Who invented alpine skiing

From there, they took to the surrounding hills with guides or by themselves, engaging in ski tours that incorporated sharp climbs, flat traverses, and rapid descents. As skiing took root in the Alps, however, the practice of the sport changed to accord with the region's steep terrain, which granted skiers the ecstasy of speed.

The focus on the downhill increasingly differentiated Alpine skiing from Nordic skiing, which demanded climbs and lengthy, flat treks, along with occasional descents. The contemporary lust for speed quickly allowed Alpine skiing to supplant its Scandinavian progenitor in popular practice. Before ski lifts were commonplace, Alpine skiers started to think of an exhausting uphill climb as an annoyance to be endured before a blissful downhill run.

In the interwar period, the novelty of the sport made it ripe for commodification, and Alpine skiing imagery was used to sell everything from Mercedes-Benz automobiles and Nivea skin-care products to Italian Fascism, as a shirtless Benito Mussolini posed with skis in to highlight his mastery of natural forces. The rising visibility of the sport spread beyond advertisements to other aspects of the nascent mass culture.

The symbiotic relationship between skiing and mass culture also made the sport a sensation across the Atlantic. Skis first appeared in North America in the midth century, as residents of mountainous mining communities fashioned practical skis to move about the frosty landscape. Similarly, Scandinavian immigrants brought their skis with them to the upper Midwest. Leisure skiing caught on in the early 20th century among well-to-do skiers in the mountains of New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire, but, as in Europe, the true growth of the sport in the United States occurred in the s and s.

As the thrills of Alpine skiing displaced the more gradual rewards of Nordic skiing, developers transformed the American West into a facsimile of the Alps. Similarly, after fleeing Austria to escape the Nazis in , Hannes Schneider moved to North Conway, New Hampshire, where he partnered with a local businessman and became the public face of Cranmore Mountain Resort.

As consumers flocked to the sport, villages that hosted winter tourists began to fashion the skiing experience to cater to consumer desires.

In the Alps, as in the United States, the first lifts and rope pulls appeared in the late s and began to proliferate in the s. Constructing a few lifts became a wise investment to attract visitors in the s, but new models of hospitality made a coherent network of lifts indispensable.

The Italian village of Sestriere launched this new era. Before the s, destinations in Switzerland and Austria dominated the winter tourism business, but their profitability depended upon preexisting village communities that had longer histories hosting visitors in the summer. As Alpine skiing became synonymous with the downhill, however, Italian developers recognized an opportunity to construct a resort solely to serve the needs of Alpine skiers. The head of Fiat Automobiles, Giovanni Agnelli, exploited his connections in the Fascist regime to create Sestriere, the first single-purpose ski resort, in the northwest Italian Alps.

The government extended the autostrada from the bustling industrial center of Milan and built a train station to deliver tourists directly to Sestriere. There, skiers laid eye upon two stunning, modernist hotel towers and a lift network that provided access to 74 downhill runs by With state support, private developers had transformed an uninhabited snow desert into a ski paradise.

This integrated model of development proved immensely profitable and became the blueprint for the development of the Alps, particularly after World War II. The ski was invented before the wheel. Twenty-two thousand years ago, when the Cro-Magnon man first attached two sticks to his feet, it was not to race down a snowy mountain just for the thrill of it. According to Huntford, cave drawings suggest that man used skis during the last Ice Age in the Palaeolithic period. The oldest ski artefacts, though, come from the more recent Mesolithic period.

Fragments of ski-like objects, discovered by s archaeologist Grigoriy Burov, date back to BC in northern Russia. Skis and snowshoes were first invented to cross wetlands and marshes in the winter when they froze over.

They enabled man to travel during the winter and hunt reindeer and elk across the frozen tundra. Skis were widely utilized in Central Asia and Europe, while snowshoes were common in the New World - probably because snow was more compact and less soft in the Old World, theorizes Huntford.

Skiing's next era evolved out of military considerations. In the s, the Norwegian army held skill competitions involving skiing down slopes, around trees, across level snowfields and while shooting. These races were precursors to Olympic sports. The first national race took place in Oslo in the s. All the while, more and more civilians — both in Norway and other parts of Europe — were trying their hand at skiing. For the Norwegians, they were obstacles that might be met on a tour over field and fell.

For Zdarsky, a slalom would prove the ability of a skier to avoid obstacles on all types of terrain, with speed being no consideration. For Lunn, slalom came from his mountaineering background.

There the skier would have to thread his way through the trees. Ten-second penalties were added to those falling down deliberately at the flags. So into the discussion came questions of suitability of terrain, equipment, style of skiing, rules, professionalism, and honor.

All this caused such a rumpus that challenges were thrown down in and again in The facts are these: Zdarsky mounted a Torlauf, an gate run dropping almost meters on the Muckenkogel outside Lilienfeld.

He wanted it designated as an alpines Wertungsfahren —a judged alpine run—but his club members were adamantly against that and insisted on its being a race, a Wettlaufen. Zdarsky managed to get the event title changed to Ski-Wettfahren, 49 i.

Eight rules governed the event. A fall is judged when sitting or lying on the snow or when the knee rests on the snow. Twenty-four competitors between the ages of 17 and 52, including one woman, climbed the Muckenkogel, and down they came watched by 14 gate keepers.

Following the event, there was virtually no publicity. The director of the Zdarsky archive, Franz Klaus now deceased , told me it was simply because Wallner was not a Zdarsky acolyte. There was little that was satisfactory about the race and it led to acrimonious accusations between Zdarsky, who claimed to be the winner, and a young Josef Wallner.

But it made no pretense to be a slalom. The rules called for stopping after each of three stem turns. During the descent, he purposefully stopped and turned around. Later he stopped and blew his nose.

These were the sort of things that anyone on a tour might do, and his time of 5 minutes 50 seconds was defined as the standard. The winner would have to beat that time. Not one of the no-fall participants reached the time requirement, so there was no winner.

End of slalom No. But not quite. There were objections, a few complaining that the track was too cut up. So Zdarsky returned to the top and ran down faultlessly in 2 minutes 30 seconds.

The last of the Zdarsky slaloms was held for 44 competitors, including 10 women, in The standard time was 16 minutes 6 seconds. Wilhelm Wagner, a veteran, won with Nobody appears to have paid much attention to this.

And that, in itself, is interesting. Spiel und Gefahr, speed and danger, these were the desires of the true man, trumpeted Friedrich Nietzsche. Speed, in the words of another pioneer, was der Schrei der Zeit—the cry of the times—and even something as static as a trunk was sold as a Vitesse speed model.

But Zdarsky clung to his system. On his 80th birthday in he died in , he gave a radio talk in which he described how he had stoutly defended his system for 40 years, one that did not advocate speed for its own sake, but with the use of the single pole insured safety on steep terrain as on undulating meadow. But he had lost the battle. The trouble was that for all his curiosity and inventiveness, his inexhaustible fitness and proficiency, Zdarsky had become a prisoner of his own system.

Skip to main content. Mathias Zdarsky, Father of Alpine Skiing. Letter, k. Korpskommando, Gurk, 21 September to k. Reichskriegsministerium, Wien. Wien: Friedrich Beck, , Announced in Jahresbericht des Alpen-Skivereins , Rickmers, cited in Wolfe Kitterle, 75 Jahre Torlauf.

Wien: Kitterle, , Arnold Lunn, cited in Ibid. Allgemeine Sport-Zeitung 1 February : Hereafter AS-Z. The Bezirksheimatmuseum and Zdarsky Archive in Lilienfeld have a number of his inventions on view and documentation for others.

Registered in , Patent As he enumerated in various articles. Hamburg: Aktien-Geselschaft, Georg Blab, Anleitung zur Erlernung des Schneeschuhlaufens. Fritz Breuer, Anleitung zum Schneeschuhlaufen. Todtnau: Skiclub Todtnau, Max Schneider, Katechismus des Wintersports.