. ski history : The First Vacations, Lifts and Lessons - 17 January 2003 - 17:18
To begin with, someone had to invent the concept of taking a vacation in the winter months. The first winter vacation is credited to a bet laid in 1864 by Johannes Badrutt, owner of the legendary Kulm Hotel in St. Moritz.
Already a spa town, in common with dozens of resorts in the Alps, St. Moritz closed when foreign tourists returned home from September until Easter. Mr. Badrutt dared some of his English guests to stay for the winter, wagering a free stay at his hotel for the entire season if the guests did not find winter in St. Moritz warmer than in London. Of course a few accepted his wager, and the rest is history -- to the great profit of St. Moritz!
The first recorded tour operator 'package holiday' was a party of 45 winter sports enthusiasts taken to the French Alps by Henry Lunn from Britain in 1898.
Ski Instruction
The Arlberg Ski Club's most famous member, Hannes Schneider, began teaching guests at the Hotel Post in St. Anton in 1907, with the famous line "This is the way you do it, that's all." After starring in an early silent film, and developing his own variant of Zdarsky's downhill technique, the 'stem christie' turn, Schneider quickly became internationally famous, attracting tourists to St. Anton from around Europe.
In 1922, Schneider founded the first proper ski school, with pupils classed according to ability. In 1930, he was invited to Japan to teach and lecture on the modern technique, even touring ski production factories to advise on the best ski designs, woods to use, and the new idea of adding metal edges. Schneider, with a number of other Austrians, emigrated in the early 40's to the USA, where he continued to use and promote his training method.
Schneider's Alberg technique dominated Alpine ski tuition for almost half a century until the 1960's, when the French devised their own approach, perfected by another of the sport's legends, Jean-Claude Killy.
Ski Lifts
The next big breakthrough in the evolution of skiing was the invention of the ski lift shortly after 1930, credited to a young German engineer, Gerhard Mueller, who used parts of a motorbike and some rope to create the world's first rope tow. Shortly afterwards, in 1934, Erich Constam built the world's first proper drag lift. By the end of the decade, the world's first chair lift had opened at Sun Valley in Idaho USA, and soon cable cars were opening up the mountains in a big way.
But for the first few decades of recreational winter sports, downhill skiing was just one of many activities offered by ther early resorts. Indeed ice skating was probably the most popular winter holiday pastime, with traditional toboganning and snow shoe walks organised as well as ski jumping (which pre-dates downhill skiing) and even the bob sleigh and luge.
Downhill skiing was seen as something of a 'crank' sport in many resorts, practised largely by upper-class touring Brits with nothing better to do with their time in Murren, Wengen and Davos (who, in an uncanny reflection of Jake Burton and his snowboards in the early '80s, actually took their sport deadly seriously, despite their popular image), or by the purists in the Arlberg and near Lilienfeld.
All that changed in the 1930s when Alpine skiing's dominance of winter sports begun. Today the trend is back towards diversification in winter sports.
Resort Development
After the second world war, ski resort development took off in a big way. Even earlier, in North America, the railroad companies created resorts to keep people using their trains during the winter months. In France, the government created entities to invest in winter sports resorts, and to develop national and regional strategies to maximize the market.
Mountain villages that had grown up as mining settlements, or spa towns, quickly perceived the new market; isolated hamlets suddenly realized that their farmers could have work through the winter if they trained as ski teachers, and learned how to say "Bend zee knees, pleez."
Trail Grooming
In 1947, again in the Arlberg region of Austria, a couple of chaps with some form of roller, invented the concept of trail grooming. This has been taken to levels of mechanized perfection by resorts like Deer Valley in Utah, Today, grooming machines are ever more sophisticated costing a quarter of a million dollars, the latest being 'Pipe Dragons' specialized for creating the terrain features for fun parks.
Snowmaking
Then, of course, came snowmaking, helping to sustain and grow the ski industry, at first in New England in particular, but now adopted the world over, and floodlit night skiing.
Ski Equipment
Technical advances in equipment led to fewer broken ankles (the advent of the plastic boot shifting the commonest injury point to the knee). Skiing today is more comfortable (whatever your feet may tell you) and safer than it ever has been.
The factors described above were part of a process that led to the boom in downhill skiing as 'the winter sport' that lasted from the late 1930s to the late 1980s.
Patrick Thorne
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