At the end of the nineteenth century, many sport were being rediscovered and modernized. This explosion of interest in leisure gave birth to alpine skiing, a sport that seemed made to match the new age. It was swift and daring. And once it was established among the snowy peaks of Switzerland and Austria, the idea of slalom and downhill racing could not be far behind.
Norwegian ethnologist Fridtjof Nansen’s account of his 1888 crossing of Greenland’s ice fields on Skis – written as he chafed at his bit as curator of the Bergen Museum – was the seminal work. But while it was being read by bugging skiers in the Alps, racing of a kind already existed in Scandinavia and the American West. Skiing of the cross-country Nordic kind had existed for centuries. Soldiers, trappers and merchants used coarse, Home-hewn boards for exclusively utilitarian purpose, simply to get about in the snow. But they made legendary heroes out of men like Mykkyel Hemmeveit who leapt 23 meters – early 70 feet – off an improvised ski jump at Huseby near Oslo in 1879. Ski jumping too is Nordic in origin.
In California, Swedes and Norwegians drawn to the Sierra Nevada by the discovery of gold, organized downhill races with wild mass starts. Cash prizes were awarded from the substantial betting pools. But though a number of such races are recorded, they were not the origin of a lasting sporting trend. When the gold miners left for new strikes in other territories, ski racing vanished with them. Skiing was only to be reborn in California seventy years later with the beginning of modern-day winter tourism on the West Coast of America
.It was the inception of skiing in the Alps that led to modern ski racing. And that in turn sprang from a new interest in mountaineering. As early as the eighteenth century certain city-bred gentlemen were gripped with the craze of conquering the Alpine peaks. While the more daring were scaling Mont-Blanc and the Matterhorn peaks, other tamer nature lovers flocked to the high Alpine valleys for the bracing air, mountains walks and the breathtaking scenery. This led to the rapid development of boarding and lodging facilities. And soon there were not just hotels, but cable cars and cog railways, which brought the towering peaks within effortless reach. Mass tourism in the Alps had begun.
It was the railway –built long before the arrival of the first skier – that helped popularized the sport.
The most active pockets of winter tourism often developed along the routes of the European expresses, which crossed the Alps from West to East. St.Anton and Kitzbühel are two examples. But local railways to smaller health resorts with sanatorium –like Chamonix, Davos and St.Moritz – also played a decisive role. Almost all the facilities were already in place when the ski craze began to grow to such dimensions that Alpine hotelkeepers opened their establishments in winter
.This process, which took place over a period of forty years, did not happen evenly across the countries themselves. The presence of a large number of British tourists in the Bernese Oberland after the first World War helped a handful of villages – among them Wengen and Mürren – to become bastions of skiing. In Gräubunden, Arosa quickly made a name for itself. But while in 1928, when the Winter Olympics were held there, St.Moritz advertised a dozen winter sports – among them tobogganing, bobsledding and skating – there was no mention of skiing.
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