1920s

Leonetto Cappiello has been called “the father of modern advertising” because he broke the norms of poster art. Early advertising tended to look like a painting, too cluttered sometimes. Cappiello often depicted individual figures in motion. In this ski travel poster, he was not afraid to leave the white slope open. It intensified the illusion of speed.

Cappiello was born in Italy but mainly lived and worked in Paris. With no formal art training, he had his first exhibition in 1892. Today, some of his paintings are displayed in the Museo Civio Giovanni Fatori in Livorno. He then worked as a caricaturist for the most popular humor magazines in France, Le Rire, Le Sourire, L’Assiette au Beurre and Femina. In 1896 his first collection of caricatures was published.

From 1900 on, he painted posters that came to revolutionize advertising. This was the era when Paris walls were plastered with posters advertising just about everything. Cappiello realized that he had to distinguish his work from the others. Speed was one of the ingredients of modernization; wasn’t Citius—Fastest—the first of the three goals of the modern Olympics? Altius and Fortius, highest and strongest, came second and third.

This 1929 illustration promotes Superbagnères-Luchon in the French Pyrenees. It has that art deco look in which speed is symbolized by the flying scarf and the swirl of the ski tracks on those vast open snowfields. And how to reach Superbagnères? Look at the top to see the Chemins de Fer du Midi, the railway line that will get you to the palatial hotel.

For those interested in the mechanics of the poster business, look at the bottom left, and you will see the word Devambez. Monsieur Devambez was what can be best described as an agent for poster artists. He would contact clients with whom he would put artists like Cappiello in touch. Cappiello was favored by such big-name businesses as Campari, Pirelli tires, Mistinguett at the Casino de Paris and others. It was a successful arrangement.

And Cappiello’s 1929 ski poster was influential enough to be followed in 1932 by a similar design for the same resort. This time there was one figure, not three. It was by the lesser-known artist R. Sonderer. 

Adrian Allinson’s woodcut of a speeding skier first appeared in Der Winter, the publication of the German Ski Association, in 1928. Oddly, because he was a well-known mountaineer and skier, it is his only known image of skiing. The woodcut certainly impresses with its depiction of action and speed.

Allinson had begun following his father into medicine but switched to the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Graduating in 1910, he promptly left for Paris and Munich. His paintings, many pastoral scenes, became well-known before the Great War. His most prized was a 1915-16 interior depiction of the Café Royal.

As one of a group of artists who were conscientious objector during the Great War, he was often hounded by Londoners. He joined the Bloomsbury Group, a liberal and loose-living set of artists and writers. Besides the many landscapes, he did opera sets, and his series for London Transport and the Imperial Marketing Board are among his best-known works. He has left an account of his artistic life in manuscript form, held in the archives of the McFarlin Library of the University of Tulsa.

A lifelong skier, Allinson was a member of the Kandahar Club, captained the British University Ski Club downhill team, and came second in the 1925 Bernese Oberland Challenge Shield, beating such luminaries as Barry Caulfeild. In the first Inferno at Mürren, in 1928, he finished fourth. Teamed with Arnold Lunn, he won the first Scaramanga Challenge Cup, in which skiers are roped together in pairs as if crossing a glacier. Lunn said that Allinson only stopped racing when he and Lunn were tied for first place two years in a row in the Scaramanga.

It is not often you can say more about the skiing of an artist than the actual art, but Allinson knew what he cut in the wood—it typified Schrei der Zeit, the cry of the times: speed. 

 

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.” 

 

Dating back to 1928, the biennial Winter University Games will return to Lake Placid in 2023.

The 2021 World University Winter Games, scheduled for Lucerne, Switzerland, last December, were canceled due to pandemic-related travel restrictions. Lake Placid, New York, is set to host the next edition of the biennial winter games in January 2023.

The idea for the Games emerged from the 1891 Universal Peace Congress in Rome, which proposed a series of international student conferences that would include sports events. While the conferences never happened, the concept led Frenchman Jean Petitjean and modern Olympics founder Pierre de Coubertin to create the International Universities Championships, hosted by the Confédération Internationale des Étudiants (CIE). Summer games were held in Paris (1923), Prague (1925), Rome (1927), Paris (1928), Darmstadt (1930), Turin (1933), Budapest (1935), Paris (1937), and Monaco (1939), and then were halted by World War II. A number of “winter” events were actually summer games held in September.

In the autumn of 1924, Walter Amstutz, Willy Richardet and Hermann Gurtner held the first meeting of the Swiss Academic Ski Club (SAS), and over the next three years organized downhill and slalom races between Swiss and international university teams in Mürren, Wengen and St. Moritz. In 1928 these races culminated in the First International Academic Winter Games, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. Because the event was endorsed by the CIE, many consider the Cortina races to be the progenitor of the Winter Universiade. The 1928 downhill and slalom were organized by SAS president Gurtner; both races were won by André Roch. The Academic Winter Games were held five more times before World War II, from 1933 on in odd-numbered years to avoid conflict with the Winter Olympics and FIS World Championships.

The Games were restarted in 1947, but soon afterwards the CIE disbanded, and successors arose on either side of the Iron Curtain. Western countries formed the International University Sports Federation (FISU) in 1949, while Eastern European nations had their own Union Internationale des Étudiants (UIE). The two groups held their own rival summer and winter games until 1957, when Petitjean was able to hold a summer games in Paris, including Soviets and a token team of six Americans. Thus was revived the term Universiade, implying that students of all nations could compete.

The first post-war Winter Universiade was held in Chamonix in 1960. Charles de Gaulle opened the ceremonies, with 151 athletes from 16 countries participating in 13 events in five sports. Thereafter, games were held in Europe on a two-year schedule, and the Seventh Winter Universiade came to Lake Placid in 1972.

The small village in New York’s Adirondack Mountains had hosted the 1932 Winter Olympics. After World War II, facing vigorous wintersports growth in New England and Colorado, the resort town lost its luster. Locals saw international sporting events as a route to reinvigorating the economy, and in 1960 they launched a new Olympic Organizing Committee.

Rebuffed in its initial attempts to gain a second Olympic bid, the organizers looked for alternatives. By the late 1960s, it appeared that Denver would be the U.S. choice to host the next winter Olympics. The best alternative multi-sport international competition was the World University Winter Games. While some upgrades were necessary, Lake Placid had the competition and hospitality facilities in place. All the town needed was money.

National federations balked at the cost to fly teams across the Atlantic. With the backing of New York State, Lake Placid offered a package including round-trip airfare, busing from Montreal, lodging in Lake Placid, and breakfast and dinner daily. The total price for participants: $324 per person. The deal was done. 

Opening ceremonies were held February 26, 1972. There would be 25 competitions in seven sports: Alpine and Nordic skiing, biathlon, ski jumping, figure skating, speed skating and hockey. There were 351 athletes from 23 countries. The games were just a few weeks after the close of the 1972 Winter Olympics. While there was some overlap, most participants had not competed in the Sapporo Games. 

The start of the Universiade was not exactly what organizers had planned. The opening parade from the Lake Placid Club to the outdoor arena at the speed-skating oval got a late start, leaving spectators restless in the evening cold. “There was a lot of horseplay,” recalled Jim Rogers, local ceremonies chief. By the time the athletes entered the arena, discipline had given way to youthful exuberance. The Italian team commandeered a sleigh and circled the oval while singing songs. The torch bearer was American skier James Miller. As he ascended the podium, oil from the torch he was carrying spilled, and the sleeve of his wool sweater caught fire. He was able to slap down the flame and light the cauldron—but it was an inauspicious start to the ceremony. Richard Nixon was busy, concluding his historic trip to China and sent a brief message read from the podium. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller was a no-show. “The wonderful part of the opening ceremonies was the brevity of the speeches,” noted one local newspaper columnist. 

The competitions went off as scheduled. Arrangements for athletes were praised. The major issue was weather: spring came early. Roby Politi, village native and two-time All-American skier, remembers temperatures going from “cold to warm to cold to warm, to even warmer.” Temperatures, below zero at the opening ceremonies, at one point reached 58 degrees Fahrenheit. “I remember ruts a foot deep on the course,” says Politi, who finished 20th in the giant slalom. It was worse for the Nordic skiers and speed skaters, who raced on slush. 

U.S. athletes finished a distant second in the overall medal count with seven, behind 29 won by Soviet students. The best American skiing result was turned in by Stanford University’s Caryn West, who took the overall Alpine gold medal. Canadian Lisa Richardson won the women’s downhill by 3/100th of a second. 

In his final report to the FISU organizers, Austrian official Prof. Werner Czisiek noted “the Winteruniversiade 1972 in Lake Placid must be called a great success.” He enthused about the logistics of transportation and efforts “to arrange different activities to bring people into contact with people of other nations.” 

The successful 1972 Games proved to be a key factor a couple of years later, when Denver withdrew from hosting the 1976 Winter Olympics. Innsbruck stepped up as the replacement and Lake Placid, with facilities and organization in place, was selected for 1980.

And so Lake Placid will get the centennial Universiade to number 30 in the winter series (it would have been 31 had the Lucerne events taken place). More than 1,600 athletes, ages 17 to 25, from more than 50 countries and 600 universities are expected to compete in 86 medal events in 12 sports over 11 days. It will be only the second time the Winter Games have been held in the United States. (Buffalo, New York, hosted the summer version of these games in 1993.)

New York State, through its Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA), has invested more than $300 million to upgrade its winter sports venues. All facilities now meet international competition standards.

Phil Johnson is the longtime ski columnist for the Daily Gazette in Schenectady, New York.

 

SNAPSHOTS IN TIME (OLYMPIC EDITION)

1931 French Wine vs.Prohibition Paris—The French athlete’s wine is so important an item of his training diet that the government will be asked when Parliament meets next week to seek permission for the Olympic team going to Lake Placid, N.Y., to take wine along. Deputy Poittevin served notice today that he would ask the Premier to intercede with the American Government so that the skaters and skiers might have the “necessary rational ingredient of their training regime.” — “French Deputy Wants U.S. to Permit Wine to be Brought Here by Olympic Athletes” (New York Times, November 5, 1931)

1960 Pedal to the Metal During the 1959-60 season, the French ski manufacturer that supplied the national team had provided Jean Vuarnet with wooden skis that he found far too flexible. “It was a disaster,” Vuarnet said. “So I went to their factory in Voiron and had a good look around. I came across a pair of metal skis that were just my size. They’d been tossed aside but they looked okay to me. I took them and tried them out in the Émile Allais Cup in Megève. One of the skis got bent but I still managed to finish fifth. So I called the manufacturer and asked them to send me a new pair because the [1960] Games were coming up.” Vuarnet became the first skier in Olympic history to win gold on metal skis. — “Vuarnet Takes Downhill Skiing to the Next Level” (Olympics.Com, February 1960)

1972 Colorado Olympic DNF Denver—The Olympic torch will not be passed to the Rocky Mountains in 1976, top organizers of the Winter Games said Tuesday after voters in Colorado cut off state funds for the event. Clifford Buck, of Denver, president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, said, “Needless to say, it is a tremendous disappointment to me. I think it’s a tragedy for the state, and a tragedy for the nation that the people of Colorado were not aware of the great privilege and great honor to host the 1976 Winter Games. But the majority has spoken.” — “Voters Reject ‘Privilege’”(Eugene Register-Guard, November 8, 1972)

1992 Olympic Training, the Tomba Way At five o’clock, Tomba will get down to the serious business of training, but for the moment nothing is more important than enjoying the last days of summer lolling on the beach in the company of a lovely teenage girl whom he met while serving as a judge for the Miss Italy contest. — Patrick Lang, “The Road to Alberto-ville” (Skiing Magazine, January 1992.)

2006 Golden Aamodt Sestriere Borgata, Italy—Someone said if you looked at his media guide picture without knowing he was a skier, you’d think he were a bank president. Yet, Norway’s Kjetil Andre Aamodt made more Olympic history at Sestriere Borgata when, out of the 25th start—he zipped down in 1 minute, 30:65 seconds and made it stand up against Austria’s Hermann Maier, who finished .13 of a second back—he won the gold in the super-giant slalom. Aamodt came to Turin as the all-time alpine leader in medals with seven. Now he has eight. — Chris Dufresne, “Norway’s Aamodt shocks in super-G” (The Baltimore Sun, February 19, 2006)

2010 Peak Performance For the athletes, the Olympics, as he described them, were a festival of internationalism and frenzied liaising—“It’s a Small World” meets Plato’s Retreat. The impression I got was of an Athletes Village teeming with specimens of youth and fitness, avid men and women who’d spent their ripest years engaged in fierce, self-denying pursuit of peak physical performance, and who now, mostly after they’d competed, could throw off their regimens, inhibitions, and sweats, and pair off, with Olympic vigor and agility. It changed the way I watched the Games. And it made me wish I’d worked a little harder in practice. — Nick Paumgarten, “The Ski Gods” (The New Yorker, March 15, 2010)

Megève celebrates 100 years as the first purpose-built ski resort in France.

Megève, the posh ski resort just off the main road between Geneva and Chamonix, has been managed by the Rothschild banking family for the past century. In fact, the Alpine skiing tradition at Megève owes its origin to the family.

Photo above: The Hotel Mont d'Arbois in the 1930s.

During the First World War, Noémie de Rothschild, wife of financier Baron Maurice de Rothschild, converted her family’s grand home in Paris into a military hospital and worked there for the Red Cross. In 1916 she traveled to St. Moritz, Switzerland, for a ski vacation at Badrutt’s Palace Hotel. The Palace had a distinctly English atmosphere, dating from 1856, which was when proprietor Johannes Badrutt allegedly invited his upper-class British guests to spend the winter.

Ugly encounter in St. Moritz

Because of that tradition, the baroness did not expect to see any Germans during her holiday. Instead, St. Moritz was packed with them. She was horrified to encounter Gustav Krupp, who built artillery and U-boats for the Kaiser (and was a notorious anti-Semite). She stormed out, determined to create a French ski resort—a “Saint-Moritz à la française.”

War won, de Rothschild went exploring with her Norwegian ski instructor from St. Moritz, Trygve Smith (who was also an Olympic tennis player). After a good deal of leg- and survey-work, they settled on the Mont d’Arbois region above Megève, a medieval village in the Haute-Savoie, as the ideal location. In 1920, with the assistance of her father-in-law, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, she set up the Société Française des Hôtels de Montagne (SFHM). Baron Edmond kicked in 100,000 francs, and Noémie bought a family pension. With the help of Parisian architect Jacques-Marcel Auburtin and others, she transformed it into the Hôtel Prima (also affectionally known as the Palace of Snows, or Palais des Neiges), which opened in December 1921.

Skiing tradition

Megève already had something of a skiing tradition. Before the war, the sport had become popular in neighboring Chamonix, just 10 miles away as the crow flies. Megève held its first recorded cross-country ski race in 1914. With the opening of the Hôtel Prima, the town needed a Sports Club, which held its first meetings in 1923. One of the beneficiaries was 11-year-old Emile Allais.

Royal guests

Early guests at the hotel included King Albert and Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, with their children. Albert and Elisabeth vacationed there in 1922 and 1923. They shared Noémie’s values: Albert had personally led the Belgian

Army against the Germans during the war, and Elisabeth had worked as a nurse at the front. Albert was also a keen sportsman–his climbing partner was the St. Moritz skiing pioneer Walter Amstutz (Albert would die in a solo climbing accident in 1934). More royals followed, with predictable benefit for the hotel’s reputation. Noémie reached back to another St. Moritz friend, the Hotel Badrutt’s concierge and 1918 Swiss Nordic Combined champion François Parodi. Parodi was tasked with teaching Noémie ‘s husband to ski. More sportsman than banker, Maurice caught on quickly.

In 1926 the SFHM acquired more property, again with Baron Edmond’s help. Noémie engaged Henry-Jacques Le Even, a young French architect, to build what would become the Hotel Mont d’Arbois. Le Even had very strong design guidelines: stone foundation, structure of Combloux granite, ground floor in Tyrolean plaster, second story in stained fir, southwest alignment, steep roofs and wooden stairs. A skating rink went in in 1929. By then, Noémie was known to locals, fondly, as Baroness Mimi.

First cable-car, 1933

A signal event occurred in 1933 with the opening of Megève’s Rochebrune cable-car. Mont d’Arbois got its own cable-car in 1934. Alpine skiing was becoming a hugely popular sport, and Emile Allais was just two years away from a bronze medal at the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Olympics. He would follow that up with triple gold at the Alpine World Championships at Chamonix in 1937. Meanwhile, another dynasty came into being: Adrien Duvillard, future downhill world champion, was born in 1934. His younger brother and son would become top skiers, too.

When Germany occupied France in the summer of 1940, the Rothschilds fled—Maurice to New York, Noémie to Geneva. The high Alps bordering Switzerland and Italy became hideouts for the Resistance; the people of Megève hosted about 2,000 displaced children, a quarter of them Jews. With Liberation, by August 1944 American forces began using Megève’s hotels as rest-and-recreation centers for recuperating airmen. A year later, Parisians were ready to resume the custom of winter holidays in the Alps. Ski racing restarted and a new downhill course, named for Emile Allais, became one of the highlights of the FIS Alpine season. It proved wickedly dangerous, however, and was dropped from the World Cup schedule in 1975, after the 1970 death of 19-year-old Michel Bozon.

In 1955, at age 67, the Baroness turned over management of the hotels to her only son, Edmond. Baron Maurice died in 1957, and Edmond assumed the title. Instead of royalty, the new Baron focused on bringing in the newly emerging “jet set” of film stars and tycoons (Boeing 707s entered commercial service in 1958). In addition to throwing up many new lifts, Edmond established an altiport at the foot of the Radaz lift. His wealthy guests could then fly from Paris straight to the snow. He also established a golf course and renovated a dozen more chalets.

Baroness Noémie passed away in 1968 at age 79. On the death of Baron Edmond in 1997, leadership of the Domain du Mont d’Arbois passed to his wife, Nadine.

Today the resort is operated by Baron Benjamin de Rothschild, the only son of Nadine and Edmond, and his wife, Ariane. The complex of 88 lifts serves three peaks, with a gondola to the town of St. Gervais. The hotels and restaurants are as stylish as ever, the skiing nonthreatening and below tree line, and there’s a gorgeous view of Mont Blanc. 

Author Bob Soden, of Montreal, wrote about the Laurentian Ski Museum in the September-October 2021 issue. He serves as ISHA’s treasurer.

Movies have had a special place in the history of skiing, of course. Because motion picture cameras were invented just about the time skiing emerged as a sport in the Alps, snippets of footage exist all the way back to the years before World War I. There's even newsreel footage of alpine troops training in France and Austria. 

But what is widely regarded as the very first commercial ski film was released 100 years ago, on December 23, 1920. Arnold Fanck’s “Das Wunder des Schneeschuhs” (The Wonder of Snowshoes) is a documentary following an expedition that climbs up to 4,200 metre (13,780 feet) high glacier slopes in the Swiss Alps. It then follows pioneering downhill skiers using the Arlberg System created by Hannes Schneider. Among other tricks and stunts skiers are shown leaping crevasses and even setting off small avalanches.

See Das Wunder Des Schneeshuhs.

The skills and bravery of the skiers filmed, the spectacular isolation of the high mountain winter landscape were beautifully portrayed in Fanck’s film and remain as visually stunning today as 100 years ago – even when viewed vias Youtube rather than on the big screen as intended.

Born in Germany in 1889, Fanck originally trained as a geologist.  His love of mountain scenery took him to remote locations creating movies that were tremendously popular with German audiences. They became known as the "mountain films" genre with more filmmakers, including American director Tay Garnett, starting to make films a similar style.

Fanck co-founded the Berg and Sportfilm company (Mountain Sport Films) to create the movies and had a run of popular successes including The Holy Mountain (1926), The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), Storm over Mont Blanc (1930) and The White Ecstasy (1931).

In the 1930s Fanck is reported to have run in to problems with the rise of the Nazi regime after he initially refused to join the party instead working on a film called The Eternal Dream which had a French hero in the lead, was filmed in the French Alps and had a Jewish producer – all politically unacceptable in Germany at the time. –Patrick Thorne

Photo above: Arnold Fanck in 1925. Matthias Fanck archive.

Photo above: Walter Amstutz led the transition from free-heel to locked-heel skiing. In 1928, he pioneered a spring to control heel-lift, soon known as the “Amstutz spring.” Reduced heel-lift helped spark the parallel turn revolution. Photo courtesy Ivan Wagner, Swiss Academic Ski Club

From 1929 to 1932, steel edges and locked-down heels transformed downhill and slalom racing into the high-speed alpine sports we love today.

It’s often said that alpine skiing was born in 1892, when Matthias Zdarsky experimented with skis adapted for steeper terrain, or perhaps with Christof Iselin’s 1893 ascent, with Jacques Jenny, of the Schilt in Switzerland.

But Zdarsky, Iselin and their heirs—including Hannes Schneider—were free-heel skiers and today we would lump them in with the nordic crowd. The sport we recognize as alpine skiing began with a pair of inventions that transformed downhill and slalom racing over the course of three winters, from 1929 to 1932.

Racers in Austria and Switzerland were primed for alpine competition, but lacked the tools for downhill speed. Kitzbühel held its first Hahnenkamm downhill in April 1906, won by Sebastian Monitzer at an average speed of 14 mph. Arnold Lunn launched the Kandahar Cup at Crans-Montana in 1911. After the Great War, Lunn headquartered at Mürren and in January 1924 founded the Kandahar Ski Club. This prompted Walter Amstutz and a few friends to launch the Swiss Academic Ski Club (SAS) the following month. Lunn intended the Kandahar to promote racing amongst his British guests—a rowdy assortment of public school Old Boys. Another contingent of sporting toffs infested the neighboring town of Wengen. Rivalry between the groups led the Wengen chaps, in 1925, to create their own ski-racing club. Because a railway ran partway up the Lauberhorn, the Wengen skiers disdained climbing. They called themselves the Downhill Only Ski Club (DHO).

 

 

Downhill and slalom racing were still fringe sports, pursued by a few dozen people at half a dozen meets each year. Lunn often said it was just good fun, and no one took it seriously. The equipment—hickory or ash skis without edges, and bindings with leather straps—worked well only in soft snow. Downhills were gateless route-finding exercises. Winning time on a typical two-mile downhill might be 15 or 20 minutes, for an average speed around 15 mph. Low speeds meant that falls, while common, rarely produced serious injury. Racers expected to fall, get back up, and finish. Slaloms were usually set to produce a one-minute winning time, but every gate required an exaggerated stem turn. A smooth stem christie was the mark of an expert skier.

On hard snow, edgeless hickory skis slipped and skidded uncontrollably. Skiers dreaded any traverse across an icy or crusted steilhang. In 1931 Christian Rubi, director of the Wengen ski school and a founder of the Lauberhorn race, recalled the terror of wooden edges:

“Touring skiers are on a Whitsun tour in the high mountains. They take their skis to the summit, and prepare to descend. Then comes the traverse on the hard firn, above the bergschrund. One of them slips, his edges don’t grip, he falls, slides, tries to stop in vain, slips headfirst and disappears into the coal-black night of the yawning crevasse – After half an hour, rescue is at hand. Someone dives into the cold depths on a double rope. There the victim dangles head-down from his ski bindings, face bloody. . .”

 

 

In December 1917, the mountaineer and ski jumper Rudolf Lettner had just such a scare during a solo tour on the Tennenbirge south of Salzburg. Lettner was able to self-arrest, stopping a potentially fatal slide by using the steel tip of his bamboo pole. Back at his accounting job, Lettner began doodling designs for steel edges. It took nearly a decade to figure out how to armor the skis without making them too stiff, but he filed a patent in 1926 for what we now call the segmented edge: short strips of carbon steel screwed to the edge of the ski-sole in a mortised channel.

Using steel edges, Lettner’s daughter Kathe finished second in downhill at the very first Austrian championships in 1928 (she reached the podium four more times in the next six years). Another early adopter was the 18-year-old ski instructor Toni Seelos of Seefeld, who used Lettner edges when he won a 1929 slalom at Seegrube—by five seconds.

Skiers outside of Austria heard about metal edges, but were skeptical. In 1927, Tom Fox of the DHO acquired a set of Lettners, but other Brits scoffed. Segmented edges looked fragile. Besides, 120 screws might weaken the ski. Arnold Lunn, after grumbling that some Englishman had tried unsatisfactory steel edges in the early ’20s, ran articles in the British Ski Yearbook suggesting that they made skis heavy, dragged in the snow, and inhibited turning. Beginners, he wrote, should by no means use metal edges. Over the next decade, experiments were made with continuous edges of brass and aluminum (continuous edges of steel proved far too stiff).

However, Lettner’s neighbors took notice. A handful of racers from the Innsbruck ski club saw an opportunity and on January 10-12, 1930, at Davos, they beat the pants off everyone at the second World Inter-University Winter Games. On Lettner edges, the Innsbruck boys took four of the top five places in slalom (and eight of the top 15 spots), plus the top four places in downhill. Notable were the Lantschner brothers, Gustav (Guzzi), Otto and Helmuth, who took first, second and fourth in downhill; Otto won the slalom with Helmuth fifth. On January 15, three days after the Davos triumph, Guzzi and Otto each went 65.5mph at the first Flying Kilometer, organized by Walter Amstutz at St. Moritz. They did it on jumping skis without steel edges, though they obviously hit the wax.

The Lantschners were hot but they had not previously been world-beaters. Only a year earlier, Guzzi came fourth in the 1929 Arlberg-Kandahar downhill and Otto tenth in the slalom.

It was obvious after the January 1930 races that steel edges were now essential for winning. Top “runners” scrambled for Lettner edges. The wealthy Brits of the Kandahar and DHO clubs were happy to pay a carpenter about $100 (in today’s money) to mortise their skis and sink about 120 screws.

 

 

In Wengen, Christian Rubi and Ernst Gertsch were convinced. Seeking to prove that local Swiss skiers could beat the Brits, they were busy organizing the first-ever running of the Lauberhorn, set for February 2-3. But Gertsch found time to take over the workbench at his father’s ski shop and install the new edges.

So equipped, they were able to beat the Lantschners. Rubi won the downhill, with three Brits following: Col. L.F.W. Jackson, then Bill Bracken, founder of the Mürren ski school, with Tom Fox third. Guzzi Lantschner settled for fifth, with Gertsch seventh.

The next day, Gertsch tied for the slalom win with Bracken. The next three places belonged to Innsbruck skiers, including Guzzi Lantschner in fourth, followed by Fox and Rubi. Bracken, who had grown up skiing in St. Anton, thus became the first Lauberhorn combined champion.

Over the space of three weeks, all the top alpine racers in Europe had converted to steel edges.

 

 

In the Illustrated Sportsman and Dramatic News (London), Arnold Lunn wrote “The Austrian team at the Winter University Games last year had all provided themselves with steel-edged skis, and they scored a run-away victory in the slalom. Again, steel edges had a great triumph in the race for the Lauberhorn Cup which was held at Wengen in the middle of February. The snow in the Devil’s Gap was the nearest thing to genuine ice that I have seen on the lower hills in winter since I was nearly killed twenty-five years ago on a cow-mountain above Adelboden. The contrast between the ease and security of the racers with steel edges and the slithering helplessness of the other competitors was most impressive.” Lunn predicted universal adoption of metal edges and recommended armor for the lower legs to prevent lacerations.

Scotsman David A.G. Pearson of the DHO reported to Ski Notes and Queries (London), “At my particular sports shop in Wengen the first supply [of edges] was sold out almost immediately, and I had to wait some days before a new stock came in. I believe that our friends at Mürren were as keen as we were.” Pearson warned that “A certain amount of skill is needed for their use. . . . If, in doing a Christiania one gets for a fraction of time on to the outside edge of the lower ski, one can hardly avoid going over like a shot rabbit . . .” This may be the first reference in print to catching an edge.

In late February, after years of lobbying, Lunn finally persuaded the FIS to sanction alpine races (some accounts say that Walter Amstutz did most of the talking on Lunn’s behalf).

 

 

Meanwhile, a parallel revolution was brewing. The switch from free-heel to locked-heel skiing began when Walter Amstutz took a close look at his bindings. Amstutz, like nearly every ski racer of his era, used a steel toe iron (Eriksen and Attenhofer Alpina were the popular brands) with leather straps over the toe and around the heel. Rotational control, not to mention what we would today call leverage control, was imprecise at best. In 1928, Amstutz introduced a steel coil spring to control heel-lift. The spring attached at one end to a leather strap above the ankle, and at the other end via a detachable clip to the top of the ski, about six inches behind the boot heel.

Arnold Lunn considered this a brilliant innovation. Beginning in 1929 nearly all top racers adopted the spring or some variant—less expensive competing versions used rubber straps. Decades later, Dick Durrance told Skiing Magazine’s Doug Pfeiffer, “The Amstutz springs were great. They held your boot to the ski. . . . we did add some strips of innertube for better tension.” By tension, Durrance meant heel hold-down.

Better control of the boot heel optimized the advantage of steel edges. Toni Seelos figured out how to cinch down his leather binding-straps to hold his heel solidly to the ski-top. He practiced jumping his ski tails around close-set slalom gates, using plenty of vorlage (forward lean) to get the tails off the snow so he could swing them sideways, in parallel, and land going in the new direction. The technique eliminated the draggy stem. Gradually he refined the movement, moving the tails sideways as a unit, without a visible hop.

 

 

Amstutz’ friend Guido Reuge, a mechanical engineering graduate of ETH Zurich, went one better. With his brother Henri, in 1928 he cobbled up a new binding, the first to use a steel cable to replace leather straps. The cable tightened around the boot heel with a Bildstein lever across the back of the boot (the lever was later moved out ahead of the toe iron, where a skier could reach it easily for binding entry and exit). But the real innovation was a set of clips

 

 

screwed to the sidewalls ahead of the boot heel. With the cable routed under the clips, the boot heel was clamped to the top of the ski for downhill skiing—English speakers called this effect “pull-down.” With the cable routed above the clips, you had a free-heel binding for climbing, touring and telemark. Reuge called this the Kandahar binding. He received a patent and began selling it in 1932. The two new technologies—steel edges and locked-heels—worked perfectly in concert, enabling all forms of stemless turning.

Meanwhile, Seelos perfected his skidless parallel turn. The concept was new and unique: No practitioner of Arlberg had ever thought of it. As late as 1933, Charley Proctor wrote in The Art of Skiing that the ultimate downhill turn was the “pure Christiana,” which skidded both skis.

That year Seelos brought his new turn to the FIS World Championships and won the two-run slalom by nine seconds over stem-turning Guzzi Lantschner. (For the full story of the Seelos turn, see “Anton Seelos” by John Fry, in the January-February 2013 issue of Skiing Heritage.) Seelos instantly transformed from ski instructor to international coach, and over the next two decades taught parallel turns to Olympic and world champions from Christl Cranz and Franz Pfnur to Toni Matt, Emile Allais and Andrea Mead Lawrence.

Decades later Durrance told John Jerome: “Seelos . . . developed this knack for getting through slalom gates like an eel. In the first FIS that he ran I think he won the slalom by something like thirteen seconds. He was head and shoulders above anybody else. He was my idol when I left Germany [in 1933]. . . With nothing but your weight shift you cut a carved turn, letting the camber of the ski do the turning for you.”

 

 

“I thought I’d just start skiing slalom like Seelos and I’d beat anybody,” Durrance said. If “anybody” meant any North American, he was right. But he couldn’t beat another Seelos fan, the professional Hannes Schroll, winner of the 1934 Marmolada downhill and new ski school director at Yosemite.

Like the steel edge, the Kandahar binding became an instant must-have for alpine racing, and then for all alpine skiers. The binding was manufactured under license, or simply copied, by numerous companies around the world. Under a variety of brand names (for instance, Salomon Lift) it remained the standard alpine heel binding design into the 1960s, long after the Eriksen-style toe iron was replaced by lateral-release toes. Some of the top racers, including Durrance, used both the Kandahar and the Amstutz spring for extra pull-down.

With new technology, race times tumbled. In 1929 at Dartmouth’s Moosilauke downhill, Charley Proctor set the fast time of 11 minutes, 59 seconds on the 2.6-mile course (average speed 13mph). He had hickory edges and free-heel bindings. By 1933, with steel edges and Kandahar bindings, he had it down to 7:22 for an average 20.25mph.

In 1930 the Lauberhorn start moved up to the summit, and assumed its modern length of 4.4km (2.7 miles). Christian Rubi won that race in 4:30.00, for an average speed with steel edges of 36 mph. In 1932, with heels locked, Fritz Steuri knocked 20 seconds off that time for an average speed of 38.9 mph.

Top speeds were getting interesting, and alpine racing became a spectator sport. At the 1936 Olympics in Garmisch, 50,000 people turned out to watch the slalom. The winner was Franz Pfnur. But there was a faster skier on the course. Toni Seelos, ineligible to race because he was a professional instructor and coach, was the forerunner. He beat Pfnur by five
seconds.

Pretty soon skiers didn’t even have to unlock their heels to reach the race start. A few resort hotels had already built rack railways and Switzerland’s first cable-pulled rail car, or funi, opened in 1924 at Crans, the first cable tram in Engleberg in 1927, Kitzbühel’s Hahnenkammbahn in 1928, and Ernst Constam’s T-bar at Davos in 1934. The race was on for uphill transportation, and alpine skiing had conquered Europe. 

Sources for this article include numerous reports in Der Schneehase and in the British, Canadian and American Ski Year Books for the years 1928 through 1939. Thanks to Einar Sunde for scanning many of these articles from his own library. Dick Durrance quotes from The Man on the Medal by John Jerome and from Skiing Magazine. More details from Snow, Sun and Stars, edited by Michael Lutscher. 

Other photo credits for the print edition: Guzzi Lantschner photo from Getty Images; Toni Seelos photo source unknown.

1921 was an important year in the history of ski racing. In 1920 the British ski racing pioneer Arnold Lunn, then age 32, became chairman of the Federal Council of British Ski Clubs and thus responsible for British ski racing. In January, 1921, at Mürren, Switzerland, he organized the first British Championships to be based on a “straight” or downhill race, with a slalom won on style points, not speed. Over the course of two days, slalom competitors were required to score points with telemark turns, stem turns, jump turns and stop-christies, in soft and difficult snow conditions. Winner of both the downhill and the combined trophy was 19-year-old Leonard Dobbs, who, as the son of Sir Henry Lunn’s local agent, had grown up skiing in Switzerland.

Lunn considered the judged slalom “a failure.” “The object of a turn is to get round a given obstacle losing as little speed as possible, therefore, a fast ugly turn is better than a slow pretty turn,” Lunn wrote in the British Ski Year Book. And so, over the course of 1921, he changed the rules. On January 1, 1922, on the grounds of Mürren’s Palace Hotel, Lunn organized the first-ever slalom race in which speed through gates was the sole criterion for victory. The winner: Johnson A. Joannides, a Great War veteran then resident in Mürren.

This was before the International Ski Federation (FIS) was founded (that came in 1924). FIS published its own rules for timed slalom in 1927 and the first race under those rules took place at Dartmouth College in 1928 (winner: Dartmouth freshman Bob Baumrucker). It would be 1931 before the FIS included a timed slalom in the first Alpine World Championships.  –Patrick Thorne