Ranking in the Arlberg-Kandahar – and the other events conceived along the same lines: the Lauberhorn, the Grand Prix of the Paris Ski Club in Megève and Alpine skiing’s debut at the Garmisch Winter Olympic – were exclusively based on combined downhill-slalom performance. So when Birger Rudd the multitalented Norwegian (he won an Olympic ski jump gold medal in addition to the Alpine World Championship) won the 1936 Olympic downhill on the Kreuzeck course, he did not win a medal. Individual downhill awards were first presented in the 1948 St. Moritz Winter Olympic – where France’s Henry Oreiller capped his career with a gold medal – irrespective of the slalom results the next day.
The apparent even-handedness between downhill and slalom in those days was misleading. Downhill still held the whip hand. Ranking in the downhill event determined which competitors would go on the slalom event on the second day of these two-days competitions. To qualify for the slalom – and thus have a chance to win any prize at all – a competitor have to finish among the top forty in the downhill. Further, the slalom’s starting
order – which is often crucial – was determined by the downhill rankings. The first five in the downhill tackled the slalom in reverse order, the second five, and so on, in eight seeds of five.
The abandonment of this original Lunn-Schneider formulation, where competitors had to qualify for the slalom with a respectable downhill performance, has led to the modern-day sport’s emphasis on specialists. Under the old rules every competitor had to perform well in both downhill and slalom. Just before the Second World War, at a time when sports in general seemed to be in their Golden Age and Alpine skiing was burgeoning, ski racing reached its first historic summit with the 1938 World Championship in Engelberg, Switzerland. The Event was a rite of passage for a sport only codified a decade before.
Until then, the annual duels of the era’s best skiers – including professional ski teachers who were thus barred from the Olympics – were demurely called the FIS races, though there had been a World Ski Games in the Mont-Blanc valley in 1924. But by 1937 when the races were held in Chamonix, the full passion of international competition was to enter the games.
It was the first time the championships had been organized by France. And the French coach, Paul Gignoux, entrusted the preparation of his team to the most prestigious champions of the time, Toni Seelos of Austria and Rudi Rominger of Switzerland. Both were true professional world champions several times over.
Seelos from Seefeld, whose artistry in the slalom produced the parallel turn, drilled his secrets into the French squad while Rominger from Gräubunden – the most elegant stylist of his generation – had them glued to his wake as he plunged down progressively steeper and more daring slopes. With such fine coaching, the French, led by Emile Allais who won three gold medals in the slalom, the downhill and the combined, dominated the “Mundial” of Chamonix, leaving only crumbs for the foreign skiers including Rudi Rominger himself!
Switzerland – sometimes in concert with Austria, Germany and Italy – had dominated the FIS meets since they were first held in Mürren in 1931. But now France had taken its place as a real contender in Alpine skiing, a fact which the French were to trumpet far and wide, much to the annoyance of their German-speaking neighbors who regarded the French as nothing more than poachers on their private reserve.
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