Bradley does not remember the hoopla (she made laps on alpine skis at Winter Park while the race jury was deciding her fate), nor much about the race itself. For a 13-year-old, it was “just fun to be out of school and to have made the team.”

But Bradley had opened officials’ eyes. The following year, 17 girls qualified to compete at junior nationals, and they had their own race. By 1969, 40 girls participated in junior nationals, and the first senior national cross-country championships for women were held that year. Bradley had shattered her first glass ceiling.

‘First’ World Championships and Olympics

In 1970, the U.S. Ski Team sent its first women’s team to a FIS Nordic World Championship. A junior in high school, Bradley qualified for the team and left school for several weeks to travel behind the Iron Curtain to Czechoslovakia. Again, she remembers little from the 5k race, just that she was wide-eyed at the sights, so different than rural Washington.

American women made their Olympic debut in cross-country skiing at the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games. Galina Kulakova, a 29-year-old Soviet skier, swept the 5k and 10k individual races and anchored the Soviets to the relay gold medal—finishing more than five minutes ahead of the Americans, who crossed the line in last place. Bradley had just graduated from high school the previous spring and finished far back in both races.

Bradley asked U.S. women’s coach Marty Hall if she could just go home and taste success at junior nationals. “He would say, ‘Do you want to be a big fish in a little pond, or do you want to be a little fish in a big pond?’ I was getting eaten by the bigger fish, but it did wake me up to what I was working towards.”

Hall gave Bradley a training journal with Kulakova’s picture on the cover. “Someday you’re going to be right there with her,” he assured her.

But after 1974 world championships, Bradley had had enough. She was only 21 but felt as if her progress had stalled. She earned a scholarship to Alaska Methodist University (now Alaska Pacific University) and moved to Anchorage. She continued to compete domestically. But she was done with racing in Europe.

Then in 1978, the national championships were held in Anchorage. After winning the 7.5k and 20k races and finishing second in the 10k, Bradley found herself on another world championship team. “I’m not going back into that, I’m going to get my education,” she firmly told Jim Mahaffey, AMU’s ski coach.

Mahaffey persuaded her to try international competition again. She was good, he assured her. “Kochie had won an [Olympic] medal, ‘You know, maybe Americans can do well in this sport,’” she recalled thinking.

Physically and mentally more mature, Bradley was finally skiing near the front. In Europe, she finished top 10 in four races, including seventh at Holmekollen. It was like catching a touchdown pass in the Super Bowl.

In December 1978, Bradley made her mark. She had a good feeling at the Gitchi Gami Games in Telemark, Wisconsin—considered as the first FIS Cross-Country World Cup won by an American woman or man, though the FIS classifies it as a “test” event. “I knew in my heart I could win it,” she said. She just had to convince her body to go through the pain of racing. At that moment, Marty Hall walked into the lodge where Bradley was sitting. Hall was no longer the U.S. coach, but he looked across the room and pointed at Bradley. She looked back and thought, “Yes! I’m ready.”

Bradley won the women’s 5k that day and the 10k as well. With a handful of other top 10 finishes that season, she finished the World Cup ranked seventh overall. It was the best result by a U.S. woman until Kikkan Randall finished fifth overall 33 years later, in 2012.

The 1980 Olympic year was the best yet for Bradley. She won the Gitchi Gami Games again and finished on the podium in several World Cup races. In all, she made $35,000 in prize money—unheard of riches in a relatively unknown sport in the United States at that time. But at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, she fell ill and finished 22nd in both races (5k and 10).

A year later, she won the last of her 10 national titles, then retired. “I was so discouraged by how up and down results would be,” she explained. “I could be right in there for some races, then people I had beaten were beating me at the big events. We wondered why our coaches couldn’t get us to peak.” She now recognizes the impact of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) on the sport. In 1979, five of the six women ahead of Bradley in the World Cup rankings were Soviets and are strongly suspected of PED use.

“In hindsight, I give myself a lot more credit,” she said. “The doping scenario was confusing for racers like us because we had this attitude that we weren’t that good. But we friggin’ were that good!”

After Racing

Bradley moved to McCall, Idaho, after she retired and started a family. Her son, Jess Kiesel, helped the University of Utah ski team win an NCAA title as a freshman in 2003. Daughter Kaelin Kiesel was a two-time All-American and student athlete of the year at Montana State University (class of 2011).

After moving to Sun Valley in the mid-1980s, Bradley coached both Jess and Kaelin with the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation, where for 14 years she helped several young skiers reach the world junior championships. Coaching at the world juniors, she once again confronted dominating males who weren’t good listeners. She knew more than most about training, ski prep, technique and, unlike her peers, had an impressive World Cup record. But she liked to concentrate on the mental approach to competition, and all the complex factors that lead to speed. “My style was very much about the person,” she said.

Then in the late 1990s, she saw a need for a program to help collegiate women make the national team. She founded WIND—Women In Nordic Development. Several WIND skiers competed in the world championships and made Olympic teams. But balancing the burden of fundraising, coaching, and raising her own kids, Bradley could not keep the WIND blowing for long.

In the mid-2010s, Sadie Maubet Bjornsen called Bradley out of the blue. The U.S. women’s team, led by coach Matt Whitcomb, wanted to learn more about the pioneering skiers who had laid tracks for the current women’s program. “I was in tears when Sadie emailed me,” said Bradley. “Really?! Someone remembers me?”

Bradley, Randall, and Wemyss ran with the idea, founding U.S. NOW. When Rosie Brennan received US NOW’s first award—and $1,000 to go with it—she was shocked. “I’ve had a lot of challenges in my whole career,” said Brennan, who was dropped for the second time from the U.S. Ski Team after she contracted mononucleosis during the 2018 Olympic year. “To be awarded this award from this group of people who have also gone through their own challenges means more than any race could ever mean to me.”

Two years after Randall and Jessie Diggins won America’s first Olympic gold medal in cross-country skiing (Team Sprint) at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympic Winter Games, Bradley was nominated to the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame, and several women on the 2018 U.S. Olympic team, plus Coach Whitcomb, penned a letter in support of her nomination.

“We are thankful for all Alison has done to further our sport, which gave us all something to dream about as young women,” read the letter. “The gold medal this winter has not only been an achievement for our team, but for the larger ‘team’ that Alison truly championed… all of (this) started with a leader who wouldn’t take ‘no’ as an answer.”

The hurdles Bradley-Owens and her colleagues faced in a male-dominated sport—and world—are in sharper focus now, but she’s pragmatic about the quest: Don’t blame the men, who deserve credit for organizing all the sports in the first place, she says, but step up yourself instead. “It’s been a slow change, but it is changing,” she says. 

Peggy Shinn is a senior contributor to TeamUSA.org, has covered five Winter Olympic Games and is a regular contributor to
Skiing History.

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

By Peter Oliver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Skiing History, Sept/Oct 2020

In 1956, two Americans crisscrossed Scandinavia to film the world’s fastest Nordic racers and make the first-ever cross-country ski technique film.

One thing leads to another. In this case, a 1956 summer school course in Oslo landed a couple of Americans smack in the middle of the three biggest cross-country ski races in Scandinavia. It was the chance of a lifetime to make an instructional film showing how Scandinavian racers skied so much faster than anyone else in the world—especially those living back home, in the good old USA.

Photo top of page: Norwegian racer Håkon Brusveen, shown here in 1952, won two medals (gold and silver) at the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California.  Wikimedia Commons.

The story started the previous summer, as I bounced along on a student sightseeing tour of historical Norwegian landmarks. I saw Viking settlements, ancient stave churches and the famous longboats that took fierce raiders to distant lands. I also happened to meet Fritz Harshbarger, a first-class cinematographer. As we rumbled along, Fritz perched himself next to the bus door, motion-picture camera at the ready, the first off at each stop. Everywhere we went, and everything we did, was recorded for posterity on 16mm film.  His mission: to provide Oslo University with great advertising footage to promote the summer school program and attract dozens of eager tuition-paying students. 

Harshbarger was no ordinary camera-toting tourist. He took amateur filmmaking seriously, and had won a number of awards for his work. Once a collegiate basketball star, he had just completed his PhD in “rocket science” (jet propulsion) and was in Norway for 15 months on a Fulbright fellowship. Tall, lanky, with weathered face and broad smile, he could have passed as a Texas cowboy. And with a laugh you could hear a mile away, he sounded the part as well. 

It was easy to strike up conversations with Fritz. I had been a cross-country racer at Middlebury College in Vermont, and when he learned of my interest in racing technique, the handwriting began forming on the wall. He was taking a year off and had two 16 mm cameras. I was a skier and coach who wanted to study cross-country racing technique. Having just completed two years of U.S. military service, I also had time. We became a team, and the more we talked, the more exciting the possibilities looked. Using two cameras, we wanted to film the biggest ski races, take pictures of all the best racers, and then put together an instructional film showing how to ski like the champions — arguably the first-ever cross-country technique film. 

That was the plan. How it unfolded follows.  

Fritz was sure that future audiences would tire of watching a parade of knicker-clad skiers. We needed a little comic interlude to liven things up. That’s how the “Cowboy on Skis” subplot was born. The script was pretty simple: Fritz, the Texas Cowboy, decked out in a flying scarf, broad brimmed hat, and wearing number O, enters the world-famous Holmenkollen race. But early on, it becomes obvious that the bouncing gait of the tall Texan will be no match for the powerful strides of the Scandinavians.

Luckily, the plot turns when the cowboy meets “The Beautiful Girl.” We found “Tova,” who had all the necessary attributes, plus a few more. What followed was love at first sight, culminating in a passionate trailside kiss that catapulted the fired-up cowboy to victory. As any sports psychologist will tell you, motivation is the key to success. 

In the film, the cowboy was shown zooming up hills in a tuck position. How did we do that? First, we modified the back end of a pair of skis so they would slide backwards. After many practice runs, along with some pretty good falls, we got the footage. Later we edited the film by flipping it to produce reversed direction and splicing that section into the final edition. It worked! The cowboy coasted up hills on custom skis with curved tips that resembled a ram’s horn.

Alas, the cowboy subplot failed to amuse the elderly members of the Holmenkollen organizing committee. Perhaps the opening shot of the cowboy, standing in the starting gate of the Holmenkollen on a pair of ridiculous-looking skis, was too much for them to swallow. Norwegian pride, you know. But the committee did like the ski technique part of the film and once completed, the NSF (Norges Skiforbund) was the first to purchase a copy. 

We had started planning our filming schedule in September 1956. We decided to focus on the marquee race in each of the three Scandinavian countries. Letters were written, phone calls were made, interviews took place and national coaches were consulted. The three national ski associations provided us with the necessary permissions. At every turn we were greeted with a friendly handshake. Many were quite enthusiastic, even flattered, that we wanted to film their racers. And, of course, national team coaches wanted to see the motion picture.     

In late fall I took a trip to Vålådalen, a sports resort and training center in northern Sweden made famous by the legendary coach, Gosta Olander. Vålådalen is a resort like no other. Ordinary vacationers and world-class athletes mix freely, eating at the same tables and enjoying the same evening entertainment. There are facilities for all the major sports, enough to satisfy the most ardent fan. I chose to hang out with the Swedish cross-country team on one of their interval training days. Yes, they were very impressive, and yes, I learned a lot that day. 

Later, the skiers showed up at the training room for their monthly bicycle ergometer test. They rode an adapted stationary bicycle that kept pedaling effort constant while heart rate was taken every minute.  Calculations would show the amount of oxygen each skier can take in and send to his working muscles.  In recent decades, science has become the basis for endurance training. The process was developed by the famous Swedish sports physiologist, Per-Olof Åstrand. 

Endurance will always be the key that unlocks the door to cross-country skiing success. I was reminded of this truism one evening in Finland when the famous Finnish racer, Arnie Hiiva, and I were hanging out with a bunch of his friends. These guys had little formal schooling. They were loggers, or woodsmen, raised on farms, and accustomed to hard work. Many generations of this hardy outdoor lifestyle had evolved a genetic pool from which gold-medal winners were born. The takeaway for other countries? When it comes to physical endurance, the rest of us have a lot of catching up to do. Sixten Jernberg’s advice for Americans was simply put: “...endurance training, endurance training, and more endurance training.” A pretty clear message.  Sixten’s own life gives us a perfect example. His formula was: Get up early, run or ski to work, chop and saw wood all day, run home and then train for two or three hours. Repeat six times a week for many years. 

Jernberg was typical of the cross-country skiers we had the pleasure of associating with during our time in Scandinavia. These were honest, simple people, no frills. They asked for no favors but, on the other hand, were willing to give you the shirt off their backs. And I remember them as being patient—in fact, amazingly patient—with some of our crazy requests. A couple of them persuaded a neighbor to hitch up his horses and pull a sled, so Fritz could take long, uninterrupted pictures of them skiing in the field. When I asked Veikko Hakulinen to use diagonal stride the whole way, he said that was not the way he usually skied, but he did it anyway, just because I asked.  

With four world titles and nine Olympic medals, Jernberg was one of the most decorated cross-country skiers of all time. He and his wife lived in a modest house, with one exception: the kitchen. Thanks to her husband’s race winnings, she had every appliance and kitchen convenience known to the civilized world. 

Another time, when we were visiting Håkon Brusveen at his home in Lillehammer, I asked if we could film him sawing a log with a bucksaw. “Why does this crazy American want me to do that?” But there was a method in our madness:  The slow-motion pictures of his sawing motion clearly showed the body initiating each stroke, with the arms following in a coordinated sequence. Good body mechanics produces a powerful and energy-saving sawing technique. I can’t imagine today’s Olympic champions taking time to do those things. We live in a much different age. 

Saunas are big in Finland and are treated with respect bordering on reverence. The family sauna is given credit for everyone’s good health and recovery from fatigue. That last part is where Nordic skiers come in. One afternoon, members of the national team suggested that I join them. It’s funny how a trip to the sauna could turn into a ski-racing lesson: Hakulinen and his teammates could have been models for an anatomical wall chart. Hakulinen probably had zero percent body fat, and that was lesson number one: Lose the extra fat.

Lesson number two is not so obvious: You needed to notice that the flat muscle on the forward side of Hakulinen’s hips was exceptionally well developed. This is an important muscle for hip flexion, as in swinging the leg forward. The Hawk’s stride had a very fast leg recovery, a rapid swing-through that carried him forward onto the next glide. Repeated thousands of times, over many years, his hip flexion muscle had become strong and well defined, a hidden key to his success.  

Dr. Birger Tvedt taught at the Oslo Orthopedic Institute and had a lifelong interest in the science of human movement. As Norway’s team doctor and physical therapist, he had a perfect opportunity to study the skiing technique of world-class athletes. He produced “training films” to help loggers and farmers benefit from his kinesiological understanding. Whether swinging an axe, cutting hay with a scythe, or sawing logs, good body mechanics affected how much work was done, effort used, and at what energy cost. It is fascinating to see how a small technique improvement makes a real impact on the day’s work.   

The same in skiing. Good technique results in going fast and saving energy. Motion picture analysis, together with a coach’s trained eye, can help anyone who wants to ski better. Feeling the improvement is exciting and so the skier’s love of cross-country skiing increases. As we learned 60 years ago as amateur filmmakers in Scandinavia, the reward is in the doing. 

The technique instruction film described in this article was released over 60 years ago. It was 35 minutes long, in black and white, with English soundtrack. Copies were sold to a number of ski associations in Europe and Asia. In the United States, several college ski teams purchased it, as did the Vermont Ski Museum in Stowe. No other copies remain.  

Rick Eliot is a former collegiate racer and coach who lives in Massachusetts. Thanks to ISHA editorial review-board member John Caldwell for his help in reviewing and editing this article.

U.S. Skiing could learn a lot from the success formula within its own women’s cross-country team. By Edith Thys Morgan

The FIRST, EVER, cross country gold medal for the U.S.!” Those words, screamed by commentators in joyful disbelief, capped off one of the most memorable moments of the 2018 Winter Olympics. When Americans Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggins won the team freestyle event, it was not only a triumph of persistence and hard work, but also the ultimate validation of the power of team. 

The U.S. victory was particularly interesting against the backdrop of Norway’s record 39 Olympic medals in Pyeongchang, accomplished with a mere 109 athletes (Team USA won 23 medals with 242 athletes). The buzzwords behind Norway’s success—culture and team—echo the values portrayed in World Class, a new book by Vermont author Peggy Shinn. They also stand in stark contrast to the dynamics that have evolved on the U.S. Alpine Ski Team in the past decade, where individual superstars have assembled private teams that cater exclusively to their needs. U.S. Alpine success in Pyeongchang was underwhelming, and U.S. Skiing could learn much from the success formula within its own organization. Through extensive research and interviews, Shinn recounts the history of the U.S. Nordic Ski Team, and details the team’s journey from the low point in 2005–2006—when the U.S. did not even name a women’s Nordic ski team for the World Cup season—to the spring of 2017, when a full team of medal-ready women stood poised to make history. 

Shinn got her inspiration while watching the U.S. Women’s Nordic Team during its breakout season of 2011–2012.  The women had just notched their best World Cup relay finish ever, fifth place, and they had done it without their longtime superstar, Kikkan Randall, who was ill that day. When Shinn asked the women about their success, she writes: “They did not credit their individual strengths…to a person they credited teamwork.” As a former competitor in many sports, and a journalist covering Olympic sports for Team USA.org, Shinn was intrigued. She set about understanding the power of team, and showing it work through the lens of a sport that is known for being solitary, brutally demanding, chronically underfunded and not particularly fun. 

After that breakthrough season, the team would go on to win eight medals in three World Championships in the next five years, and they would accomplish this decked out in patriotically striped goofy socks, pink-streaked hair, glittery face paint and huge smiles. The medals validated their own individual journeys of hard work, optimism and uncompromising standards, but also their unwavering commitment to each other. As Shinn writes of the Nordic team: “They have everything from the transformational leader, to the coach who connects with his athletes, to the agreeable, conscientious energizers who comprise the team.”

THE LEADER
The transformational leader is Kikkan Randall, an Alaskan who graduated from high school in 2001 with the nickname “Kikkanimal” and a ten-year plan to win an Olympic medal. She soon became a star on the U.S. Ski Team. Like top U.S. Nordic women before her, she did this as a solo star, traveling and training with the U.S. men or with women from other countries. Unlike many stars, Randall is also the consummate teammate and leader, who hordes neither control nor attention, and is “as happy for her teammates’ successes as she [is] for her own.” In the spring of 2006, inspired by the steady and remarkable ascent of the Canadian Nordic team, Randall lobbied hard for a women’s team, with teammates and a dedicated coach. Coach Pete Vordenberg demanded a $1 million budget for the Nordic Team and U.S. Skiing president Bill Marolt agreed, putting the money towards coaches and a young development team.  

THE COACH

Matt Whitcomb, who had built a Nordic program at Burke Mountain Academy, joined the U.S. Cross Country Ski Team in 2006 and was named head women’s coach in 2012. He brought the structure, discipline, patience and inclusiveness to turn Randall’s team vision into a reality. Friendly and approachable, his positive coaching style—gleaned from his own coaches growing up in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts—reinforced what athletes did right, versus dwelling on what they did wrong. He also adopted Burke’s motto of, “All leaders, no leaders.” Whitcomb explains that only four of the seven podium-level women can be on a relay team. “But it’s the three who aren’t selected who hold the key in their hands. The tone that they set—from the moment they find out they are not selected for the relay—can either add or subtract from the team atmosphere.” That realization of interdependence is a cornerstone of how the team viewed and treated each other. 

THE ATHLETES
In addition to these remarkable leaders, World Class is about the entire team that buoyed, pushed and lifted each other to greater heights.  This includes Liz Stephen, Holly Brooks, Jessie Diggins, Ida Sargent, Sadie Bjornsen, Sophie Caldwell and Rosie Brennan—women

who range from young phenoms to college athletes to working adults, and come from points all across the country—as well as the many women before them who steadily emboldened Team USA. They did so by their performances but also by cheering wildly from the sidelines, being patient with rookie moves and costly mistakes, or embracing rituals like group karaoke and writing personalized Secret Santa poems. Working hard together, inside a supportive, communicative, and optimistic environment, they became a high-performance engine.

THE ATTITUDE, AND LACK THEREOF
World Class is also about cooperation for a common cause, and how a sport becomes a family. The decades it takes to fully develop talent, combined with notoriously shoestring budgets, mean the U.S. Nordic Ski Team must rely heavily on privately funded, post high school feeder programs. These include the Craftsbury Green Racing Project and the Stratton Mountain School T2 in Vermont, along with Alaska Pacific University and top NCAA schools that fund development through their ski teams. The National Nordic Foundation—a nonprofit grassroots organization—also lends support to up-and-coming Nordic skiers. Success depends on cooperation and communication between all these organizations and the national federation. Here, too, the Alpine team can take notes on how to fully embrace and optimize development resources. 

World Class captures many pivotal moments, be they inspirational success, resilience after failure or the necessary readjustments when the magic seemed to be gone, and tells a story that goes well beyond the success of one team. As Sadie Bjornsen said after her first individual World Cup podium: “…We are dreamers. But we are also believers. It’s crazy how much confidence you can get from a teammate’s success if you allow yourself to stand beside them.”

World Class: The Making of the U.S. Women’s Cross-Country Ski Team by Peggy Shinn. Published by ForeEdge (2018); 248 pages, 38 color illustrations; $19.95 paperback, $14.99 e-book (www.ForeEdgeBooks.com).