1970s

The celebrity artist visited Aspen for more than 20 years.

Andy Warhol died in 1987. But his cultural significance remains white hot, as his obession with fame, celebrity and personal branding is more relevant than ever in today’s media–dominated world. Perhaps predictably, Warhol mania is on the rise, with plays staged in London and New York and the airing of the Netflix series The Andy Warhol Diaries, all exploring the man and the myth. What isn’t commonly known about Warhol is that he was enchanted with Aspen, bought property there and visited often enough to be considered a part-time local.

(Photo above: credit Mark Sink)

The man who deified Campbell’s soup cans (to his lasting regret, he claimed) had been coming to Aspen off and on for about 15 years before he even learned to ski. That happened in December of 1981, when he and photographer Christopher Makos decided to take a lesson at Buttermilk. As longtime Aspen instructor Gerry Bohn recalls, “I was a supervisor at the time, and we ran out of instructors, so I gave him a two-hour private.”

Warhol wrote in his diary about the Powder Pandas slope and its T-bar: “We did about two hours of zigzagging and going up the handrail and you just sort of sit on the thing and go up the whole hill and it was really fun.” He also mentioned falling three times, which isn’t bad for a first-time skier.

Denver-based photographer Mark Sink lived part time in Aspen then and worked for Warhol at Interview magazine. He remembers meeting Warhol and Makos at Buttermilk that day. “We just talked at the base,” says Sink. “I asked if he had tried the ‘flying wedge’ down; he thought that was a funny term. He was done for the day, hurt his hand in a fall on the baby hill. His Rolex hurt his wrist, apparently. I remember him talking about Reggie Jackson and other stars in the lift line. His star-spotting was amazing anywhere we went.”

On that same visit, Warhol and Calvin Klein met Paramount heavyweight Barry Diller and his ski instructor for lunch at West Buttermilk. Then Warhol went for dinner with Diller, Italian film producer Marina Cicogna and Diana Ross at Andre’s, where Ross, as Warhol recalled in his diary, was wearing “a cowboy hat and big white shoes” and danced on top of the table. A media star himself, habitually surrounded by celebrities, Warhol was as star-struck as any skier who drove up from Denver for the day.

Warhol first came to Aspen in the mid-1960s at the invitation of locals John and Kimiko Powers, major modern art collectors and some of his biggest patrons. John was running the Aspen Center for Contemporary Art at a time when it was one of the most important avant-garde art communities in the country. Warhol participated in several Colorado exhibitions sponsored by Powers. And in 1966 he guest-edited the third issue of an experimental arts and culture magazine called Aspen (also known as Aspen in a Box), founded by part-time Aspenite Phyllis Johnson, a former editor at Women’s Wear Daily and Advertising Age. Warhol’s issue, like all of them, was bundled in a box, which he had designed to resemble one of his trademark cultural references, a package of Fab laundry detergent.

Far from just a casual visitor, Warhol during this period bought land just downvalley from Aspen. In the early ’80s he also bought a house in Aspen and devoted a chapter of his book America to the town.

In the summer of 1984, at the star-studded Aspen Tennis Festival fundraiser for the United Cerebral Palsy Research and Educational Foundation, Warhol arrived on the back of a Harley piloted by Jack Nicholson. Warhol offered to do a portrait of the highest bidder at the celebrity auction, and it drew so much interest that he agreed to do four of them at $40,000 each, raising a quick and generous $160,000 for the cause. It would be his last trip to town before his death.

The Powers Art Center near Aspen, which showcases John and Kimiko’s collection, continues to regularly display many of Warhol’s works. And his only major museum retrospective in North America in 2021-22 recently closed at the Aspen Art Museum. The cliché about Aspen is that real locals came for the skiing but stayed for the intriguing people. For Warhol, it was always about the people, and the skiing was mainly a way to meet more of them. 

SNAPSHOTS IN TIME

1952 Voice of Experience
No one knew better than Coach Émile Allais what the team was up against. Once the greatest of all racers in Europe, he had lost his front teeth years ago at Chamonix in the French Alps and shared this deficit now with most of his boys who had lost theirs at places like Reno, Aspen and Whitefish, Mont. He not only knew all the tricks but invented most of them himself, including a special racing crouch, ventilated goggles that would not fog up and even a new method of skiing. — Marshall Smith, “Hell on Snow,” on the American downhill team training for the 1952 Oslo Olympic Games (Life Magazine, February 11, 1952)

1970 Timeless Tuning Tip
It’s a great day. Great snow. You feel great. But your new skis seem to have a mind of their own. So you tighten your boots, loosen your bindings, have your poles shortened. But your skiing is still going haywire. Before you pack the whole shebang into the attic, take a look at your ski bottoms. Minor problems there often cause major problems in your technique, even with new, high-priced skis. — Editors, “Sure, Why Not Blame Your Skis?” (Skiing Magazine, February 1970)

1974 View from Texas
The important point to remember about skiing is that until the basic skills are mastered, the sport is not to be enjoyed. —
Suzanne O’Malley, “Who is That, Lying in the Snow in a $200 Ski Outfit?” (Texas Monthly, December 1974)

1980 Not So Special
With the extreme specialization we see today, a good downhiller cannot be a good slalom skier the way it was when I raced. — Jean-Claude Killy, interview (Powder Magazine, September 1980)

1998 Mountains of Opportunity
Now at least I can get my vacuum cleaner fixed in Ketchum and I certainly couldn’t do that when I moved here 20 years ago. New entrepreneurs are filling up business niches I didn’t even realize existed. Tourism might just be a phase in the economic growth of mountain towns. —“State Rep: In Search of Common Ground,” Wendy Jaquet, interview (Snow Country Magazine, February-March 1998)

2000 Can You Hear Me Now?
I would like to ski in the fantasy land with the three gentlemen who wrote against cell-phone use on the slopes. I am lucky enough to live and work 10 minutes from a great ski area and if I can steal a few hours from work to go skiing, then the cell phone is a small price to pay. It sure beats being stuck at your office desk waiting for that one call that might bring in a huge deal. I would imagine that skiers—real skiers, anyway—will agree that skiing is better than working. I also enjoy calling my friends and telling them what they are missing. — Steven Strauss, Coplay, Pa., “Pro Phone,” Letters (SKI Magazine, May-June 2000)

There was more to Willy Schaeffler than stern disciplinarian.

By PETER MILLER

During the 1970-71 World Cup season, the men of the U.S. Alpine squad clashed with their coach, Willy Schaeffler. After Billy Kidd’s departure in February 1970, Spider Sabich was the team’s most successful skier. When he quit in January 1971 to join World Pro Skiing, the proximate cause was money—U.S. Ski Team racers earned none. But Sabich also butted heads with Schaeffler. In his book The 30,000-Mile Ski Race (1972), Peter Miller told both sides of the story.

At fifty-four, their head coach, Willy Schaeffler, was a good generation gap older. His hair is grey, thin and combed straight back close to his skull. Part of his face seems to be paralyzed, so that his smile stops in the middle. Willy is a neat dresser and walks erect, almost stiffly. His blue eyes are appraising and sometimes appear quite cold. He spent the first half of his life in Germany, where he was born.

He had told the team earlier, when they were training in Aspen, Colorado, that he was the team hatchet man and that if someone had to be kicked off the team, he would do it, and he would be the scapegoat for all the difficulties. He had also told them that he was going to discipline their minds and bodies, and that although skiing is an individual sport, everyone must work together. He wanted to develop winners.

Willy has been a winner all his life. In his twenty-two years as the coach at the University of Denver his ski teams won 100 out of 123 dual meets, and 14 National Collegiate titles. For a while, his archrival was Bob Beattie, who, before he became one of Willy’s predecessors as National Ski Team coach, trained the ski team at the University of Colorado. Willy beat the pants off Bob. Most of the team did not appreciate Willy’s authoritarian attitude toward ski racing. . . .

The two months during which the young racers had lived and trained under their new coach had convinced them he was an autocratic disciplinarian. They called Willy a heavy-handed Kraut. What few of them realized was that Willy, like them, had started his life as an avid skier who disliked authority, discipline, regimentation, and the draft. During World War II, Willy’s rebellion against the political-military establishment in Germany nearly cost him his life half a dozen times.

Willy was raised in Bavaria, not far from Garmisch, where he learned to ski. His father was a Social Democrat, and since Hitler was not very well disposed to political opponents in the mid-thirties, the father was placed on the blacklist. Willy was drafted in 1937, and in a letter to an uncle in Chicago he described some of his training. The letter was censored. Then the government extended his Army duty, two weeks before he was to be discharged. Just as any American youth would do, Willy bitched, loud and clear. The Army brought forth the letter and accused Willy of being a spy. They criticized him for lack of patriotism. As Willy was not in the Party, and his family was blacklisted, they busted him from warrant officer to private and sent him to the Dutch border to what was called a baby concentration camp. For the next year and a half, he dug ditches from 5:00 a.m. until 4:00 in the afternoon. He was twenty-one, the same age as most of the racers he now coaches.

Willy was released in 1938 and started to live a happy period as a test driver for the Ford Motor Company. On weekends and holidays, he was a Garmisch ski instructor. When the war broke out, his presence on the blacklist saved him from being drafted. But the Army reconsidered in 1941 and inducted him into the ranks as part of a penal battalion. The battalion was sent to Poland to build bridges. When the offensive into Russia began, Willy’s penal battalion was offered a chance to rehabilitate itself. The men were given weapons and were used as special patrols and on spearhead missions. Willy was somewhere behind Moscow, as part of a pincer movement, when the temperature dropped to -54 degrees and the Russians began to pull the Germans apart. Willy put on the clothes of dead Russians. He was captured and lined up before a firing squad. He went through a very quick and intense period of concentration, where his life flashed in an instant. They fired and Willy, sure he was dead, fell to the ground. The Russians, drunk on vodka, fell down too, laughing madly over their practical joke. Willy managed to escape and rejoin the Germans. His life on the Russian front was probably saved by his fifth wound, shrapnel in the right lung and upper heart chamber. He was evacuated in a plane, which was shot down behind enemy lines. Willy, one of two survivors, hid in a small compartment for two days before he was rescued. He was transferred from one hospital to another until he arrived in Munich, weighing 130 pounds. It was 1944.

The military establishment decided that Willy, after he gained twenty pounds, was so well trained in winter warfare that he could rehabilitate himself again by returning to the Russian front. Willy silently refused. At about the same time, American Flying Fortresses blasted Munich. The headquarters building was evacuated before the raid, but Willy and a friend lingered and filled a knapsack with code numbers, passes, stamps, requisition orders. The building was demolished by bombs five minutes after Willy rifled the offices. A day later, Willy and his friend were dug out of a nearby bomb shelter. No one would ever know that the papers were stolen. Willy split for Austria.

He could, with the papers, go anywhere, requisition guns and munitions, food and uniforms. He entered the underground, harassing the German Army with sabotage. His biggest coup was in 1944, when Hitler ordered a last stand at St. Anton. Tanks, cannons and supplies were brought in by train from Germany through the Arlberg Tunnel, and the guns were being dug into the lower slopes of St. Anton—where today there are ski slopes. Willy blew up the tunnel with a box of dynamite and for the rest of the winter, from his hideout on the Valluga mountain, watched German troops struggle over the Arlberg Pass.

After the war Willy fished out a few top Nazis who were hiding in Austria and managed to land his old job at Garmisch, ski instructing American troops. One of his students was General George C. Patton. They became friends and Patton helped Willy, who had been living for two years on forged identifications, to receive official papers and the goodwill of the U.S. military.

World War II is history; the emotions of that period are lost on the younger generation. Yet perhaps it is the residue of that period of hardship that has forged this particular generation gap, the difference between the easygoing young American ski racers and the older, German-born, adopted American. Willy developed, in his younger days in Bavaria, as an independent thinker who believed in self-determination and who loved to ski. His beliefs, and they were as strong as are the anti-Vietnam war protests of the youth today, turned him into a rebel against authority, the establishment, draft, right-wingers. He developed his own philosophy, survived against the odds, and became a person who dislikes criticism and who is uncompromising in his beliefs. When he was twenty-one, the average age of the American ski racer, he was, because of his independent, outspoken attitude, digging ditches in a concentration camp. In fact, Willy, a German who sabotaged the war effort of his own country, has all the qualities that the young Americans think are so cool. The difference is that Willy was nearly killed a number of times because he adhered to what he thought was correct. Discipline and physical stamina and the will to win, or survive—that which he hopes to instill in his young American skiers—kept him alive. Money, prestige, security were luxuries he never knew in his youth. 

Willy Schaeffler was elected to the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame in 1974. After repeated cardiac surgeries, his heart gave out in 1988. He was 72 years old.

Peter Miller joined Life Magazine as a writer/photographer in 1959 and went on to write and shoot for dozens of national magazines, including Sports Illustrated and, from 1965 to 1988, SKI. He has written ten books. In 1994 he received ISHA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism.

Sven Coomer recalls the design process leading to Nordica’s groundbreaking boots.

As told to Seth Masia

In 1962, I went to Chamonix to watch the FIS World Championships and got to train with the French team. I also met Hans Heierling, who was meeting with Trappeur to license their Elite boot, in which the French team was having great success. Nordica took a license, too. I wasted no time getting to Davos to see Heierling’s manufacturing operation. I got a job on the trail crew. Every afternoon for two weeks, after avalanche control and snow maintenance, I visited the boot factory, watching every step of the process while they made my first pair of custom leather double-lace boots.

Photo above: Sven today, with the leather Sapporo of 1969. It was the first boot with both a high back and high tongue. Kathy Richland photo.

I first saw plastic boots in 1965, when I skied with Vail Ski School Director Morrie Shepard, and he offered me the job as his assistant. Morrie was Bob Lange’s ski instructor, and he was skiing in Lange’s double-lace, pre-production boot (Morrie soon went to work full time for Lange). Instead of working in Vail, I accepted the ski school director’s job at the PSIA

experimental ski school in Solitude, Utah, which sounded much more interesting in the first years of the PSIA [Professional Ski Instructors Association]. After a year at Solitude, I moved on to run ski schools at Mt. Rose and Slide Mountain near Lake Tahoe. In the spring of 1967, Doug Pfeiffer, editor of Skiing magazine, invited me to Mammoth in April and May for the first magazine ski tests. Over six weeks I found that testing equipment, analyzing and problem solving were my true calling. Doug then invited me to New York each summer to write up our ski test reports and compose technical articles on equipment and the emerging techniques of the time.

During the tests in 1967, ‘68 and ‘69, Junior Bounous came to Mammoth to test Rosemount fiberglass boots and asked me to try them. They were very comfortable, with the side-hinge entry-exit door and a collection of fitting pillows to insert in several pockets to adjust the comfort and support. With the mechanical hinging action and very rigid sole, it was a significant contrast to my Nordica leather race boots. When the Canadian team trained at Mammoth, Rod “Yogi” Hebron lent me his Lange plastic race boots. They made my feet numb, as if with Novocain. I couldn’t feel the skis. By comparing the plastics directly to my leather boots, one on each foot, I really noticed that the plastic had the effect of isolating the delicate sensitivity and proprioception and balance feeling of the feet for the skis and snow. That is, the “feeling of leather” was absent.

Leather boots, when well fitted, were stiff and sometimes bruising for a week or two, then felt great. They were good for two weeks of hard skiing and then went soft. We tried reinforcing the leather with layers of fiberglass, with disappointing results. Every brand in the boot business was convinced that plastic would be the final cure for the woes of leather boots. But the first generation of plastic boots, and especially the racing Langes, never grew comfortable. It looked like plastic promised only more durability than leather, and maybe drier feet.

During testing in the spring of 1968, I met Norm McLeod from Beconta, the importer of Nordica boots, Look bindings and Völkl skis. Beconta had kindly supplied me with Nordica boots while I was directing ski schools, and I supplied constructive feedback. We rode Mammoth’s Lift 3 and Norm asked what I thought about plastic boots. “They are interesting,” I told him. “Their impressive durability and shell stability marks them as inevitable. It’s obviously the future, but they still have a long way to go. They are unpredictable. There’s perhaps too much support, and I can’t feel or ski with my feet. They force me to emphasize with my knees, using knee-hooking to start turns. And they hurt!”

We talked for hours about ski boots, and he offered me a job. I joined the company at their San Francisco warehouse early in 1969.

Nordica was playing catch-up to Lange and Rosemount. Lange made a big splash at the 1966 World Championships in Portillo, on the new World Cup circuit in 1967 and at the 1968 Grenoble Olympics. Nordica needed a response. They already had injection-molding machines for the outsoles, but Nordica’s designers were leather-boot artisans and didn’t know how to engineer plastic boots to be truly functional. In 1968 they made a big investment in molds and shot a line of “Astral” thermoplastic shells for introduction in ’69, but these were too narrow and worked no better than existing plastic boots.

I settled in at Beconta with a plan to perfect their leather race boot, then find a way to duplicate that fit and performance in plastic. I fed design ideas to Norm, who airmailed them to Nordica in Montebelluna, Italy. The summary that sealed my relationship with Nordica was about developing integrated high-back boots. Norm told me they were very excited about that and wanted to meet me. Nordica asked me to move to Italy and work in the factory.

Their team of brilliant artisans, led by Piero Martin Iego and Otto Heinz Izzo, made dozens of different custom leather boots and we tried them out with the U.S. and Italian ski teams. Our key discovery was that the high-back should be countered by an equally high tongue, so that the tibia was “centered” with the ankle at its optimum-strength angle.

With racer feedback, I compiled a list of 173 functional design criteria. Then we combined all these ideas into the Sapporo leather slalom boot (see photo, top of page). We got it to racers for the 1969 model year, and we had a number of top slalom skiers in it while everyone else was in Langes. A couple of years later, Fernando Francisco Ochoa won the 1972 Olympic slalom in the Sapporo boot.

Long before that, we pushed ahead to translate the design into plastic. We created a beautifully handcrafted leather inner boot and shaped a shell mold to cradle it accurately. The first result, the Olympic, was a one-piece design (shell and cuff molded as a single unit) based on the final version of Ochoa’s boot. It gave racers tremendous edging power and embodied criteria still used today in all top race boots.

But in 1971–72, Henke had trouble with their plastic boots. The weak plastic cuff straps broke and the warranty costs put Henke out of business. The single mold for the Olympic was difficult to inject and we worried about weakening the cuff straps with voids in the plastic. So the boot was retired prematurely.

We reworked the shell shapes into a two-piece design, where the separate cuff was a much easier item to injection-mold. That hinged-cuff design reached the market in 1971 as the second-generation Astral series. The real innovation was subtle. Where every other high-performance boot on the market had adopted a high-back “spoiler,” the Astral had a spoiler and a high tongue—higher than the spoiler, in fact. The following year we offered the locked-hinge Slalom model. In North America, it was bright yellow and thus became the “banana boot.” It made all the other race boots on the market look obsolete and cemented Nordica’s worldwide market share at 30 percent. 

Sven Coomer will be inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, Class of 2022, in the spring of 2023.

Belatedly elected to the Hall of Fame, the charismatic skier drove the professionalization of Alpine ski racing.

From the moment he entered the world on January 10, 1945, a ball of energy and gangly limbs, Vladimir Peter Sabich Jr. would be known as Spider. His father, Vlad, a World War II B-25 bomber pilot and California Highway Patrol officer, and his mother, Frances, the local postmistress, were hard-working and pragmatic. They raised their kids in Kyburz, California, nestled along the South Fork of the American River, where the Sierra Nevada foothills rise into the mountains enclosing Lake Tahoe.

Photo top of page: Spider Sabich in peak form at the Aspen World Cup slalom, 1968. Courtesy John Russell.

Nature served up hunting and fishing in the summer and skiing in the winter. Spider, his older sister Mary and younger brother Steve (known to all as “Pinky”) learned to ski fast as part of Edelweiss Ski Area’s Red Hornets. Dede Brinkman, Spider’s Hornet teammate and lifelong friend, remembers the boy with big ears and a crooked front tooth as determined, focused and kind. By their teens, she says, “he had an aura. There was something magical about him.”

As the team packed into station wagons and racked up trophies throughout California, word of the “Highway 50 Boys” traveled beyond the Sierra. Spider and Pinky caught the attention of Bob Beattie, who offered them skiing scholarships at the University of Colorado. In 1963 Spider arrived in Boulder to study aeronautical engineering and ski. At the time, before the U.S. Ski Team was formed, Beattie’s CU Buffs were the de facto U.S. Men’s Ski Team. Spider and Pinky joined future Olympians Billy Kidd, Moose Barrows, Jimmie Heuga and Jere Elliot.

Beattie brought a hard-nosed, football-coach mentality to the ski team, implementing tough dryland training regimens. Bars were off limits. Instead, the team’s house, complete with swimming pool, became the party, where bands played, beer flowed and teammates bonded for life. Part drill sergeant, part cheerleader, part father, Beattie developed protective relationships with his athletes, no more than with Spider.

World Cup Victory at Heavenly

Over the course of his early career, Spider suffered seven broken legs. But by the spring of 1967, at age 22, he was whole and strong. He made his World Cup debut in the final slalom of the inaugural World Cup season at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and finished sixth. The following year, he tackled the circuit full time. Teammates remember him for his street sense and maturity, as well as a penchant for fun and mischief.  

In medal position after the first run of the 1968 Olympic slalom, Spider ended up fifth. The result matched Kidd’s GS finish as the best American skiing performance at the Games, and—though eclipsed by Jean-Claude Killy’s three gold medals—it heralded a bright future for American skiing.

During the 1968 season, Robert Redford was in Kitzbühel, Austria, researching his role for the 1969 film Downhill Racer. Though the original script based the lead on Olympic medalist Kidd, Redford gravitated to an unheralded, unpretentious and supremely charismatic teammate. “Spider Sabich was largely the inspiration for Dave Chappellet, probably more than any other one athlete,” says Redford. “What I remember most about Spider, and what I wanted to depict, was the way he attacked the race course, which to me reflected a feeling of going for broke.”

Spider ended his first full season on the World Cup with a win at Heavenly Valley, 30 miles from Kyburz. A crowd of 5,000 people lined the slope to cheer the hometown hero, who secured the win on a come-from-behind second run. Killy, who finished seventh in that race, won his second overall World Cup title and then retired.

Over the next two seasons on the World Cup, Spider won three more podiums and 11 top-10 results for a career total of 16 finishes in the top 10. Meanwhile, Beattie had moved on to launch the World Pro Skiing Tour (WPS), with Kidd as its star. After winning the FIS World Combined Championship in 1970, Kidd immediately turned pro and won the 1970 WPS championship as well. Spider, who was still competing on the World Cup, grew increasingly restless and unsettled at the hand-to-mouth existence it offered American skiers, while their European counterparts profited richly from sponsors. He finished out the 1970 season and went to Europe with the team the following winter, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Peter Miller, who chronicled the 1970–71 World Cup season in his book The 30,000 Mile Ski Race, summed up the particular challenge for U.S. skiers: “The American racer is a lonely figure on the international circuit. He is an amateur competing against professionals.” Miller also captured the personality conflicts within the team, under the disciplined coaching of Willy Schaeffler. None of it meshed with Spider’s motivations or personality, and he was ripe for change.

To Tyler Palmer, a 20-year-old slalom phenom on the World Cup during the 1970-71 season, Spider was both mentor and friend. In early January, the night before the slalom race in Berchtesgaden, Spider told Palmer he’d be leaving to join Beattie’s WPS. “My stomach hit the floor,” remembers Palmer. “You’re going to be fine,” Spider assured Palmer. “You’ve got everything I’ve got. Don’t hold back.” The next day Palmer, starting 61st, finished fourth. Two weeks later he scored his first World Cup victory.

Spider flew home immediately after Berchtesgaden. “It was such a relief to stop racing as an amateur,” Spider told Sports Illustrated in 1971. “I was fed up with the hypocrisy. Fed up with racing against guys who were making $50,000 a year, guys who had other people to wax their skis, sharpen their edges and who could go home when they got tired. I was nervous trying to compete with what I thought were insufficient weapons. Now I have no worries.”

Going Pro

Spider won his first pro race on February 4, 1971, at Hunter Mountain, New York, pocketing a check for $1,250. “The next thing we know, we’re getting reports Spider is winning every race.” recalls Hank Kashiwa, a U.S. Ski Team racer who joined the WPS in 1972. Spider went on to win seven races, beating Kidd in the final to win the overall tour title and $21,188. In the 1972 season Spider defended his title with nine more wins and broke his own record for prize money, making more than $50,000 ($360,000 today). That same year, the male U.S. Ski Team athletes were reimbursed $200 each for their commitment, the women $80.

WPS brought the relatively unknown sport of ski racing to the American people in an easily understood format and in easily accessible venues—from high-profile Colorado’s Aspen and Vail to tiny Buck Hill, Minnesota, and Beech Mountain, North Carolina. In Beattie’s head-to-head, gladiatorial format, the rules were simple: cross the finish line first and you win. The tour brought the drama, excitement and fun of ski racing up close to viewers and offered them ready access to the athletes and their personalities.

The tour also allowed sponsors and athletes alike to connect with the audience while enabling athletes to maintain their independence and claim cold hard cash. Under amateur rules, U.S. Ski Team members could not directly work with sponsors, but on the pro circuit, skiers could serve as billboards, eager to sell their sponsors’ brands while creating their own. Explains John Demetre, whose sweater designs, especially one based on Spider’s Kyburz High School football jersey, exploded in popularity, “This was showing America Demetre every weekend.”

Regular TV coverage on ABC and NBC, as well as Beattie’s made-for-TV celebrity pro-ams, ensured attention, sponsors and prize money for WPS. In its first season, prize money totaled $92,500. Over the next four years, the amount had grown to more than $500,000. Spider’s laid-back attitude, approachable personality and contagious joie de vivre made him a marketer’s dream, and he earned more than $150,000 annually from sponsors. Said Gordi Eaton, then racing director at K2, “Having Spider ... you knew he was going to handle the public side of the thing well because he loved people and could sell anything to anyone.”

In tirelessly promoting the tour, Spider took his sponsors along for the ride, none more so than K2. At home, he charmed the brand’s factory workers, retailers and customers, and diligently worked trade shows and press conferences to win the hearts and attention of fans. In Europe, where the American ski companies had previously garnered little credibility, he represented the free-spirited ambition and legitimacy of American skiing, and skis.

Klaus Obermeyer once described Spider as “a man drinking life out of a full cup.” Spider could seamlessly switch from being laser focused on course to being friendly elsewhere, headlining everything from autograph sessions to wet T-shirt contests and sponsor parties. He’d pound a glass of water before bedtime, then be first up in the morning to train. The ambassador of hard work and fun was eminently approachable, especially around kids, for whom he’d get down on his knee to have eye contact while signing autographs.

Explained the late Gaylord Guenin, the WPS PR director, “It was simply Sabich being Sabich. . . . He brought an honest vitality to the sport that can be compared to the vitality Joe Namath brought to football.”

Meanwhile, the restrictions on amateur skiers tightened further, climaxing with the disqualification of Austria’s top skier, Karl Schranz, from the 1972 Sapporo Olympics for “professionalism.” This impelled more top Olympians, enticed by Spider’s success and lifestyle, to travel directly from the Games to join the WPS. Among them were Kashiwa and Palmer. As more World Cup racers joined the ranks and learned the format, Spider rolled on to defend his title and lead ski racing’s revolution.

A Plane, a Porsche and a Pad

Spider embodied everything that Beattie had imagined WPS could provide: American ski racers making a living on their own terms, on their own turf, and using it as a springboard to their professional lives. With his earnings and competing near home, Spider was able to enjoy a lifestyle similar to that of European ski stars. He engineered a home in Aspen’s Starwood neighborhood, near his friend John Denver. The house was neither huge nor showy, but a unique creation featuring California timber, curved stone walls and a waterbed in the living room. He earned his pilot’s license and bought a twin-engine Piper Aztec that he often flew to competitions.

“He had the plane, the nice house, the Porsche. We wanted to be like him,” says fellow pro Dan Mooney, while noting that no competitors begrudged Spider his success. They fully understood the work it took and his talent for walking the line between fierce competitor and life of the party. Spider generously mentored incoming athletes, teaching them that making it as a pro meant managing training, travel, equipment, sponsors and one’s own competitive instincts. It meant working hard in the gym and on the hill, in the ski room and the board room, at trade shows, in ski shops and, most importantly, with sponsors.

Whereas amateurs were punished for promoting sponsors, pros were fined for not going to sponsor parties. Terry Palmer recalls Spider teaching him how to drink at tour parties by having one shot, then discreetly throwing subsequent drinks over his shoulder. His message, Palmer recalls, was always clear: “If you’re going to be good, if you’re going to make money at this, if we’re going to have a good tour, you’re going to have to work hard.”

Sponsors and athletes organized themselves into factory teams, bringing together the financial and logistical support of a national team while preserving the monetary incentive for individual success. So compelling was the tour that Killy came out of retirement for the 1972–73 season and joinedWPS, bringing it international attention.

Kashiwa was with Spider when they learned Killy was joining the tour and felt his demeanor change. “I think he wanted to prove that we [on the WPS] were the best skiers in the world,” says Kashiwa. Initially unprepared for the physical challenge of the format, Killy earned $225 total in his first race but retrenched over the Christmas break and roared back, winning five races to Spider’s three. Spider and Killy’s epic battle for the 1973 season title—recounted in the film Spider and the Frenchman and in Killy’s book Comeback—ended when Spider crashed off a bump, badly injuring his neck and shoulder.

Despite losing the title to Killy, and amid the infusion of new stars, Spider graced the cover of GQ magazine in November 1974. Clutching his red, white and blue K2 skis, in his signature Demetre sweater, he remained the face of the American pro tour and the picture of success. As tour director Nappy Neaman once put it, “Every kid wanted to be Spider. Every girl wanted to date Spider.”

As a brand ambassador for Snowmass (the resort’s only front man since Stein Eriksen), Spider deftly navigated all aspects of Aspen’s scene, comfortably mingling with cowboys, ski bums, celebrities and the ultra-rich. In 1972, at a pro-am event in California, he met French singer Claudine Longet. Recently and amicably divorced from Andy Williams, who had facilitated her Hollywood career, Longet and her three children later moved in with Spider. For a time, the couple seemed genuinely in love, but friends recall that her quick temper and possessiveness turned the intensity of the relationship into a liability. This shift coincided with Spider’s competitive decline. “If you’re out of shape by the eighth run, you’re not going to be able to do the things that you’re telling yourself mentally you can do,” he said. “And that breeds inconsistency. And in this game, inconsistency is elimination.”

Last Runs

In 1974, Spider managed two wins and limped through the season to finish fifth in the tour standings. By then his litany of injuries included knee, back and neck problems—on top of the seven early-career broken legs. Publicly he made no excuses, remaining upbeat and optimistic about the future. After missing the entire 1975 season due to injury, Spider knew his ski racing career was coming to its natural end. He and Beattie (as friend and advisor) together plotted the next step, which would likely involve K2 and Snowmass, and possibly ski area development, real estate and TV commentary. With Spider’s talent, education and connections, his next chapter promised to be as exciting as the last, and less stressful.

By March 1976, having qualified for the weekend round of 32 only twice that season, Spider decided to quit two things that were no longer healthy for him: ski racing and Claudine. He told Tyler Palmer as much in their hotel room in Collingwood, Ontario, before the penultimate race of the season. Palmer, upset at the prospect of once again losing his teammate and mentor, also mistrusted Longet. “I told him ‘Just be careful with her,’” Palmer recalls. “That was the last I saw of him.”

Longet and her kids were to move out by April 1. On March 21, Sabich spent his afternoon training at Buttermilk, while Longet, according to toxicology reports that were ultimately disallowed as evidence, spent hers indulging in Aspen’s notorious après ski. After a short visit with Beattie, Spider headed home to change. He planned to meet Beattie later that evening and to fly to the annual ski trade show in Vegas the next day. Instead, Longet shot him to death in his own bathroom, with the gun his dad had bought as a souvenir from the ’68 Olympics. Spider was 31 years old.

While the shooting itself still holds mysteries, the aftermath of the killing, the trial and the events that led to Longet’s sentence—a $250 fine and 30 days at the Pitkin County Jail to be served at a time of her choosing—are well chronicled (see “Spider Sabich: A Tale Larger Than Life,” by Charlie Meyers, in Skiing Heritage, September 2006).

A Long Legacy

Under Chuck Ferries’ supervision, K2 had introduced its first race ski in 1969. Spider’s success helped bring the brand to prominence, and by 1975 it had achieved a 30 percent market share in North America. Iconic, fiercely independent stars like Phil and Steve Mahre, Glen Plake and Bode Miller continued to build the uniquely American brand. Beattie’s WPS thrived, and the popularity of the format inspired a women’s pro tour, started by Jill Wing Heck in 1978. In 1993, Bernhard Knauss became the first pro skier to break the $1 million mark in tour winnings. “Even in the 90s, this name Spider Sabich meant something,” says Knauss. “I realized from the beginning that if I work hard enough and do well it can change my life.”

Skier Erik Schlopy revived his own amateur career with the technique and independence he learned through the pro format. When it came to naming his own son, Schlopy was inspired by one person: “Spider Sabich was the coolest racer of all time,” he says. Young Spider Schlopy now races for the Park City ski team. Today, a revived pro tour features both amateur and pro skiers facing off with no eligibility restrictions, and its star, Rob Cone, is a laid-back former U.S. Ski Teamer and collegiate skier who races on his own terms. Meanwhile, at the Spider Sabich Race Arena in Snowmass, people of all ages come to experience the rush of head-to-head racing.

Spider lives on in a more tangible way, too. “In the early summer of 1967,” Dede Brinkman recounts, “he and I spent the night together, and we conceived a child.” At the time, both were otherwise engaged, Dede to her future husband and Spider with his skiing career. The two decided to keep this secret. Dede remained close with Spider, as their lives took both of them from Tahoe to Boulder and, eventually, to Aspen. After her divorce, she lived in Starwood, where their daughter, Missy, had a close connection to Spider.

When Brinkman told her daughter, then age 20, the truth, “there was a lot more about my life that made sense,” says Missy. She now runs a successful coffee business in Salt Lake City, and her own daughter, Grace, recently graduated from UC Berkeley. They share a love of skiing and an appreciation for Spider’s ideals, which Missy describes as “doing what’s right, not what is easy. And making a difference.” While Spider never met his own grandchild, his parents did. Missy recalls Frances Sabich’s words: “It’s just the nicest thing to know there’s a legacy.’” 

Regular contributor Edith Thys Morgan spent nine years on the U.S. Ski Team, competing in three World Championships and two Olympics. She last wrote about “What to Expect When You’re Inspecting” in the January-February 2022 issue.

Spider Lives: On Film and in the Hall of Fame

Spider Sabich’s life is commemorated in the new film Spider Lives, which will hold its premiere at 5:30 pm on March 25 during Skiing History Week in Sun Valley. Produced by Christin Cooper, Mike Hundert, Mark Taché, Edith Thys Morgan and Hayden Scott, the 90-minute film earned a 2021 ISHA Film Award. On March 26, Sabich will be inducted into the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame, during its banquet in Sun Valley.

Jess Bell’s lipstick racers dazzled the ski world.

Photo above: Jess Bell (center in hat) often entertained New York fashion editors, providing an opportunity to field test his skin-protective cosmetics. The late team captain Karin S. Allen is third from right in the yellow outfit.

Revlon or Estee Lauder or Helena Rubinstein can have their high-fashion models. Their runways. Their heavily purple–shadowed eyelids and rouged cheekbones. Cleveland businessman Jess A. Bell, Sr., had a different idea when, in 1959, he succeeded his father at Bonne Bell, the family cosmetics business.

As major stores and ski area shops slowly warmed to his line of ski lipsticks, sunscreens and high-altitude creams (an alternative to pasty-white zinc oxide), Bell tossed in the women, called “girls” back then. They would come to be known as the Bonne Bell Ski Team.

Reported Anita Verschoth in the November 22, 1971, issue of Sports Illustrated, “Bell’s beauties all look as if they had just dropped in from the wholesome house next door. … The emphasis is on a sort of dewy-cheeked outdoor look, complete with creamy tan and snowy teeth.”

Bonne Bell Cosmetics was founded in 1927 by Bell’s father, Jesse Grover Bell, who had been selling cosmetics door to door in Kansas. After moving to Ohio during the Depression, he made his products on a hot plate in his basement and continued door-to-door sales. The company was named after one of the elder Bell’s daughters.

Beginning in the 1950s the company actively pursued the outdoor market, developing sun blocks, heavy-duty moisturizers and lip protectors for skiers, hikers and joggers. While more elegant cosmeticians fought over big-city sales, Bell’s tagline resonated with resort-bound skiers: “Out there you need us, baby.”

In 1973, as its celebrity sales reps were storming ski country, Bonne Bell introduced a lip pomade called Lip Smacker, aimed originally at skiers, then later at pre-teens. According to Women’s Wear Daily, “Lip Smackers achieved cultural icon status as the first flavored lip item on the market.” Lip Smackers started with strawberry, green apple and orange-chocolate flavors. By 1975, the brand made news with a Dr. Pepper flavor.

Jess Bell, a graduate of Valley Forge Military Academy and Baldwin Wallace College, served as a paratrooper in both World War II and the Korean War. He defied the common image of a cosmetics industry giant. A fitness buff, he scaled Kilimanjaro, ran marathons, swam to keep in shape and served on the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

His Lakewood, Ohio, offices were smoke-free long before that became common, and he pioneered the idea of an office fitness center. He offered incentives to employees who exercised regularly, lost weight or quit smoking. 

Avalanche of Applicants

Georgia Lesnevich Haneke, a photographer and horsewoman from Heber, Utah, was on the Bonne Bell Ski Team from 1971 to 1974. She recalls that the selection process was fierce, with “thousands of applicants.” She asked her stepfather, a classmate of Jess Bell, to provide an introduction.

She flew to Bonne Bell headquarters, and 48 hours later Bell offered her a salary of around $12,000 per year, all expenses paid, and free ski equipment. She credits her acceptance to “good looks and skiing ability.” But it was no walk in the park. Her responsibilities included selling cosmetics, visiting retailers, straightening stock, filling out sales reports, going to ski resorts and pre-running NASTAR courses.

“It was 90 percent hard work, and 10 percent glamour,” she says. “Sure, it was a sales job, but I felt like a mini movie star. You’d walk into a retailer or hotel or ski resort and when the Bonne Bell Ski Team girl arrived, they treated you like royalty. Everyone knew who you were and what you represented.”

The late Karin S. Allen, team captain, told Sports Illustrated in 1971 that being on the team was better than being Miss America.

Allen moved to Woodstock, Georgia, following 40 years with the company in roles that also included international sales training. She passed away in August 2021, shortly after sharing her Bonne Bell experiences with us.

“Jess was brilliant,” she said. “The Bonne Bell Ski Team was made up of surfers as well as skiers, and was a great marketing tool for attracting new customers. The other cosmetics salespeople showed up in mink coats and high heels. Instead, our girls were athletes. There were about 10 of us at any one time, working across the U.S., and we were all skiers.

“Jess used to say, ‘You’re healthy and wholesome, toasty and brown, and you’re killing your skin,’ in reference to girls who went into the mountains or out in extreme weather with no sunscreen protection,” Allen said.

“When I look back on my career, I consider it to be the most amazing job you could ever have. Jess Bell was generous, loyal and supportive. We could not have had more fun in our working lives. There wasn’t a morning when my feet hit the floor and I wasn’t excited to do the job.”

“Sign Me Up”

Nancy Stofer Brehm, a retired schoolteacher in Saugatuck, Michigan, remembers what it was like being around the Bonne Bell Ski Team for five years, pitching the brand on campus. “As a young college student working at Bonne Bell part-time, I felt the members of the team were the epitome of cool,” she says. “I loved skiing as a sport and was envious they were getting to ski around the country. I thought to myself, ‘If this is a job, then sign me up.’”

Team member Bettie Simms Hastings, a retired Indiana horse farm owner now living on a ranch near Telluride, remembers, “It was a great job before skiing became so commercial and corporate. It was all fun. How many people are hired to go to different ski areas and be paid to have fun skiing with people?”

She especially liked her Captain America–like outfits and skiing in films by Willy Bogner, Jr. Another highlight was meeting Robert Redford while traveling through the airport in Denver. “He would look you right in the eye while he talked,” she recalls.

Mission accomplished, the ski team was disbanded in the mid-1970s. According to Karin Allen, the promotion saturated its target market. “We expanded to nearly every ski area in North America,” she said. “Our efforts eventually evolved to focus on international sales and the higher volume U.S. cosmetics retail business, which paid the bills.”

Jess Bell died of heart ailments in 2005, at age 80.

Bonne Bell Cosmetics was sold to Markwins Beauty Brands in 2015. Markwins closed the Bonne Bell headquarters, laying off 91 employees, according to Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer (Jan. 30, 2015). Those nostalgic about the brand’s 90-year run can still find Ten-O-Six astringents, moisturizers, and deep-pore cleansers (now known as Formula 10.0.06) on Amazon and at Walmart. Lip Smacker lip gloss and lip balm is sold on Amazon and in Dollar General stores. Lipsmacker.com invites kids to become “Balm Squad” artists.

Bettie Hastings adds, “The independence we had to do the job, the travel, and meeting people at ski areas, skiing everywhere, and having capital F-U-N. I don’t think sales reps today have the same freedom. Younger friends don’t know about the Bonne Bell Ski Team, but I’m proud to still be called a Bonne Bell girl … especially at my age. It was a wonderful chapter in my life.” 

ISHA board member Jeff Blumenfeld, a resident of Boulder, Colo., is president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA.org). He is author of Travel with Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism (Rowman & Littlefield).

Wayne Wong, of Vancouver, British Columbia, at age 19, took third place in the very first International Championships of Exhibition Skiing, held in March 1971 at Waterville Valley, New Hampshire (grand prize was a Corvette). In 1976, Wong endorsed the new 230-horsepower Dodge Aspen R/T—the performance version of the “compact” Aspen introduced that year. The code-name for the development program had been Aspen-Vail, and the Plymouth version was named Volaré (without the accent it means “to fly” in Italian). Wong flew on to stardom, but the Aspen/ Volaré was a lemon. By 1978, quality problems nearly bankrupted Chrysler, and incoming boss Lee Iacocca axed the Aspen in favor of the front-wheel-drive K-Car series,
introduced in 1980. —Seth Masia

In future issues:

Whatever Happened To Down/UP? Remember when instructors told us to get tall to start the turn? Is up-unweighting still a teaching tool? Ron LeMaster explains.

Where Are They Now? American racer Marco Sullivan retired after 15 years on the World Cup circuit—and a record 105 downhills. Edith Thys Morgan catches up with the speed specialist.

True Northland Fires and feuds in St. Paul: The real story behind the world’s best hickory skis.

PLUS

Listen Up! Remember singing “Super Skier” around the ski lodge fireplace? From yodeling odes to “90 Pounds of Rucksack” to the latest streaming jams, music has always been a key part of ski culture. Listen to the classics through ISHA’s multi-media reconstruction of ski-music history.

The cerebral side of ski instruction grew dominant in the mid-1970s. The approach vanished a decade later, but had made its point that mastering technique is only part of the game.

More than three decades ago, skiing was ripe for a change in the way the sport was taught. Amid a new wave of research in psychology and neurology that supported a holistic approach to how people learn, ski instructors were still shouting orders to tense skiers about the placement of their knees and shoulders.

Jean-Claude Killy, it was revealed, had used a form of yoga to help win the 1967 overall World Cup title and his triple gold at the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble, France. Switzerland’s national ski team won seven medals at the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games after employing a Jungian psychotherapist.

Sportswriter and expert skier Denise McCluggage, who’d studied Zen Buddhism, attracted national attention with her concept of Centered Skiing. She urged skiers to control their skis not intellectually from the head, but viscerally from the body’s physical center—a point located just below the navel.

At about the same time, in 1975, Tim Gallwey, the best-selling author of The Inner Game of Tennis, burst onto the ski scene. Skiers, he said, should learn to focus on mental images of how they wanted to ski down a slope and on how a perfect turn should feel. He went on to co-author the best-selling book Inner Skiing.

The nation’s ski schools mostly welcomed the Gallwey influence. Colorado’s Copper Mountain started a dryland program instructing students to feel the motions of skiing before they even put on skis. A rush of workshops and books, such as Ski With Yoga, appeared.

The Hidden Skier claimed a latent talent and unique style of skiing lay within each of us. In Skiing from the Head Down, two psychologists presented skiing as a total mind and body experience.

It wasn’t long before doubts were raised about overemphasizing the inner approach to instruction. Skiing does, after all, involve a technical activity: sliding down snowy slopes at high speeds. A Zen-like inner peace doesn’t address a student’s need to make it down the slopes in one piece.

By the mid-1980s, the Inner Game schools had mostly disappeared. While racers continued to work on the cerebral aspects of skiing, the ski-instruction establishment largely returned to focusing on execution and technique. Nevertheless, the mental approach of the ’70s has left the sport with an enduring legacy: a reminder to instructors that technical expertise is only the beginning of successfully teaching people how to ski. 

Excerpted from the October 2008 issue of SKI. John Fry (1930-2020) was editorial director of SKI and Snow Country magazines and longtime president, then chairman, of ISHA. He authored the award-winning book The Story of Modern Skiing. His final book, published posthumously, is Abandon Foolish Scheme: Deathly encounters that you won’t find in bestsellers about dying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Early Days

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘First’ World Championships and Olympics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Racing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo above: At its finest, skiing is both an art and a science—as is effective marketing. In 1993, Killington commissioned six artists to customize 45 cabins as part of the launch of the Vermont resort’s new Skyeship gondola. The public relations score was hauling a cabin to the Whitney Museum in New York City for an evening of celebration and national exposure. A legal kerfuffle ensued when an enterprising illustrator artfully claimed that his work had been exhibited at the Whitney. Mark D. Phillips photo

For skiing’s P.T. Barnums, no news is bad news.

It was about 6 a.m. on a chilly morning in the early 1970’s when then-Sugarbush marketing director Chan Weller and Gary Black Jr. of the Baltimore Sun began a slow hike to the top of the Sugarbush Snowball ski trail to witness an event which may have been a first at any ski area in the East.

After lighting smoke flares, the friends used an old wind-up 16mm film camera to record pilot John Macone, perhaps best known as the top PR executive at the Squaw Valley Olympic Winter Games in 1960, perform one of the most audacious PR capers of all-time: landing a ski-equipped airplane on a ski trail.

After a short flight from nearby Warren-Sugarbush Airport, Macone guided the plane to an uphill landing, bouncing across the moguls. He managed not to bury the prop in a pile of snow, according to Weller’s 2019 account on Sugarbush.com.

Soon, they realized their folly.

“Macone could get busted and his flight ticket pulled. I could lose my job as marketing director at Sugarbush. Black would be the only survivor,” Weller wrote.

“John cranks her up, I get ready to release the rope, Gary rewinds the 16mm and points it at the plane for posterity and we have ‘lift off.’”

The two later chuckled that the Ski Patrol, none the wiser, were puzzled about two straight tracks down the mountain that simply vanished.

It remained a secret until the internet came along, and the clandestine escapade could be shared in all its grainy black and white glory with the world. (See it at https://tinyurl.com/sugarbushstunt)

Channeling Barnum

You’ll find them at Sugarbush and every other ski resort. At X-C touring centers. At gear and apparel manufacturers and at ski shows. Promotional stunts are skiing’s modern-day version of P.T. Barnum, the American showman who in the 1800s sewed a monkey’s torso and head onto a fish and called it a mermaid, and toured the country with a woman he said was George Washington’s 161-year-old wet nurse.

In the ski business, promoters went to extreme lengths to grab attention. The goal was to stage events so outrageous, so over the top, no media outlet could ignore it.

Consider some of the wackiest ski promotions of the mid-20th and early 21st centuries, which, so far, looks to be the golden age of ski stunts.

Bombs Away

At the head of any publicity parade would certainly be Walt Schoenknecht (1919-1987), the entrepreneur who opened Mohawk Mountain in Connecticut in 1947, then ventured north to purchase a 500-acre farm from the man with the perfect name: Reuben Snow. Mount Snow, opened in 1954, went to extraordinary lengths to generate awareness, according to Thad Quimby, writing in the Burlington Free Press (Feb. 12, 2016).

“He put a pool outside in the cold and a skating rink inside. He started a ski club in Florida. He allowed a fountain to run in the winter to create a mound of ice large enough to ski down (and people did ski it). A showman? Maybe. Crazy? That’s fair,” Quimby writes.

“He even commissioned the Atomic Energy Commission to explode an underground nuclear bomb to create a bowl for skiing and add more vertical feet to the resort. Thankfully, calmer heads prevailed, and his request was denied,” according to Quimby.

By the 1970s, publicity stunts were as much a part of skiing as stretch pants and bota bags.

For Pete’s Sake

In an inspired bit of Barnumesque showmanship, in 1977, Crested Butte promoters enlisted Tom Pulaski, then the 20-year-old director of the Gunnison Climbing School and Guide Service, to impersonate the fictional “Crested Butte Pete,” then camp at Crested Butte’s Monument Hill with his Siberian husky mix Charlie.

The plan called for Pete to remain on top from early November until he could ski all the way down, certainly no later than Thanksgiving Day.

He was only supposed to be there for 10 days, but needed to resupply to cover an eight-day delay. On Thanksgiving, a flock of sixth graders brought him a turkey. Meanwhile, thanks to a telephone line in his tent, he conducted radio and TV interviews nationwide, racking up publicity for happy Crested Butte executives. Even Charlie became a star of Colorado TV weather reports.

After 18 days, there was enough snow to make the first triumphant run of the year, all filmed by three TV stations and witnessed by numerous fans, according to Skiing Magazine (February 1978).

Recently contacted in Gunnison, Colorado, where he is a retired woodworker and property manager, Pulaski says he still hears from people annually who remember the stunt.

“The promotion really worked. It was just kooky enough that it caught everybody’s eye,” he tells Skiing History.

Speaking of first runs, Olympian Billy Kidd took the first run of the 1977-78 season in New York’s Central Park when Steamboat Ski Area and the Ski The Rockies association purchased a truckload of crushed ice and spread it on a tiny hill near Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street, exclusively for the NBC Today Show.

The idea was to give skiing enthusiast Tom Brokaw, co-anchor of the show, lessons in slalom racing. Steamboat flew in 550 pounds of powder, which had congealed into hardpack, then spread it atop 8-1/2 tons of more hardpack ice purchased in Manhattan.

It didn’t rain that day, it poured, adding to the not exactly prime conditions. Promoters asked the ice vendor whether he thought they should go ahead and spread the ice. “Why not?” he said, according to a story about the event in Ski Magazine (February 1982). “You paid for it.”

To his credit, Brokaw showed up in a business suit, apologized and begged off the stunt.

Ski The Rockies promoters were as crushed as the ice. But there was a happy ending: later in the season, Brokaw and a film crew visited Steamboat to ski on the real stuff.

Eye in the Sky

In the early 1990s, war broke out among New England ski resorts regarding who had the most trails. If a trail from top to bottom is defined as Upper Middlebrook and Lower Middlebrook, is that one or two trails? Some resorts increased their trail counts by creative naming, without cutting a single tree. Killington, determined to put an end to the nonsense, hired an independent aerial surveillance company to fly over their competitors’ terrain and count trails.

Former Killington marketing director John Clifford recalls, “We picked the top 10 ski resorts in the Northeast and left the smaller areas alone.”

Some fellow marketers thanked Killington for actually expanding their terrain; others requested that the “Beast of the East” mind its own business. The New York Times and Boston Globe lapped it up when the results were released.

In 1993, Killington created its high-speed heated Skyeship gondola. To add some sizzle, they commissioned six artists to create 45 artsy designs for the exteriors of 139 cabins, calling the result an “art gallery in the sky.” So what better way to launch the new lift than at a private event at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art? A gondola cabin was trucked to the Whitney to impress otherwise blasé New Yorkers. The event generated enormous exposure for the resort but later resulted in a lawsuit. It seems one of the gondola artists claimed his work was exhibited at the Whitney. Technically yes, for one evening. But the buyer of one of the artist’s other works sued for misrepresentation. Killington was happy about the promotion. The buyer of the artwork, not so much.

Human Snow Globe

How could this possibly fail? To create excitement at the annual Ski Dazzle ski show in Los Angeles in 2002, Greg Murtha, then the marketing director of Sugar Bowl, near Lake Tahoe, created an inflatable 18-foot Human Snow Globe. Visitors could step inside to enjoy a “blizzard” of shredded Styrofoam. Jeep, a corporate sponsor, parked a new car inside. It was a huge hit, although Guinness World Records turned down their submission because the globe didn’t contain water.

The plastic see-through attraction toured California ski and auto shows until Murtha realized that it might not be healthy for visitors to breathe in Styrofoam dust. Later, Sugar Bowl turned the giant plastic globe into a sumo wrestling arena. People lined up to don one-size-fits-all inflated sumo suits and have a go at it.

“It was hysterically funny. People would watch for hours,” says Murtha, who now runs Xplorit, an interactive virtual travel company in Incline Village, Nevada.

“We succeeded in putting a smile on people’s faces as they engaged with our brand. There were a few drunk rounds of faux wrestling, but those stories are best untold.”

How Now Brown Cow

It’s not just ski shows and resorts that resorted to press stunts. The largest ski industry association also succumbed to the siren song of publicity. During a 1983 trade show, DuPont and Ski Industries America (SIA) hosted a cow-chip tossing competition in the Rotunda of the Las Vegas Convention Center. In the same hall where the Beatles performed in 1964, SIA encouraged the industry to bond and create publicity by throwing dried cow excrement, for distance.

“The rules were simple,” said then-SIA president David Ingemie. “Reps competed against retailers in an event well-lubricated by free alcohol.”

Ingemie remembers the cow chips, on arrival, were, “very fresh – right off the ranch.” They had, however, dried into fragile discus-shaped pies. It turned out that mere strength wouldn’t win the contest: throw too hard and the pie disintegrated. Finesse and technique ruled the day.

I was in the room where it happened. After about an hour I looked at Ingemie. He looked at me through a cloud of dry cow chip dust, and we both realized how disgusting the event was becoming. The name of the winner is lost to skiing history.

But Ingemie managed to nail second place and has the plaque to prove it. “To this day, my wife still gives me, er, crap about hanging a cow chip on the wall, but I remember it as one of the funniest events we ever did at the Ski Show.”

Another legendary SIA Show escapade began in 1982. A boom was on in polyester fleece and Gore-Tex skiwear, so journalist Bob Woodward (not the Washington Post Woodward) and friends thought it would be a hoot to dress for dinner in polyester leisure suits. Woodward dubbed himself The Right Reverend Lester Polyester of the Holy Church of Synthetics, and his flock convened at El Sombrero, a far-off-the-Strip Mexican restaurant. Dozens of reps and retailers dressed like extras in a John Waters movie for an evening of debauchery that is fondly recalled to this day. The Poly Party became a tradition.

“The ’83 party was a ripper as word spread around the SIA Show that good times were to be had at a totally out-of-kilter party which would be the complete opposite of the typical corporate big bash,” Woodward told the trade publication SNEWS.

By 1986 the party drew dozens of staid corporate ski executives channeling their inner Saturday Night Fever. Woodward needed a larger venue. In April 1987 Sports Illustrated reported, “One highlight of the convention was the ‘Polyester Party’ at the El Rancho bowling alley. People who never wear anything but cotton turtlenecks and wool sweaters raided the Vegas boutiques for synthetic shirts and shorts, and prizes were awarded for the flashiest getups.”

Woodward recalls, “The realization that we had created something really big came while waiting for baggage at the Las Vegas airport, and watching a ski show attendee’s bowling ball rolling out onto the conveyor belt.”

So next time you read about a crazy ski industry stunt involving former speed skiing legend C.J. Mueller strapped on top of a moving car, or click on a viral video of a two-year-old snowboarder at Jiminy Peak, or watch TV coverage of a ski area’s sled dogs hauling along Central Park South, remember these stunts don’t just happen. Behind the scenes is a ski promoter risking a job, just to get you to slide a little more often. 

ISHA vice president Jeff Blumenfeld, a resident of Boulder, Colorado, is the president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA.org). He is author of Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Learn more at travelwithpurposebook.com.

Amateur photographers: Paul Ryan feels your pain.

Blue sky, green trees, white snow, happy skier. Every ski photographer risks producing cliché images.

Paul Ryan understands. “In today’s world, we are saturated with photographs in the media and online. Sometimes when I go out to shoot, these images pop up and scream at me ‘Someone’s done that! I’ve seen that!’” he says.

Ryan, 83, offers this wisdom gleaned from six decades behind a lens: “Be open for something odd and new, not necessarily strange, but a different vision of the familiar. Perhaps a juxtaposition of disparate elements in the same frame. Wash from your mind all the classic images that linger from the past. Images by others you’ve seen and loved, even images that you see right away—the obvious.”

To that end, when shooting, he strives for “an empty mind, or at least a clean vision,” a reference to the 1970 book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, which he found inspiring early in his career.

Photo top of page: Ryan started his career as the staff photographer at California’s Sugar Bowl resort. The Silver Belt, the final big race of the season, was held in the late spring. Part of the post-race festivities was a softball game on skis between the racers. “The European racers, unfamiliar with baseball, found the game amusing,” Ryan says. Buddy Werner, a natural athlete and a born competitor, took the softball game—and winning it—seriously. Those are American Olympians Tom Corcoran and Linda Meyers watching the action.

Ryan grew up in Boston and, after taking a BS in engineering, moved to Stowe to pursue what he imagined could be a career in ski racing. An Eastern snow drought in 1960-61 led him to Aspen, and for a few years he spent winters racing and summers in San Francisco, going to film school. He eventually found himself at Sugar Bowl Resort in California for the final race of the season, where general manager Ed Siegel candidly told him that his future wasn’t in ski racing, and hired him as resort photographer.

It was a good fit. John Fry eventually hired Ryan as the staff photographer at SKI magazine for several years. He traveled the world shooting for SKI and other periodicals.

But his professional pursuits expanded beyond skiing. He chronicled the 1960s counterculture in San Francisco. He studied under the greats of the time, including Minor White and Ansel Adams. His photography has been honored in numerous shows, with recent exhibits including “The Sea Ranch, Architecture, Environment, and Idealism” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Ryan has easily pivoted between photography and cinematography. His cinema credits include Robert Redford’s “A River Runs Through It” and “The Horse Whisperer.” His documentary work includes “Gimme Shelter,” “Salvador Dali,” and recently a film on George Soros.

He has always found his way back to the mountains. Here are some of his favorite images from a different era. “When on the side of the mountain, I had to pre-visualize the end result, not seeing the film until days later,” Ryan says from his home in Santa Monica, California.

Ryan said that White, one of his early mentors, introduced him to the idea that a compelling photograph is more than a static image—it has an afterlife, of sorts.

“White spoke of ‘Equivalents,’ which is a photographic concept that the photograph mirrors something in ourselves—something that remains in mind after the literal image has faded,” Ryan explains.

To reach that end, Ryan says, the strongest images touch upon a commonality, something universal across the human experience. These images draw the viewer into the frame and into a broader narrative. “The most powerful photos evoke something beyond what was literally in front of the lens. This may come from the implication of what happened just before or of what might happen a moment after,” he says. “What remains is not only the image of the time and place, but a visual residue connected to a broader spectrum of our own experience.”

Of course, in order to achieve White’s concept of “Equivalents,” the photographer does have to first nail the shot. These days, with everyone shooting an endless stream of digital photos at the press of a button, that’s an achievement that’s often underappreciated.

Not by Ryan. “To achieve a high level of visual acuity is demanding,” he notes, “particularly while simultaneously navigating deep powder, an icy mogul field, high speeds or the intensity of race day—all with an array of cameras in check.” 

This is the second installment of a two-part photo essay series from Paul Ryan. (See part 1 in the September/October issue.) View this photo essay as a mini-master class in photography, as Ryan explains his approach to his craft and the intriguing backstories to each image. Find more of Ryan’s work at paulryanphotography.com.

Ryan first got to know Billy Kidd during the 1960 season at Stowe. “He was always friendly and curious about photography and actually filmed some of the Megève downhill for me when I was making the Lange film, Ski Racer. This photo was taken at Kidd’s home in Stowe circa 1967. The wall was lined with trophies and his bibs from the 1964 Innsbruck Olympics, where Kidd and Jimmie Heuga became the first American men to win alpine medals. “Ever since 1966, Billy was plagued with recurring ankle injuries,” Ryan recalls. “It was interesting to see a young admirer realizing that even a hero is vulnerable.” Ryan was fascinated throughout his career with catching athletes away from the competition, believing that these moments can tell a story as revealing as the athletic action itself.

One of the many challenges of nailing a great image is “photographing people up close in difficult situations,” Ryan says. Fortunately, Ryan had spent a lot of time with the Canadian team and earned its trust, such as after a nasty downhill tumble by racer Andrée Crepeau, who recalls the crash. “It was on the flats at the bottom of the downhill in Stowe, where I learned that catching an edge is not always reversible. And down I went, face first—real quick.” The resulting image captures both the physical toll of the crash and the indominable spirit of the Canadian’s women’s team. “In photographing emotional situations, it’s always better to be physically close to the people rather than standing farther back with a telephoto lens,” Ryan says.

Great photography is at the intersection of art and science, according to Ryan. Getting the technical aspects right, such as the light, focus and framing, is key. But some of it is just heading into the field and hoping for the best. “Shooting ski action at slower than normal shutter speeds, here 1/8 second, is photographing without the luxury of certainty,” Ryan says. “After a while you get better at anticipating the results, but it’s still guesswork.” Here, at Stowe, the “obscuration of the subject promotes an awareness of the overall graphics in the frame.” Ryan also liked the flame-like gate banner flickering above the racer’s head.

Contrasts help bring a viewer into the frame, seeking out details of the surprising image. “In this case it was the ominous dark tree in the white landscape that attracted me,” Ryan says. “I waited for a bit, assuming a skier would come into the frame. He did and that completed the image.”

In 1970, Ryan made a documentary film on Austrian ski champion Karl Schranz. He filmed for several weeks on the World Cup circuit. “But I was curious to film Karl’s off-season life in his hometown of St. Anton,” Ryan says. He traveled to St. Anton in the summer, after the race season, and talked to locals who knew Schranz since his boyhood. “Karl brought us to meet his mother, who lived in the same small house she had for the last fifty years,” Ryan recalls. “As a widow, she had raised five children.” With photos and medals decorating this modest shrine to her son, Ryan likes the image because it tells as much about Schranz and his upbringing as it does about his mother.

Mammoth was one of the first destinations on Ryan’s unofficial resort itinerary when he headed West as a young racer in the 1960s. “I spent a lot of time there, both skiing and photographing the Mammoth racing program.” The racing operation was a top-notch group, whose roster frequently included members of Mammoth founder Dave McCoy’s family. At the end of a training day, racer Kandi McCoy chats with Dennis Agee, a junior coach at the time, who went on to become the Alpine Director of the U.S. Ski Team. “I liked her shy reaction to a coach’s compliment,” Ryan says.

In 1968, John Fry “had the idea to send me to do a photo story on skiing in the flatlands of the Midwest” for SKI. Ryan ended up at Boyne Mountain, Michigan, with its modest vertical of 500 feet. “For Othmar Schneider, a past Olympic champion and previously at Stowe where I knew him, it must have been confining,” Ryan says. “This image had a feeling of him reaching for something greater—or at least higher.”

John Fry and Mort Lund assigned Ryan to do a photo essay for SKI specifically on the experience of the downhill discipline. “This is the only event where there is a day or more to prepare, inspecting the course and taking a practice run,” Ryan says. “But there is never the sense of totally understanding what it will be like on race day.” At the end of the day prior to the race, there’s one last inspection down the course. Ryan strived to capture the intense preparation and anticipation in this early evening shot of a solitary racer looking down the course. Ryan: “I often find it rewarding to hang around for that extra hour at the end of the day, after the main action has ended. The light is dramatic and interesting things sometimes happen.”

All photographers have favorite assignments. This was one of Ryan’s. “One of my first and most gratifying assignments at SKI was a photo essay on Nancy Greene on the 1967 race circuit. I followed her travels for three weeks, on and off the course,” Ryan says. As well as being a superb racing talent, Ryan learned that Greene was a good friend and dedicated mentor to her teammates. Greene also didn’t let any aspect of her gear go uninspected. “Like many racers of the era, she personally paid exacting attention to the details of her skis,” Ryan says.

For Ryan’s 1969 photo essay, “The Steepness of Stowe” for SKI, he began experimenting with colored gel filters on the lens. “I liked the creative effect and usually made a few photographs this way on most other assignments,” Ryan notes, such as here as part of a story on Roger Staub at Vail (see right). With the analog film of the time, there was no way to know how the gels were working until the film was processed days later.

Digital photography now provides instant feedback (see above). “In contrast, a couple of years ago at the World Cup finals at Aspen I was fascinated with the maze of blue lines left by the multiple course markings. Shooting digitally, I could see the image right away and later, in Photoshop, I was able to exaggerate my impression of the intensity of the blue dye,” Ryan says. “Photography now has evolved to allow for, and even expect, imagery beyond simple representation of reality.”

Beat writers are often accused of writing stories for the audience of other beat writers, bringing nuances into play that can only be picked up on by other pros. The same goes for photographers. Ryan was attracted to the action in this shot for a SKI assignment. The racer is in sharp focus at the 1968 Grenoble Winter Games, with other elements blurred. However, “I liked the patrol sled waiting in the background behind the fencing,” Ryan says. “It quietly portrayed a sense of risk and danger.”

Ryan competed in the Roch Cup slalom in 1962, which became a hinge point in his career. “This was the last of my efforts at ski racing,” Ryan says. “I was decent, but when I was up against world-class racers, I realized I should spend more time at photography.” And for that decision in 1962, skiing’s visual legacy is, indeed, a bit richer.