1960s

Radical racing invention, or a variation of a long-established technique? By John Fry

Was the Egg (oeuf in French, Ei in German) a radical ski racing invention? Or merely a stage in the steady progress made in streamlining the skier’s body to achieve faster speeds?

In France the question is alive, and afire with controversy. Jean Vuarnet, his son Alain, and his supporters tell of the enormous research he did to achieve his invention. They cite the French newspaper Le Figaro, which once compared the Egg to the Fosbury Flop, a single change in body action that eventually enabled all high jumpers to leap higher. Vuarnet also suggests retaliation—that doubts about his “invention” only began after his involvement in the controversial firing of six racers from the French ski team in 1973. Critics and opponents, like Jean-Claude Killy, say the Egg wasn’t an invention, but merely a variation of what downhill Olympic gold medalists Henri Oreiller and Zeno Colò were already doing a few years earlier.

Experts in the rest of the world appear baffled by why there should be a controversy. They mostly see Vuarnet’s work as part of speed skiing’s changing aerodynamics, going back at least to 1930 and 1931, when Gustav Lantschner and Leo Gasperl set world speed records, and earlier to the 19th century, when California gold miners sat low over their long skis to speed downhill. It’s hard to find anyone outside of Gaul who thinks l’Oeuf is anything but a stage in the evolution of the hocke, crouch, tuck and streamlining of the racer’s body. Vuarnet first exhibited his stance in Ski ABC—Technique Moderne. The 1957 book contains a picture of him in what is clearly the optimal aerodynamic stance of the time—poles and lower arms parallel to the skis, which, however, are not as far apart as in later editions of Joubert’s and Vuarnet’s books. No textual analysis is offered.

The foreword to Ski ABC was written by Ralph Miller, who helped with the first English-language edition, and who set a world speed record at Portillo in 1955. Miller thinks Vuarnet’s stance was simply a further refinement of body positions designed to reduce air friction.

The 1960 edition of Ski Moderne (Arthaud) contains excellent photos, illustrations and text about l’Oeuf. It’s the first detailed description I can find in print. A photo sequence of Vuarnet from the pages of Sports Illustrated is wonderful. That magazine, and others at the time, credited Vuarnet’s Squaw Valley downhill gold medal to his use of metal skis, as well as to his superior aerodynamic stance. The Austrians were the big losers. “We missed the wax,” Anderl Molterer told me recently.

I have a copy of the German Ski Moderne, a translation by Hanspeter Lanig, published in 1963. Via e-mail, Lanig told me that l’Oeuf was an invention (erfindung) of a word, not of a technique. And Dick Dorworth, the American who set a new world speed record at Portillo in 1963, says he knew about Vuarnet’s Egg. He thinks stance is shaped considerably by the racer’s own morphology. In competitive downhill racing, the V-J or Oeuf is a technique mostly limited to shaving seconds on flatter sections of the course. How valuable it is depends on the terrain—the Streif on Hahnenkamm and Birds of Prey at Beaver Creek yield less advantage for l’Oeuf than, say, the Sarajevo Olympic downhill of 1984, or the Squaw Valley downhill of 1960.

Austria’s Stefan Kruckenhauser was said to have invented “wedeln” about the same time as Vuarnet “invented” the egg. Both drew their inspiration from racing technique. Lanig might say that the word, not the act, is the invention.

My own view is that Vuarnet’s writing and photos brought into public view the final ideal stance for attaining the highest speeds on flatter sections of downhill courses and in setting speed records—an evolution that had begun at least 30 years before. Joubert and Vuarnet’s 1966 Comment se Perfectionner à Ski (How to Ski the New French Way) shows a further evolution: the bullet or bolide. It was a super-egg-like streamlining of the body, with legs even more splayed, torso even more compressed between the legs. Here, arguably, was the final form. It hasn’t changed much in the ensuing 50 years.

His Olympic gold was only the beginning. The triumphant, sometimes tumultuous professional and personal life of the 1960 Olympic downhill gold medalist, technique analyst, resort developer, and entrepreneur of eyeglass fame. By Alain Lazard

Today in the Haute Savoie of the French Alps quietly lives Jean Vuarnet, 83, captor of the first Olympic medal ever won on non-wooden skis. Vuarnet’s downhill victory at the Squaw Valley Winter Games signaled the start of the most productive decade for the great French national ski team of the 1960s. At the time of the Games, Vuarnet had already begun to co-author, with Georges Joubert, a best-selling series of influential ski technique books. In the period 1968–1975, he directed major changes in both the Italian and French national ski teams. He spearheaded the development of France’s first car-free ski resort, and then launched an eponymous and très chic line of sunglasses, marketed worldwide. Later in life, he experienced a strange twist of events that had their beginning almost 50 years earlier.

Vuarnet is dividing his time these days between the ski town of Morzine, where he was born, and Sallanches, gateway to the Mont Blanc region, where he resides in a boutique retirement home with two other residents, and his lively companion Hifi, a King Charles Spaniel. Sallanches is where the Dynastar ski company has long been headquartered. Last year, Vuarnet—just as he was recovering from hip replacement surgery—suffered a stroke. Despite this double blow, he’s determined to rebound from the ordeal.

From Law School to the Winter Games
Jean Vuarnet was born on January 18, 1933 in Tunisia, where his father, Dr. Victor Vuarnet, had recently established a medical practice. Originally from Savoie, Dr. Vuarnet soon changed his mind about life in North Africa. He returned with his family to the French Alps in 1934, settling in Morzine, one of few established French ski resorts before World War II.

Little Jean began to ski when he was two-and-a-half years old. When his father bought him his first pair of skis, he threw a fit because he thought they were too short. It was an early indication of his penchant for going straight downhill rather than wasting time with turns.

He was known by everyone in the village as Jean-Jean, the son of Dr. Vuarnet. Like the other kids, he skied and ice-skated whenever possible. He also introduced skijoring to the valley by attaching a harness to Toto, a dog that belonged to his childhood friend Roger Vadim. (Vadim went on to become a movie director and the husband, at various times, of Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda.)

When he finished grammar school at age 11, his father sent him to a private boarding school in Paris. He was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a physician. Dr. Vuarnet exerted an overwhelming influence over his son. He encouraged Jean to pursue excellence in sports, but not to the detriment of his education. The elder Vuarnet had achieved this balance himself by attending medical school while playing soccer at an elite level, including his selection to the French national team for the 1936 Summer Games.

Vuarnet’s mother, overshadowed by Victor, had a lesser influence on him. The couple divorced when Jean was 10. His father remarried quickly, but as soon as Jean began to bond with his stepmother, his father divorced and remarried again.

As a high school student in Lyon and Annemasse, Vuarnet skied mostly during the holidays, dabbled in jumping, and became a competitive swimmer. After graduation, he decided to give ski racing a serious shot while earning a college degree. He enrolled as a law student at the University of Grenoble in 1952.

Around the same time, he became romantically involved with a young French-Canadian woman who, after she discovered she was pregnant, wrote a letter to Jean explaining the situation. The letter arrived at the Vuarnet home in Morzine. Dr. Vuarnet opened it, and then promptly decided not to reveal its contents to his son, who was away at college. Jean discovered nothing of what had happened. The girl returned to Montreal, presumably never to be seen again.

At law school, Jean joined the Grenoble University Club (GUC), where the ski program had recently been taken over by a PE teacher named Georges Joubert. It was a remarkable winter. At the French University Games, Vuarnet won the 1952 national titles in downhill, slalom and combined. He also picked up a lasting reputation as a “city racer” from his future colleagues on the French national team, mountain boys who at the time seldom pursued education beyond the age of 13 or 14.

Schooled in cities, Vuarnet was only partly raised in a ski town. He never became a true “natural” skier by his own admission. To compensate, he observed and analyzed what the best skiers were doing. Olympic bronze and silver medalist Guy Périllat expressed it well in a 2002 interview in l’Équipe Magazine: “Jean wasn’t the most gifted among us, but he always scrutinized everything in depth.”

Vuarnet’s attitude was a perfect fit with what Georges Joubert was doing at the GUC. Their first book, Ski ABC: Technique Moderne, published in the fall of 1956, was praised by 1937 overall world champion of alpine skiing, Émile Allais, who contributed a preface. The purpose of the photos in Ski ABC was to demonstrate that the world’s best racers all used the same basic techniques. That opinion contradicted the narrow nationalism prevalent in ski technique at the time, when French, Austrians and Swiss each were claiming to have the superior method.

For more than a decade, Joubert and Vuarnet analyzed and explained what they observed in elite racers, codifying their findings in five books, translated into multiple languages, which influenced ski coaching and teaching around the world. Joubert tended to focus on turning technique, Vuarnet on speed. From their books emerged inventive technique terms, such as the Jet Turn, the Serpent, Avalement (swallowing terrain irregularities), and l’oeuf.

Vuarnet’s downhill research led him to an enhanced streamlining of the body, with feet farther apart for superior gliding. After he used it to win his Olympic downhill gold medal at Squaw Valley, American media called it the “egg,” which translates to French as l’oeuf. Actually, a cartoonist at the French sports daily l’Équipe, André Caza, in 1946 used the word “oeuf” in a comical way to describe the positions employed by cyclists and skiers to streamline themselves.

For Vuarnet, the correct stance was not natural. It required special physical conditioning to build the stamina necessary to hold the position for sustained periods of time. It combined the two necessities for reaching maximum speed in speed racing: a body profile offering minimal air resistance, and the ability to keep skis flat on the snow and properly loaded for the best possible gliding. The racer could employ it to gain time on the easier sections of downhill courses. Later, Honoré Bonnet, the iconic director of the French Ski Team, wanted to call the position “VJ” (Vuarnet Jean), but it was dropped for l’œuf, or aller tout schuss.

The Path to Olympic Gold
During the period leading up to the 1960 Winter Olympics, Vuarnet rose rapidly through the racing ranks, winning regional and national races and competing on the international circuit. He collected seven national titles in all three existing disciplines—downhill, slalom and giant slalom—from 1957 to 1959.

He made the cut to race the giant slalom and the downhill at the 1956 Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, only to discover at the last minute that his GS spot had been given to another team member. Angry, he declared publicly that James Couttet, the French team coach and 1938 world downhill champion, “…was a great racer but a mediocre coach.” The declaration made the front page of France Soir, a daily newspaper with a print run of 1.2 million copies. Vuarnet didn’t ski in the GS or in the downhill…and Couttet resigned.

At the 1958 World Championships in Bad Gastein, Vuarnet won a bronze medal in the downhill, then added three titles at the French National Championships. That year he married the attractive Edith Bonlieu.

Vuarnet’s new bride had experienced family misfortune. She had grown up among four siblings with three different fathers, without knowing her own. One brother was 1964 Olympic GS gold medalist “Le Petit Prince” François Bonlieu, who was killed tragically in 1973. Notwithstanding these challenges, Edith became a formidable racer in her own right, winning three national titles. A leg fracture prevented her from competing in the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics. She could console herself with the knowledge that, uniquely, she had a brother and husband who were both Olympic gold medalists. (Edith and Jean went on to have three children—Alain, b. 1962; Pierre, b. 1963; and Patrick, b. 1968.)

At the 1960 Winter Games at Squaw Valley, Vuarnet rode a pair of metallic Allais 60s made by Rossignol, designed in collaboration with Emile Allais. At the time, high-performance competition skis were still made of laminated wood. One of the drawbacks of the first metal skis produced was the lack of consistency between the skis in a pair. Vuarnet left France for the Olympics without a pair to his liking. Even with the best pair sent to Squaw Valley, only one ski performed well. He instructed Rossignol to make him a second ski similar to the one he liked… and he received it in California only days before the race! The skis were worth their weight in gold.

A New Life After Racing
On returning from Squaw Valley, Vuarnet was greeted at home by an overwhelming reception in Morzine. He was offered the position of Director of Morzine’s Office du Tourisme, in charge of promoting the resort. He started work immediately. Also, with the aid of ski journalist Serge Lang, he wrote a book, Notre Victoire Olympique. A new life, a new career had begun.

Pouilloux and another eyeglass manufacturer approached him with an offer to develop a new and stylish pair of sunglasses, called the Vuarnet. Sales were slow, but took off in the 1980s after the company was a sponsor of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, where it introduced its catchphrase, “It’s a Vuarnet Day, Today.” Newspapers compared owning a pair of Vuarnets to having an Hermès scarf. Celebrities Mick Jagger and Miles Davis wore Vuarnet glasses, as did world-class sailors and ski instructors at resorts like Cortina, Courchevel and Megève. Annual sales reached 1.4 million pairs worldwide and in the United States, Vuarnets surpassed Bausch & Lomb’s Ray-Bans for a few years in a row. France rewarded the success with the coveted Annual Export Award.

Creation of the Avoriaz Resort
Beginning in the 1960s, new ski-in, ski-out resorts were being developed in France—among them La Plagne, Tignes, Les Menuires, Flaine and Les Arcs. As head of Morzine’s Office du Tourisme, Vuarnet envisioned a grand project—the development on an adjacent plateau of a high-altitude, pedestrian resort.

“I convinced the municipality to imagine a brand new resort above Morzine,” Vuarnet recalls, “free of cars. It would be Avoriaz.” As the possessor of a law degree, an Olympic gold medal, and knowledge of skiing and the local terrain, Vuarnet was seen as having the assets necessary to launch such an ambitious venture. The municipality gave the project 200 acres of developable land for a base village. Avoriaz, the first no-car resort in France, opened in 1966. Later Vuarnet negotiated an agreement to connect Avoriaz to 11 adjacent resorts, including four in Switzerland. Les Portes du Soleil is now the second-largest complex of interconnected ski areas in the world.

Italian and French National Ski Teams
After the launching of Avoriaz, Vuarnet anticipated devoting more time to his growing family, with two boys and a third on the way. But another challenge arose: The president of the Italian Winter Sports Federation asked him to lead the country’s languishing alpine ski team, ranked 8th in the world. The losing status was unacceptable to the proud Italians, who still remembered the great period of Zeno Colò, 1950 world champion in giant slalom and downhill at Aspen and downhill gold medalist at the 1952 Olympic Games.

Vuarnet hesitated, but finally accepted the challenge, with the condition that he be given carte blanche to run the operation as he wished. He led the team from 1968 to 1972, blessed with the arrival of 18-year-old racer Gustavo Thoeni. Success followed. Before his tenure, the Italian alpine team in 17 years had scored only one podium in the classic races. A year after Vuarnet left the team, 1973, Italy had risen to second in the men’s Nations Cup standings, and a year later first, ahead of Austria. The exceptional team was nicknamed The Blue Avalanche. Between them, Thoeni and Piero Gros won the overall crystal globe, symbolic of the best alpine ski racer in the world, consecutively between 1971 and 1975.

In 1972, Vuarnet was petitioned to accept the vice presidency of the French Ski Federation, which perceived the national team to be in trouble. Against his better judgment, he accepted, with the condition that his friend and collaborator Georges Joubert be placed in charge of the team. Despite what the two men brought to the table—Vuarnet’s just-accomplished turnaround of the Italian team, and Joubert’s transformation of an insignificant university ski club into the number-one team in France—the new assignment quickly turned sour. Their reforms were derailed. The fusion of staff, racers and suppliers, which Vuarnet had been able to create in Italy, did not happen. The French Federation, supported by the government’s Secretary of State for Youth and Sports, decided to fire six top racers for intransigence. Joubert resigned.

The mountain community and 1968 Olympic triple gold medalist Jean-Claude Killy unconditionally supported the racers, leading to a split between Killy and Vuarnet that persists to this day. It’s a long, complicated and unpleasant story. (For one version of what happened, visit www.affairevaldisere.fr; a differing interpretation will appear in the July-August 2016 issue of Skiing History.)

Vuarnet quit after two years. By 1974, he had spent almost 15 years working nonstop since his gold-medal win at Squaw Valley, with little time for family life. Edith had borne the brunt of handling the house, running two ski shops in Avoriaz and raising three boys. The only time the family spent together was during extended summer vacations in the South of France, the Costa del Sol in Spain, and aboard Vuarnet’s sailboats, the Eileen and the Tahoe, a 64-foot custom-built schooner.

Vuarnet took advantage of this window of time to try his hand at a lifelong passion: books and reading. For a few years he launched and operated a publishing company, Les Éditions VUARNET, which handled titles as diverse as cinema, history, travel guides, sports and medicine. This semi-dilettante period didn’t last. In 1987, Vuarnet decided to capitalize on the strong brand recognition of his namesake sunglasses by launching a skiwear line with his son, Pierre. Subsequently created was Vuarnet International, which branched out into watches, sportswear, shoes, perfume, cosmetics, pens, luggage, leather goods, jewelry, ski underwear, helmets, ski poles and skis. The company came to oversee luxury Vuarnet shops in Brazil and France, and developed licensees with distribution in 30 different countries. Jean Vuarnet retired in 1998. His son Alain, who succeeded him, stepped down two years ago.

Family Tragedy
The years 1994 and 1995 were horrific ones for Vuarnet and his family. In October 1994, news emerged of a mass suicide in nearby Switzerland. The bodies of 53 members of an obscure apocalyptic cult, the Order of the Solar Temple, were found dead and partially burned. A few days later, two journalists showed up at the door of Vuarnet’s chalet in Morzine. From them Vuarnet learned that his wife Edith and Patrick, the youngest of his three sons, belonged to Solar Temple. Thankfully, they were not among the victims. But the family was devastated. Over the next year, they desperately tried to persuade mother and son to leave the sect.

The effort failed. On Christmas Day 1995, another 14 sect members were found in a remote area of the Vercors range near Grenoble, their bodies shot and partially burned. After a week of waiting, Jean learned that Edith and Patrick were among the dead. It was a terrible tragedy. Despite public outcry and civil lawsuits, a key cult leader—a Swiss musician and orchestra conductor—was inexplicably acquitted.

The funeral of Edith and Patrick in Morzine was a moving tribute to the Vuarnets from the local community and afar. Jean received hundreds of condolences from around the world. One was from a Montreal woman named Christiane. She reminded him that they had known one another in the early 1950s. By coincidence, Jean’s son Pierre was living with his Canadian wife and two children in Montreal at the time, so Jean decided to spend the 1996 Christmas holidays with them. While he was there he looked up Christiane. To his shock and surprise, she told him how she had moved to Canada and given birth to a lovely child, Catherine. In Montreal, for the first time, Vuarnet met his biological daughter, named Catherine.

Three years after re-connecting in Montreal, Jean and Christiane married. Over the next 13 years together, they divided their time between Morzine, the Baleares Islands (where Vuarnet moored his schooner, Tahoe), and a picturesque Cantons de l’Est village in Quebec, Knowlton, which happens to be the longtime home of Canadian two-event world champion Lucile Wheeler Vaughan—who had no idea another gold medalist was living nearby.

In 2012, Christiane died of a heart attack. After her passing, Vuarnet sought a place where he could spend the remainder of his years. He found a retirement home in Sallanches, then recently returned to his home town of Morzine.

Only a handful of French ski champions have accomplished so much after their successes on the slope—notably Émile Allais, Vuarnet, and Jean-Claude Killy. Vuarnet looks back at his career with pride and equanimity. Over his multi-faceted career, he made a good amount of money, “but money-making,” he says, “never drove the decisions that led to my successes.”

The author, the late Alain Lazard, was a longtime ISHA member and frequent Skiing History contributor. His most recent articles included “Rise and Fall of Racing Nations” (May-June 2015) and “Joe Marillac: The Little-Known Frenchman Who Helped Squaw Valley Win the Winter Olympics” (July-August 2013).

Five locals tell the story of five decades of progress at Whistler Mountain in British Columbia. 

By Michel Beaudry

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. All the ski experts agreed: The place was too stormy, too big and too isolated to succeed. The proposed resort was on the edge of the world, way out on the western coast of Canada, and there wasn’t even a direct road. It was inconceivable that something so different could work.

And they were right...sort of. This was an era when skis were long and boots were low, when being able to “carve a turn” was reserved for elite practitioners. Skiing in the early 1960s was an adventure. Who needed steep slopes and big vertical? Just getting down a mountain was accomplishment enough. To even conceive of such a wild place was a departure from convention. But to actually build it?

Fortunately, Franz Wilhelmsen didn’t listen to his detractors. Based in Vancouver and well known as an entrepreneur with a  air for the dramatic, Franz had seen firsthand what Squaw Valley and Walt Disney had done for the 1960 Winter Olympics. He’d also travelled extensively in the Alps and skied its most famous slopes. He was convinced that British Columbia’s biggest city deserved nothing less than a worldclass, Olympic caliber ski hill. And he knew exactly where to build it.

The saga of Whistler Mountain’s construction could  fill a book (and it has; for a review of Whistler Blackcomb: 50 Years of Going Beyond, see page 36). Nobody in the North American ski world had built on this scale before. Nobody knew if it was possible. Still, it’s worth noting how much past and future combined in the mountain’s construction: The first ski area to use helicopters to carry the massive load of concrete needed to pour footings for its lift towers, Whistler was also one of the last to use mules and horses to carry supplies to timberline to feed the construction crews living up there.

When the new ski hill offcially opened for business on January 15, 1966, the brash young newcomer didn’t make much of a bang on the international ski front. But for those adventurous enough to make the long trek out to Vancouver and then suffer the white-knuckled four hour drive to Whistler, the ensuing ski experience was something to rave about. What follows is a brief trip through Whistler’s first five decades, seen through the eyes of  ve longtime locals.

It’s fair to say that the first ten years of Whistler’s existence were somewhat chaotic. The sheer size of the place—the monster snowfalls, the vicious shifts of weather, the huge vertical—dictated a new form of mountain management.

The mountain had no grooming machines. As for snowmaking, forget it. You skied what was there. Bumps the size of Volkswagens, open creek beds, uncovered stumps, blowdowns, wind crust, sun crust, frozen crud. And to ski from top to bottom, nearly a vertical mile, you had to prepare yourself for screaming thighs and pounding heart.

But the young people kept coming. They came to ski, to party, to explore, to re-invent themselves. Some even settled down. After all, it’s not every day that you stumble onto a magical mountain valley where building lots can be had for under $5,000. By 1971, Whistler’s ski bum reputation was made.

Toulouse is one of Whistler’s most revered elders, and something of a trickster figure too. Ever heard of the notorious Toad Hall nude poster? That was the work of Toulouse with photographer friend Chris Speedie (to learn more—and check it out—go to http://blog.whistlermuseum. org/2013/07/10/the-story-of-the-toad-hallposter/). Remember the hard-charging Crazy Canucks? Toulouse was their masseur and start coach for over a decade. Recall the time Prince Charles visited Whistler with his two sons?

It was senior ski-instructor Toulouse who guided them on the mountain. 

The one-time Xerox salesman is full of tales. But it’s his stories of early Whistler that are the most fun. “It was Speedie who first invited me to Soo Valley,” he begins. An abandoned lumber camp at the north end of Whistler’s Green Lake, the complex had become the communal home for a group of longhaired skiers who’d solved Whistler’s notorious housing shortage by squatting in the derelict buildings.

“Living conditions were primitive,” he says. “It was very rustic, especially in winter. I would sleep inside three sleeping bags, and still wake up freezing!”

But they had fun. Take the notorious 1973 St Patrick’s Day affair. “Well,” he begins, “nudity wasn’t that big a deal in the old days and...” Again, it was a Speedie and Toulouse caper. This time the two comedians doffed their clothes at the summit’s Roundhouse Lodge, and fortied by a few hits of Irish whiskey, streaked the popular Green Chair zone wearing nothing but skis and boots.

“We skied right under the chairlift,” says Toulouse, who now helps his wife, Anne, run one of Whistler’s most popular bed-and-breakfasts. “We had a pretty good laugh at the shocked faces staring down at us.

“You know, I moved to this place for the skiing,” adds the 73-year-old. “But I stayed for the people.”

The next ten years ushered in some of the biggest changes in the young resort’s history. In 1980, Blackcomb opened with 24 runs and 350 acres on the next peak north, facing Whistler’s new northside lifts. Between them, in the new pedestrianonly village—planned and built from scratch—guests could access two separate ski areas by taking a few steps in either direction. It was bold. It was creative. And it was all due to visionaries like Al Raine and new Blackcomb president Hugh Smythe (remember that name!).

In the meantime, Whistler’s staff was engrossed in the technical challenges of operating such a vast and dangerous physical plant. The ski game had also changed. Supported by highbacked boots and stronger and more flexible skis, the skiers of the mid-1970s were venturing far beyond their elders’ tracks.

This totally changed the game for the Whistler Mountain ski patrol. Led by Smythe—who would soon leave Whistler’s employ to launch Blackcomb next door—the team devised an innovative avalanche control plan whose modus was to control the danger points within the ski area by bombing the critical start zones.

It may sound like old hat today, but back then it was leading-edge stuff that sparked the imaginations of young skiers like Cathy Jewett. Originally from southern Ontario, the outgoing teenager had moved west to live the Whistler dream. She was hired in 1976 as a lift attendant, only to be greeted by one of the worst ski seasons in history. “My first work memory is getting sent to the Green Chair area to shovel snow onto the runs,” she says. “I was skiing through snow with grass sticking out.”

Cathy can recall the exact date she decided to become a patroller. “It was March 10, 1977. A big storm cycle had just come through, and Shale Slope, a classic north-facing pitch, looked particularly inviting.” She sighs. “They didn’t bomb it, so I knew how good the skiing would be. Faceshots at every turn.” She grins. “It was at that point that I found my life’s work: Throw bombs. Ski powder. Cheat death. And save lives.”

Her dream wouldn’t come true until 1980, when Whistler Mountain was forced by the sheer size of the new expansion to hire more women. Thirty five years later, she’s still “Joe patroller,” she says. “I don’t have any special skills. I’m not the weather forecaster or the avi expert. I just pick up injured skiers. Still, I’m proud of what I do. Proud of what I’ve accomplished.”

When real estate developer Joe Houssian met Blackcomb Mountain boss Hugh Smythe in the mid-1980s, few observers realized that ski culture in the Whistler Valley would never be the same. The Vancouver-based Houssian quickly understood that British Columbia’s ski area development policy favored the bold.

The essence of the policy was straightforward: The more lifts a ski area built on the mountain, the more valley land the provincial government would provide for real estate sales. But no one had ever pushed the model to its logical conclusion.

That is, until Smythe and Houssian teamed up. Millions were invested in new mountain infrastructure. More millions were spent on  ashy advertising and sophisticated sales campaigns. Flush with cash and armed with a newly revised master plan, Smythe spent money on high-speed detachable quads like a kid in a candy shop. By 1986, Blackcomb was transformed and Houssian’s real-estate investments started to pay dividends.

Meanwhile, Whistler’s reputation was also on the rise. Local hero Rob Boyd triumphed on its vaunted World Cup downhill course in 1989 and the victory cemented the valley’s reputation as a “go for it” kind of place. Whistler was cool; it had mystique.

Mike Varrin arrived in the early 1990s. “Those were the days when there were still fierce mountain loyalties,” he says. “Back then you were either a Whistler skier or a Blackcomb skier. And the twain never met.”

Varrin had been recruited to take over Merlin’s, Blackcomb’s lucrative après ski bar. He had only one mission: “My new boss told me: ‘I want you to break some rules!’ And that was it. I just had to make sure my bar was more popular than any of their bars.”

Varrin wasn’t going to let that opportunity slip through his fingers. Every local remembers the afternoon when über entertainer Guitar Doug came  ying down onto Blackcomb Square on a tandem paraglider, singing and playing his guitar. “The whole patio at Merlin’s is looking up and screaming,” he says. “Doug has this shtick, where at the beginning of his show he calls out: ‘Who’s thirsty?’ Well, as he’s floating down to earth, he calls it out and everyone on the patio responds. Meanwhile I have 75 jugs of margaritas ready to go, one for each table. And while we’re serving them, the bylaw of cer is right at my elbow saying, ‘You can’t do this...’.”

The Reverend Mike (yes, he’s a legitimate preacher) says his hijinks are now mostly behind him. Since the turn of the century, Mike has worked as Manager of Bars for Whistler Blackcomb, overseeing some of the most popular drinking establishments in the valley. “These days, I’d rather be home playing with my two kids,” he says. “That’s why I have young staff. They can represent while I go home to bed.”

Nobody predicted how fast Whistler would grow in the 1980s and 1990s. But as the turn-of-the-century approached, the big little ski hill that could became a leading destination resort. The turning point had come with the 1997 merger of the two mountains under Intrawest, anchored by a village that featured more drinking establishments per block than just about any other town in North America.

For locals, it was a mixed blessing. The economy was booming and Whistler was getting lots of attention from the global media. But with more than two million skier visits a year, the skibum lifestyle was slowly disappearing. Many of the old guard cashed out and left for Rossland, Fernie, Invermere or Nelson.

But for valley newcomers, Whistler was everything they had dreamed about. And when Vancouver beat the odds in 2003 and won the 2010 Winter Games, after a string of failed Olympic bids, the community’s stock soared.

Like many others, Anik Champoux came for the skiing, landing a job with the Whistler Blackcomb ski school in January 2001. “My friend and I were on Eastern carving skis,” she says, “and our supervisor took us up Blackcomb to Spanky’s. It was so steep and wild...we were terrified! But there’s no way we were gonna give up.” The next day the two women bought fat skis, and she passed her Level 4 certication—the Holy Grail for many Canadian ski instructors—in 2005.

“Three women from Whistler Blackcomb passed their Level 4 that year,” she says. “It turned into a big deal: It was the first time something like this had happened, and it sparked big changes in ski school culture. We’d shown there was no difference in technical skiing between male and female skiers!”

But teaching was only a parttime job, and Champoux wanted more. In 2007 she joined the Whistler Blackcomb marketing department and by the fall of 2013, she was named Brand and Content Marketing Manager. “It’s my dream job,” she says. “It’s all about driving the mountain’s narrative. Making this place come alive for people.”

Today, Whistler is far more than a ski town. It’s a year-round resort with a booming summer season fueled by mountain biking and hardcore sports. The calendar includes the Ironman, Crankworx Festival, Tough Mudder and a host of Red Bull sponsored bike contests.

Claire Daniels was born and raised in Whistler. Her mom Kashi started skiing here in the 1960s as a pony-tailed teenager, her dad Bob not much later. They met on the mountain in the early 1970s, fell in love and set down roots. Both belong to that little group of iconoclasts who chose to settle here before there was a village, before Whistler went global.

Maybe that’s why their oldest daughter Claire exemplifies so much of what is good about this community. A veteran traveller, elite trail runner and cyclist, top-ranked triathlete, and skier and snowboarder sans-pareil, Claire also has a master’s degree in planning and works for the Squamish Lillooet Regional District.

Growing up in the valley, she says, was a wonderful experience... particularly if you like being outside. “There’s always somebody up for an adventure,” she says. “As a kid, the sports performance bar is so high, you don’t realize how tough an athlete you are until you leave.”

But Whistler’s still not an easy place to live, particularly if you’re young. “Whistler is an intentional community,” she says. “Choosing to live here is not a casual decision.”

She knows this firsthand. Many of her peers have left, and most will never be able to afford a home here. “It wasn’t always easy to grow up in this place,” she says. “We were—and are—privileged. But Whistler kept changing so fast, sometimes the local kids didn’t know where they fit in. Our ‘sense of place’ was really tested.”

Articulate, thoughtful, intelligent—the 29-year old seems to have it all. But Claire is far from unique. Whistler’s children are scholars and Olympic medalists and award winning artists; they’re scientists, activists and  lmmakers. Some are in nearby Squamish, others live in Pemberton, many are dispersed around the world. Still, they’re a fitting tribute to the community that conspired to bring them up. It’s the stuff great ski towns are made of.

A Whistler skier since the 1970s, Michel Beaudry is an award winning mountain storyteller and poet. "Whistler Pioneers" text adapted from Whistler-Blackcomb: 50 Years of Going Beyond by Leslie Anthony and Penelope Buswell. This article was funded by the Canadian Ski Hall of Fame and Museum through a grant from the Chawkers Foundation.

Bode Miller learned to ski on slopes that his grandparents, Jack and Peg Kenney, cleared after World War II on the family's New Hampshire land. From interviews and journals, the author tells the tale of a small ski area with a big legacy. By Nathaniel Vinton

 Brochures courtesy Jo Kenney

Jack Kenney (above, in an undated photo) started Tamarack Lodge in December 1946 with a rope tow and a single slope. Photo courtesy of the New England Ski Museum

The ruins of the old ski area have been all but absorbed by Kinsman Mountain. All that remains to memorialize those long-ago New Hampshire ski days is the rusty steel guts of an old car engine that had powered a rope tow. Mike Kenney says it’s a Ford Model T, and an automotive historian would probably marvel at the brittle belt still hanging on as the moss and pine needles creep in.

It is an artifact of a ski area that U.S. alpine racer Bode Miller’s grandparents tried to establish on land they bought in the town of Easton almost 70 years ago. The motor is tipped over on its side, split into two main pieces. It rests in a small clearing on the family’s storied property, right by the Franconia town line.

The most decorated male ski racer in U.S. history learned to ski, at age two, just down the trail in the yard behind the family’s Tamarack Tennis Camp. From there, it was three quarters of a mile up a different trail to Turtle Ridge, the off-the-grid cabin his parents built in 1974. (It has recently been renovated and is now home to Miller’s younger sister, Wren, and her family.)

Miller was born in 1977 and spent every winter skiing, sledding or otherwise navigating the icy paths on his family’s rural property. In 1992 he went off to Carrabassett Valley Academy in Maine, and then to global fame. Now he is 37, aiming to give Kitzbühel another shot in 2015. Recovering from November back surgery, he expects to compete in February in the FIS World Alpine Championships in Beaver Creek, Colorado.

When he’s not traveling, Miller now lives in California, but he was back at Tamarack on August 23, 2014, hosting a golf-and-tennis fundraiser for the Turtle Ridge Foundation, his charity supporting adaptive and youth sports programs. In the doubles tournament Miller was paired with his father, Woody. Meanwhile his mother, Jo, agreed to lead me up to see evidence of the ski area her parents had tried to launch.

Jack and Peg Kenney had gotten to work on the endeavor in 1946, shortly after purchasing 450 acres, a farmhouse and the barn. The Kenneys possessed an irrepressible entrepreneurial spirit and were avid skiers. Peg—her maiden name was Taylor—had been a racer with Olympic aspirations. They hoped to draw tourists up to the Franconia area. (Jack's original partner in the venture was a Navy friend, Bob Allard; Kenney bought him out after the first season.)

“If you took this innkeeping business seriously you would be charging into a padded cell in less time than it takes for a cancellation,” Jack wrote in a diary entry dated December 12, 1946. “Your worries encompass every thing from the major item of snow to trivia such as how the pie will turn out. I honestly don’t see how a serious-minded person could last long. Your nerves would snap.”

Just six miles away was the Cannon Mountain tramway, built in 1938. Adjacent to that was the Mittersill ski area, established a few years later by Austrian Baron von Pantz, whose resort would boast of colorful European ski instructors like Sig Buchmayr and Swiss born Paul Valar. But the Kenneys were hoping to draw people to their little inn and ski slope, and Jack’s journal entries are full of pride and romanticism.

“We are ideally suited for this life as we have a sense of humor and we can see how little control we have over the elements and the fortunes,” he writes. “You are whipped mercilessly by so many things: the weather, high prices, cancellations, etc. It’s an ever-changing business and very uncertain.”

The diaries are now in the possession of the eldest of Jack and Peg’s five children, Jo. She was born in 1949 and now lives in her parents’ funky old house in the woods above Tamarack. She says her parents were “doing what they wanted to do” and were “not really concerned about what the upper classes thought."

“He charged a dollar a day, I think,” Jo says of the ski tow. “He writes about it in his diary, which is hysterical. He wrote articles in the Boston Herald for years—funny things. He was really into promoting the area. North Conway at that point had all the light, and Stowe.”

The remains of the rope tow were something I’d heard about while doing research for my new book, The Fall Line (see page 35). The book tells of Miller’s unlikely rise to the top of alpine skiing, but although Miller thrived as an outsider on the World Cup, he inherited a rich skiing tradition.

Jack and Peg Kenney's children—from left to right, Jo, Billy, Davey, Bub and Mike— grew up on the Tamarack property. Mike raced on the U.S. Pro Tour and today is Bode's mentor and primary coach. Photo courtesy Jo Kenny.

“It’s probably the richest ski culture in the country, in this area, where I grew up,” Miller told me at the Tamarack event last August. “Everyone around here knew about racing. It’s a bit like being in Austria. Within my family, my uncles made it to pro, so we always had this thing where it wasn’t like racing was something that just kids did.” 

The Kenneys were avid skiers—Jack a Dartmouth graduate, and Peg an Olympic hopeful. Their kids all became skilled and dedicated skiers. When Bode was growing up, his uncles and other family members could explain to him the different echelons and qualification measures that governed American skiing. (Two of Miller’s uncles, Peter and Mike, both raced on the U.S. Pro Tour; two other uncles, Bill and Davey, were also skilled and dedicated skiers.)

“It was clear there were steps all the way to the top,” Bode recalls.

Helping young Bode get up some of those critical early steps was his grandmother, Peg. When Bode was in his early teens, she loaned him money at the start of each winter for season passes at Cannon Mountain, where he would spend truant days skiing alone, discovering his distinctive turn.

“Two hundred and sixty bucks," Miller recalls of the loans, which he’d pay off fixing the Tamarack courts. “I’d pull tennis court nails on our clay courts, and roll up the lines, and sweep the courts and fix fences and mow lawns. She’d end up paying for the whole thing, but I ended up paying for usually about half of it, but I was usually one season behind.”

In his 2005 memoir Go Fast, Be Good, Have Fun, Bode Miller writes about how his grandparents “met on skis” in late 1944 at Sugar Bowl, California, with Peg just out of UC Berkeley and Jack on leave from the Navy, having seen action in the South Pacific. Within two years they were at Tamarack, trying to inaugurate their little ski area.

“I had a fine time laying pine boughs across gullies over roots on the bottom of the ski slope,” Jack Kenney writes on December 1, 1946. “Cut out some of the hill to the left of the tow—I think that is going to be a fast, interesting run.”

Jack Kenney (far left) on the snow-covered tennis courts at nearby Mittersill in 1951, during a fundraiser for the 1952 Winter Olympics ski team. He played with (left to right) U.S. tennis champion Pancho Segura, Chilean tennis player Ricardo Belbieres, and New York society columnist Cholly Knickerbocker. By 1952, his Tamarack ski lodge was struggling and Kenney has started to plan a tennis camp on the property. Photo courtesy of New England Ski Museum

The same entry describes his fears about whether the new rope tow will work. There are mechanical adjustments to make, and he has a feeling it won’t work, but he accepts reservations anyway.

“A party calls long-distance from Boston to reserve 6 in the bunkroom after Christmas,” he writes in the same entry. “Call Joe about 5 cord of slabwood at $7 per cord—he can’t hear me. We all get laughing and I scream at him. Peg comes up to the room pulls over her pants and jumps into bed with me and we love—she asks me if I’m happy. I am and very serene. She is happy but a worrier.”

The Kenneys prepared food at the farmhouse and did what they could to ready the slopes despite early-season fears over inadequate snow. They sent out marketing material—“Excellent Skiing, Outstanding Food, Gay Informality,” their brochure read. And they enlisted friends to help them build a small wooden structure meant to house the rope tow’s engine and offer skiers a little mid-mountain retreat. 

In Jack Kenney’s diaries, mixed in with the food bill totals and worries about snowfall, there is just enough time for reflection, as is the case on January 5, 1947. That day the rope tow finally starts working properly, and Jack records “a sudden surge of satisfaction and joy” over what they are accomplishing. 

“Life can be beautiful! It even is at times,” he writes that day. “Today at about 5 p.m. the first person hoved into view coming up on the enigmatic rope tow. What a thrill that was. We have been moaning, sweating, belaboring and bitching about that damn thing for weeks.” 

This comes under an entry topped with jubilant block letters: SKI TOW RUNS!! GROSS INCOME FOR TWO WEEKS: $1021!! He records his vision of a fully operational ski area, presumably with his ski-racing wife offering personalized lessons. The ski area doesn’t have a name; it’s simply part of Tamarack Lodge.

“Now imagine what will happen if we get the ski tow operating, the warming shelter going and ski lessons continuing,” he writes on January 5, 1947. “We will have five sources of income: the lodge transportation, ski tow, ski lessons, and the warming shelter (sandwiches, hot drinks and other food).”

The ski area was a constant struggle, and Tamarack’s other facilities were under-utilized in the summer, so by 1952 Jack and Peg had envisioned the tennis camps. They had the market to themselves, and within a few years the Tamarack Tennis Camp was the family’s main commercial focus, along with a tennis court building-and-maintenance company that’s still going strong. They shut down the ski area sometime after the late 1950s.

Today Tamarack Tennis Camp is thriving under leadership of Wren and her husband, Chuck Weed—whom she met at the tennis camp when they were 10—along with the rest of the family. In addition to the regular seven-week summer camp season, they offer tennis weekends for adults, host the Brandeis College tennis team for a fall training weekend, and rent the lodge for two weeks in January to the University of New Hampshire ski team, which trains at Cannon. 

After all these years, the place retains a rustic, low-key vibe. It was recently lauded in an article for The New Republic by Michael Lewis, the acclaimed author of Moneyball and Liar’s Poker, who wrote that Jack Kenney “ran his tennis camp less as a factory for future champions than as an antidote to American materialism.” 

Future ski historians will owe a debt to Jo Miller, who rescued many of the trophies, papers and other mementos of her son’s nearly 20-year career in elite, professional ski racing. At her home she keeps scrapbooks full of early press clippings, award certificates and curiosities. She also arranged for Bode to display five of his six Olympic medals and three World Cup trophies at the New England Ski Museum, adjacent to the base of the Cannon Mountain tram.

On a piece of paper from a 2001 training session in New Zealand, a coach has recorded Miller’s times on a full-length GS course as he edges out his teammate Erik Schlopy; another scrapbook contains a 2006 article from an Austrian men’s magazine featuring one of Miller’s ex-girlfriends in her underwear, ice cubes balanced in her cleavage; and there is a U.S. Ski Team worksheet—a five-year-plan that Miller’s coaches made him fill out at age 22; in the final box, he has written a simple goal: “stay the ultimate one!”

Skiing is still a family affair to Bode Miller, and perhaps even more than ever. His primary coach on the U.S. Ski Team staff—if an athlete as intensely independent as Miller can be said to have a coach—is his uncle, Mike Kenney, who is known on the World Cup for climbing tall trees along the tour’s downhill courses to get better footage of his nephew and other team members for the scientific digital video analysis that is part of modern World Cup strategy.

Miller has also made a point of bringing his young children to see him race. When on the World Cup with him they might stay in his luxurious motorhome; the chauffeur typically parks the bus in the television truck compound near the race finish. Both children were also with him at the August charity function.

“The tennis camp was very firmly established by the time I was here,” he says. “The fact that [my grandparents] were ski lodge entrepreneurs was lost on me. The rope tow, I didn’t really know about that until I was older.”

Photo above: Bode Miller, shown here during the 1996 U.S. national championships, learned to ski at age 2 on the trails at Tamarack. Courtesy New England Ski Museum.

It’s true that the skiing culture ran deep in the Easton Valley. Cannon Mountain hosted World Cup races during the tour’s inaugural 1966–67 season. Sel Hannah, one of the founders of the American ski industry, lived nearby; one of his daughters, Joan, won bronze in giant slalom at the 1962 world championships. In 2005, Miller bought the Hannah family’s 630-acre potato farm in Sugar Hill, but he sold it recently after putting considerable improvements into the property. 

The U.S. Ski Team recently signed on to invest in alpine racing infrastructure at Mittersill, which was resurrected in 2009 after lying dormant for decades. More than $3 million will go into snowmaking and trail building as part of an agreement with the Franconia Ski Club, Cannon Mountain and the Holderness School.

The national team wants it to become a center for serious super G and even downhill training, in case there’s another original talent out there in the woods, just waiting for the right opportunity. No one is expecting another racer like Bode Miller to come along—he’s a one-of-a-kind talent. Then again, he doesn’t need replacing yet anyway. He’s still got a few more races left in him—a few more chances to shake off the rust and represent Kinsman Mountain on the world stage. 

Nathaniel Vinton is the author of The Fall Line: How American Ski Racers Conquered a Sport on the Edge. The book is being published in February 2015; for a review, see page 35. 

From 1961 through 1967, the annual Bee Hive giant slalom competition attracted the world’s top professional racers to Canada. 

By Caroline Forcier Holloway

On March 7, 2014, the Georgian Peaks ski area in Ontario hosted its annual Super GP Classic, a team giant slalom race on the intermediate Minute Mile trail. Located near the town of Collingwood and overlooking Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay, this private alpine club offers 24 trails with a vertical rise of 820 feet, the highest in the province.

Though the GP Classic is an amateur event, open only to club members, it recalls a little-known but interesting chapter in racing history. On February 26, 1961, Georgian Peaks hosted the inaugural Bee Hive giant slalom. It was the first professional GS race in Canada and a smashing success, attracting elite racers like Stein Eriksen, Othmar Schneider, Ernie McCulloch and Anderl Molterer. For the next six years, top pro racers from Europe and North America convened in Canada to race on the Bee Hive circuit. 

Skiers ride the double chair at Georgian Peaks in Ontario on the day of the event. All frame enlargements courtesy Library and Archives Canada, Dan Gibson Fonds, Bee Hive Films No. 1, 4 and 7.

The event was named after Bee Hive Golden Corn Syrup, an energy food manufactured by the St. Lawrence Starch Company of Port Credit, Ontario, the event sponsor. A Montreal Gazette article published in February 1962, following the second annual Bee Hive, reported that “to those who watched this spectacular and successful event, it was evident that professional ski racing had arrived to stay.” It also established Georgian Peaks as a training ground for Olympic-caliber Canadian alpine racers, including Judy Crawford (who placed fourth in women’s slalom at the 1972 Winter Games in Sapporo), Todd Brooker (who raced on the World Cup from 1981 to 1987 and is now a TV ski-racing commentator) and Brian Stemmle (who competed in four Olympics, from 1988 through 1998).

The driving force behind the first Bee Hive was Ian Rogers, a Toronto lawyer who founded Georgian Peaks in 1960. A key partner was the late Dan Gibson, a portrait photographer, budding filmmaker and avid skier, who was keen on promoting skiing in Collingwood and at Georgian Peaks. Sponsorship was easily secured through Gibson’s skiing friend Lorne Gray, of the St. Lawrence Starch Company. Through its signature Bee Hive corn syrup, the company was already sponsoring national and local sports events, including the National Hockey League. (At the time, corn syrup was a regular staple on breakfast tables, to pour on pancakes or addto your coffee.) The company’s role in the annual GS event included covering the competitors’ expenses, putting up the prize money, and advertising and promoting the race. And every year, a comely “Miss Bee Hive” was on hand to award medals and give each competitor a free can of corn syrup, which the racers drank (as seen in the films). Gibson documented the races and distributed his films for free, to promote the event and the sport of alpine racing—and skiing—across Canada (see “To Learn More”).

The First Bee Hive: Stein Eriksen Wins the Prize

Stein Eriksen won the first Bee Hive in 1961. 

The 1961 inaugural Bee Hive attracted some of the biggest names in ski racing. Stein Eriksen, the Norwegian superstar who had won a gold medal in GS and silver in slalom at the 1952 Winter Games, took first place. Anderl Molterer of Austria, also known as the “Blitz from Kitz,” took second. Fellow Austrian racers Christian Pravda and Othmar Schneider came in third and fourth, respectively. According to Red McConville, the former president of the Canadian Ski Association who raced in the 1964 Bee Hive, Toni Sailer, the world champion racer from Austria, was present for the first Bee Hive, but didn’t compete due to his new career as an actor. In Gibson’s film, he is seen congratulating the Bee Hive winners. In total, 23 competitors raced in the inaugural Bee Hive, including Canadian champion Ernie McCulloch of Mont Tremblant, Québec. 

A newspaper headline of the day reads: “The real heroes of the race, however, didn’t wear skis.” This is a nod to the race organizers and volunteers, who ensured that the race would happen despite poor conditions that almost caused its cancellation. For a week before the race, unusually mild temperatures, mixed with rain and a lack of snow, made for almost non-existent skiing at Georgian Peaks. Officials refused to give in, spending upwards of $3,000 hauling snow by the truckload in the days before the race. On the night before the event, chemical snow cement was used to harden the snow around the slalom gates, and snow was funnelled onto the course through coal chutes. Skiers, local workers, high school students and residents of Collingwood, Thornbury and Clarksburg pitched in to help pack and shovel snow.

The racers were discouraged by the condition of the trail, but on race day, the overnight rain had turned into freezing sleet and the course was lightning fast. By noon, the sun had melted some of the ice and turned the surrounding dirt into mud, making it difficult for skiers and spectators to maneuver.

First-person recollections recount the challenges faced by the first Bee Hive race organizers. In particular, Helen Gibson of Toronto, Dan Gibson’s widow, recalls: “The day before the race there was a disastrous thaw to bare grass. Snow was trucked in, and many helpers shoveled it onto the mountain to make a single track down the course, which froze overnight so the race could be held. (What) a miracle!” She was one of more than 9,000 enthusiastic spectators who lined the course to watch the event.  

Many others recall vivid memories of the first Bee Hive: the “February Thaw” and the difficult course conditions, the excitement of the race, billeting the racers, and the fine reception at the end of the day at a private home in Collingwood, where a select few had the rare opportunity to meet and mingle with the world’s skiing greats, including Eriksen, the star of the day.

Six More Years on the Circuit

The Second Annual Professional Invitation Bee Hive Giant Slalom was held at Mont Gabriel, in Québec`s Laurentian Mountains, on February 25, 1962. With the sponsor offering a larger total cash purse of $5,000, the event attracted even more pros. By changing the location, organizers hoped to promote professional ski racing across Canada and allow greater exposure for the sponsor. The race was held on O’Connell’s Slip (Scott’s Slip), a 4,000-foot-long trail that was reconstructed to make it steeper and tougher, and the resort used the event to promote its state-of-the-art grooming and snowmaking ability. Heli Schaller of Austria was the 1962 champion. 

Christian Pravda 

The Third Bee Hive challenge was held at Devil’s Glen, near Collingwood, on February 10, 1963. Twenty-five pros raced on a course set by Red McConville, the Devil’s Glen co-founder. The champion that year was Ernst Hinterseer of Austria, who had won slalom gold and GS bronze at the 1960 Olympics. Hinterseer returned to Devil’s Glen in 1964 to win the fourth Bee Hive.  This race included three of the world’s leading skiers: Egon Zimmermann, François Bonlieu and Pepi Stiegler, who won GS bronze and slalom gold that year at the Innsbruck Olympics. Other veteran professionals competing at Devil’s Glen included Anderl Molterer, Adrien Duvillard, Pepi Gramshammer, Christian Pravda and Heli Schaller.

The following year, the Bee Hive headed west for the fifth annual race held on March 13, 1965 at Mount Whitehorn in Lake Louise, Alberta. Twenty skiers competed for the trophy including five talented Canadians (Jean Carpentier, Bob Gilmour, Jim McConkey, Al Menzies and Lorne O’Connor). 

The first Bee Hive GS attracted some of the world’s top ski racers, including Othmar Schneider and Christian Pravada (pictured above).

They competed against other world-class racers, including Mike Wiegele, Toni Spiess, Christian Pravda, Pepi Gramshammer, Marvin Moriarty and that year’s Bee Hive champion, Adrien Duvillard from France. The Sixth Bee Hive was set in Eastern Canada, at Lac Beauport, Québec, on February 13, 1966, with 

Ernst Hinterseer capturing first place for the third time. He completed the two-run race with a total time of 2:34.366, and Gramshammer placed second with a time of 2:34.735. The race comprised 42 gates and covered 2,200 feet over a vertical drop of 700 feet.  Altogether, the race included 23 racers with 10 racers from Austria, 10 from Canada, two racers from France and one from the United States (Moriarty). 

According toCanadian Sport Monthly, much attention was placed on the timing mechanism used to clock the Sixth Bee Hive race: a new Heuer timer from Switzerland. “The device is so revolutionary that on the day before the race our officials were still trying to figure it out,” said sponsor Lorne Gray. It offered reliability and accuracy down to one-thousandth of a second.

The seventh and final Bee Hive was moved to Mont Tremblant, Québec, and held on March 12, 1967. Hias Leitner from Austria, silver medalist in the 1960 Winter Olympics, took first place. The film by Dan Gibson offers a record of the racers in action—some in slow motion to showcase their technique and ability—including Herman Goellner, Toni Spiess, Egon Zimmermann, Anderl Molterer and others. 

No one can say for certain why the Bee Hive series ended after a successful seven-year run. Some believe that competitors were asking for more than the sponsor could provide in an overall purse of $5,000, with $2,000 going to the race champion each year. Others say the Bee Hive had a good run and simply died a natural death. Regardless of the speculations, most agree that after Lorne Gray’s untimely death in 1969, the momentum was impossible to regain.

Caroline Forcier Holloway is an archivist, a former CSIA instructor and an avid skier. She lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

Read more about the Bee Hive

In the beginning, there was the vision of John Fry.

He was the youthful editor-in-chief of SKI Magazine during the 1960s. The United States ski industry was young in the 1960s - and growing fast.

Fry saw some things that disturbed him about American ski instruction and ski area management, including:

• Ski schools concentrated on teaching "style" with no definite scoring system to measure a student's progress or a skier's general proficiency.
• There was no organized national competition for the recreational skier when, all research indicated, the recreational skier comprised 95 per cent of the total skiing population.
• Certain areas refused even to allow the setting of gates for race practice.

In the October, 1967 edition of SKI, Fry wrote a strongly-worded editorial deploring the "sorry state of affairs" of skiing at that time.

"We have forgotten that skiing is a sport, sport is competition, and that is what the fun and excitement is all about." He went on to say that the forbidding of practice in gates "is a policy that surpasses imbecility."

"Somewhere along the line, skiing has lost touch with competition. When it happened, we snuffed out a flame that should light our sport. It is sorely in need of re-ignition."

Fifteen years later, John described the tone of his words as "somewhat irascible." Maybe so, but his opinion of those ski industry practices was right on the mark. And that editorial carried in it the seed of the idea for Nastar.

During the 1967-68 winter, he pressed forward with his idea about establishing a program for recreational skiers with a national standard. "Wherever I went - to ski areas or meetings of ski industry people - I asked people if they had any ideas about how skiers could measure their speed, ability or performance on some kind of a common basis."

The French Connection

On a trip to Vermont, Fry was told by Bob Gratton, the ski school director at Mt. Snow, that he might gain some valuable insight by studying the French Chamois Races.

NASTAR uses the principal of time percentages to calibrate a skier's ability, a concept pioneered by France's Ecole de Ski Nationale Chamois program. For certification, a ski instructor had to perform well enough in the Ecole's annual Challenge to earn a silver medal.. . be less than 25 percent behind the time recorded by the fastest instructor. The Chamois  was a regular slalom race course with hairpins and flushes. A certified instructor, back at his home area, could set the pace for local participants  in Chamois races. His time was not re-calibrated or speeded up, as in Nastar, by the amount he lagged behind the winning time in the annual Challenge. The Nastar idea of adjusting a local pacesetter's time to a national standard was introduced in France 20 years later,in the winter of 1987-88. SNMSF (Syndicat National des Moniteurs de Ski Francais) introduced Fleche, an open-gated giant slalom, during the same winter that Nastar began, though unknown to Nastar's founder Fry. 

Fry envisioned another possibility. "It didn't take long for the dim bulb in my cerebrum to light up and see that simple, open-gate giant slalom races on intermediate slopes could attract hundreds of thousands of people to measure their skiing ability."

The idea for the new program had now crystallized in John's mind.

First, top racers and instructors nationwide would come together at the beginning of the season to rate their performance against the best U.S. racer of the time. Then they would return to their home resorts as pacesetters.

The times recorded by these local pacesetters, adjusted by the amount of their percentage ratings, would create a national standard. And that standard could be used to compare the performances of recreational racers throughout the country.

If pacesetter Roger at Steamboat was originally 6 per cent slower than the nation's fastest racer, and a Steamboat guest was 20 per cent slower than Roger, then he or she was about 26 per cent slower than America's fastest skier would have been if he'd skied the Steamboat course that day. The guest had a 26 handicap.

In addition to comparing skiers around the nation, handicaps would be used as the basis for awarding pins (gold, silver, bronze) according to a racer's level of proficiency.

Naming the Program

Top management at SKI Magazine was very supportive of Fry and his idea, which he wanted to call the National Standard Race, with the acronym "Nastar." Together, they decided to organize a pilot program for the 1968-69 season.

Of primary importance was finding a sponsor capable and willing to fund a national program. "We found out that the advertising agency for the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Co. was interested in sponsoring some kind of ski program," recalled Fry. "I flew to Chicago and we presented it to them."

The ad agency people were very interested, but they absolutely insisted on calling the program "the Schlitz Open." When John returned to New York and told his German-speaking wife about the negotiations, she burst into laughter. "What's so funny?," he asked. She informed him that Schlitz is the German word for the fly on a man's pants.

Armed with his new linguistic expertise, Fry telephoned the ad agency to re-open negotiations. "Ski areas employ many German-speaking instructors," he told them. "You guys would be laughed off the mountain."

Schlitz finally decided to support the program with the name "Nastar." They also would sponsor an invitational final event, named "The Schlitz Giant Slalom," to which the best Nastar ski racers of the winter would be invited - at no cost to the competitors.

The Original Eight

The program really began to take shape in the fall of 1968 when eight ski areas signed on to take part in the inaugural season. They represented a geographical cross section of American ski country: Alpental, Washington; Boyne Country, Michigan: Heavenly Valley, California; Mt. Snow, Vermont; Mt. Telemark, Wisconsin; Song Mountain, New York; Vail, Colorado; and Waterville Valley, New Hampshire. Jimmie Heuga, an American hero since winning a medal in the 1964 Olympics, signed on as the first national pacesetter. Gloria Chadwick, who had just left the USSA, took on the job of secretary/coordinator of Nastar.

Tom Corcoran organized and hosted the first Pacesetter Trials, which were held at Waterville Valley in early December. The eight areas sent their top pros to earn a pacesetter rating. At those trials, Manfred Krings of Mt. Snow equalled Heuga's zero handicap.

Computer specialist Charlie Gibson programmed the original Nastar handicap tables used by ski areas to determine gold, silver and bronze pin winners.

Bob Beattie

Only 2,297 persons took part in Nastar that first season. However, by the time of the March Finals at Heavenly Valley, word-of-mouth praise was attracting the interest of many more recreational skiers. For the second year of operation, plans called for expansion to 35 participating ski areas. This would mean increased costs, and thus a need for more sponsors to share the greater financial load. Nastar needed a salesman who could move easily in the atmosphere of top-level management.

Bob Beattie, who had recently resigned as head coach of the U.S. Alpine Team, was just such a man. He became Nastar commissioner, a position he would hold for 30 years.

By the start of the 1969-70 season, Beattie had sponsorship agreements with TWA, Bonne Bell and Hertz to ease the financial load on Schlitz and SKI Magazine (owner of Nastar). He and Gloria Chadwick had signed up 39 areas, and the program was really rolling.

Then and Now: Different Practices

The basic Nastar system has remained the same for 35 years. But a few practices in the early seasons may be surprising to modern racers, including:

No age divisions. Although the percentages needed to earn pins varied slightly from men to women, there were no age divisions whatsoever the first year.

That meant a 70-year-old racer had to ski just as fast as one who was 25 years old in order to win any kind of pin.

Nastar leaders discovered this was not very practical, and the format was soon changed. Adults were split into ten-year age divisions with varying handicaps needed to earn pins. The ten-year brackets would continue until 1999, when adult divisions started being split every five years.

A program for junior racers (originally sponsored by Pepsi Cola) was started in the early 1970s. Like the adults, there were several age divisions with varying handicaps needed to win pins.

Presentation of pins. In modern times, most ski areas give pins to winners at the bottom of the course at the time of the race. A much bigger production was made of the Nastar pin presentation process in the early years.

Racers were allowed to earn only one pin per year in each of the three (gold, silver, bronze) categories. Those pins were mailed to the winners at the end of the season, and their names were published in SKI Magazine.

In the program's second season (1969-70), SKI reported that 664 gold pins were awarded. The number grew to nearly 3,000 by 1972-73.

Changing Role

With Beattie and his World Wide Ski Corp. staff on board to manage the administration of the program, the role of Fry and SKI Magazine changed to one of editorial support.

And SKI has given plenty of publicity, running stories about Nastar very regularly.

"I have always believed that a special interest magazine like SKI should not only report journalistically," Fry said, "but should get actively involved in advancing programs which are good for the sport. I think that Nastar has more than fulfilled that role." The editorial support helped propel participation in the program to an even higher level than was dreamed by its pioneering founders in the 1960s.

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

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

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

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