The advent of Alpine ski racing took place thanks to a young Englishman whose father owned the Lunn Travel agency in London. For year, Lunn senior had shepherded thousands of tourists around some of the Alp’s most spectacular scenery. The English, who by this time had discovered Interlaken, had a romantic attachment to picking edelweiss and were irresistibly drawn to the “Mer de Glace” in Chamonix.
Born in 1888, it was as a young boy that Arnold Lunn first visited the Alps. By the time he was an adolescent, he was spending most of his time between Chamonix, Crans and Montana in Valais, Adelboden and Mürren in the Bernese Oberland. In love with the Alps and the snow, Arnold Lunn somehow managed the convey his passion to thousands of his countrymen. And it is thanks to him that Alpine ski racing, as we know it today finally took root.
In 1905, Kitzbühel had already organized its first downhill ski race. The event was so successful that the following year special trains had to be laid on to bring spectators from Innsbruck and Bavaria. In 1922 Lunn invented the slalom – Skiing’s first properly codified events –. It derived from the gymkhanas he organized for tourists in need of exercise and amusement. In 1924 he organized the first combined event, a downhill and slalom. Then he fought hard within the International Ski Federation (FIS) – founded that same year in Oslo – to endorse Alpine ski races, a battle he did not win until 1930.
But it was the meeting of – by then– Sir Arnold Lunn and another giant of ski lore, Hannes Schneider of St. Anton, which gave birth to the first of the great classics – the Arlberg-Kandahar– . This event was to become the real starting point of international Alpine ski racing.
The name of the race itself reflects the collaboration between the two men. Schneider contributed the Arlberg after the mountain range he turned into a Mecca of skiing. It was there, from his ski school in St. Anton, that the mysteries and techniques of skiing were first taught to graded classes, each grade addressing a different stage of the skier’s development.
Lunn added the Kandahar in honor of Lord Roberts of Kandahar, the hero of the British raj who distinguished himself in a battle during the relief of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan in 1879. In 1911, Roberts donated a magnificent trophy for the race organized by Lunn, on 19 January that year, from the Glacier de la Plaine Morte to the hotels and chalets of Crans-Montana. And it was called the Roberts of Kandahar challenge.
Thus was born, in the Arlberg, one of the most majestic skiing terrains, the Arlberg-Kandahar race.
Inaugurated in St. Anton, the Arlberg-Kandahar was to be alternately run there in Mürren, where Lunn had made one of his homes. In 1938 it was once again St. Anton’s turn to host the race. But, a few days before the events, Nazi Germany Annexed Austria and the Gestapo arrested Hannes Schneider who they considered to be hostile to Hitler’s regime. In retaliation, Lunn cancelled the race. But he kept up negotiations with the Germans over the next year’s event long enough fir Schneider to flee with his family to the United States. There Schneider created a new ski school modeled on the Arlberg school he’d been forced to abandon in Austria.
Once Schneider was safe, Lunn refused to let the race return to German-occupied St. Anton. Instead of offered friends from Chamonix, in France – including the young world downhill champion James Couttet – the chance to include their town on the Arlberg-Kandahar circuit. After the Second World War, Sestriere and Garmisch-Partenkirchen were also included on the circuit, but the original Lunn-Schneider formula was to remain as that era’s ski racing model.
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