Mathias Zdarsky (1856-1940) was a German-speaking Czech of private means from Moravia who made Austria his home, becoming known as the “hermit of Lilienfeld”, Lilienfeld being where he retired to devote himself to developing ski technique.
Inspired by Nansen’s crossing of Greenland on skis, Zdarsky developed a binding suitable for making turns on steep Alpine slopes and introduced a form of slalom. Arnold Lunn said of him “Zdarsky had one great virtue as a pioneer, a stubborn refusal to be ignored”. Lunn considered Zdarsky to be the father of Alpine skiing with Zdarsky’s adoption of s-turning as opposed to straight running, but his legacy was tarnished by his insistence on one pole skiing and stubborn rejection of alternative ideas; nothing in the evolution of skiing owes anything to the techniques he taught.
That is not to diminish his contribution to the development of Alpine skiing. In his heyday in the early 1900’s, thousands of devotees would descend on Lilienfeld on a Sunday morning to learn from the Master, and he greatly influenced many of his contemporaries such as W.R. Rickmers.
“Deggers”, who was born on 21st May 1891 and died on 15th May 1951, was one of the outstanding personalities in the golden age of downhill racing. He was a founder member of the Kandahar. He spent many years in Canada as secretary of the Seigneury Club.
As a racer he never won an important cup, but he was second again and again in Kandahar events. He was, for instance, twice second in the Alpine Ski Cup, the parent of all slalom races, and once third in the British Championship Slalom. He was also second in the first race for the Scaramanga Challenge Cup, which is the world’s senior cup for roped racing. Two years later he was again second in this cup, this time to Christopher Mackintosh and me. His description of the first Scaramanga race is reprinted below.
Deggers was a successful cartoonist, the best of the ski cartoonists. As a cartoonist and as a humorous writer he ranked with the talented, but he touched genius as an entertainer, not on the stage but among friends. I have never met anybody who could transform, as he could, even the stickiest of parties into a riot. Some of his performances at Arlberg-Kandahar prize-givings are still remembered. His “positively last appearance” on the Mürren stage was not only the most brilliant of exits but also the most moving. In his last years Deggers lived in the shadow of a great fear, the recurrence of cancer, and this was not his only cause for anxiety. The paper shortage reduced the amount of space available for cartoons in general and for Deggers’ cartoons in particular. His powers of invention were beginning to fail, and he was finding it increasingly difficult to place his work. He had saved nothing and it would be idle to pretend that he would have found it easy to live on bread and water. Particularly water.
At Mürren he did his best as an entertainer, and there were flashes of the old genius from time to time, but it would have required almost as much imagination for anybody who only saw him in 1951 to reconstruct the Deggers of legendary fame as is necessary to reconstruct from the thighbone and fragment of a cranium found in Java those detailed drawings of Pithecanthropus which figure in the manuals of popular science. I remembered Peter as a small boy, half sick with laughing, following every gesture of Deggers with goggly eyes and gasping out between peals of happy laughter, “Eat Fardie’s spectacles.” Clearly his faith in Deggers’ fertility of invention was unbounded. There was nothing that Deggers could not make amusing – eating Fardie’s spectacles for instance.
In the course of February 1951 Dr. Mosca of Mürren, who had given Deggers practical proofs of his great affection, sadly diagnosed a recurrence of cancer. Deggers stayed on for another week at Mürren while arrangements were being made for a bed in a hospital. Some of the best things in life are within the reach of the poorest, the splendours of the starry sky, hills and the sea, sunrise and sunset. And courage, the loveliest of the virtues, is so common that it is only its absence which calls for comment. But there are sunsets and sunsets, and the courage which Deggers showed in his twilight hours was to ordinary courage what the last flush on Alpine snows is to dusk in Hyde Park. Sunt lachrymae rerum. There was a Virgilian sense of tears for mortal things in the air of Mürren during those last dragging days. Walter von Allmen, the head of the ski school, was devoted to Deggers and I shall never forget looking in at the Palace bar during the farewell party which he organized for him. By the time it :finished they were all convinced that Deggers would return. All but Deggers ; he knew.
Deggers was very touched that Fritz Stager (of Lauterbrunnen) and Werner Feuz insisted on taking him down to Interlaken and putting him on to the Calais train. This meant a great deal to Deggers, for like all humorists he was a man of deep affections who could have made his own the lines:
From quiet homes and first beginning, Out to the undiscovered ends, There’s nothing worth the wear of winning, But laughter and the love of friends.
And the love of friends did not fail him. He was turning out cartoons at the rate of two or three a day to tide himself over the operation, cartoons which bore much the same relation to his best work as his evening performances to the glorious impromptus of his youth, but several were bought by one kind-hearted lady, Miss Molyneux-Cohan.
It would be ungracious to forget and tiresome to chronicle all those who helped Deggers on the last lap of his courageous langlauf G. Tapp, for instance, who went down to his cottage in Devonshire and stirred up the authorities to connect it with the hospital by telephone, or Mrs. Duff-Taylor, who went to the hospital and helped to settle Deggers’ account. I mention these things as evidence, ifevidence were needed, of the affection which he inspired in all who knew him.
He carried on bravely to the end. I happened to look in at the ballroom just after midnight on the eve of his departure. An Irish girl, Mrs. O’Reilly, was doing a tap dance, and Deggers was caricaturing her…. The flame of his genius, rekindled from the ashes of pain and disease, had never burnt brighter. And as he sank exhausted into a corner of the bar and gratefully accepted champagne cocktails my mind was still hunting an elusive memory somehow linked with Deggers’ final appearance in the Palace lounge…. Ah, yes! Of course…. Kipling’s tribute to a great comedian whose son was killed in the first world war but who, like Deggers, did not allow the least flavour of private sorrow to ruin a hilarious public performance.
Never more rampant rose the Hall At thy audacious line, Than when the news came through from France, Thy son had followed mine.
That Deggers knew that he would not survive the operation was made clear to me by something he said a few hours before leaving Mürren. “Lotti,” he said, “has just asked me to draw her something funny for her album ” (Lotti presided over the Mürren bar), “which as I’m going back home to die is in itself a very amusing subject for a funny drawing. But I’ve done my best. Bless her.” Apart from this one remark he seemed determined to maintain the fiction that he would soon be back again. I wandered in and out of his room while he was packing and we talked of indifferent things until I could bear it no longer and returned to Room 4.I sat down at my typewriter to write the things which I dared not try to say, a good-bye letter rather than a good-bye speech, but a confusion of memories made it difficult to find the words which I was searching for … our Austrian journey and the first visit to St. Anton which sowed the seeds of the Arlberg-Kandahar … the beer party at Lauterbrunnen after the first Inferno … Deggers at a Kandahar dinner describing the horrors of sharing a room with me at Interlaken….Deggers playing the hand-orgel and singing, a dynamic blend of gesture, laughter and song…. His favourite song, with which he wound up beer parties and rowdy Kandahar dinners at the Palace, gradually acquired the character of a Kandahar doxology. I can see and hear him singing as I write:
Tante stelle sono al cielo Tante baci ti dario Uno solo mi basteria Per poter mi consolar, Son marinaio, evviva, evviva, Son marinaio, evviva le onde del mar Evviva il mare, evviva le onde evviva l’amor. Evviva il mare, evviva le onde, evviva l’amor.
Somehow or other I managed to transfer to paper a few bleak words of gratitude for thirty years of gay unbroken friendship, and of admiration for the gallantry with which he was exemplifying the Kandahar code-“Never give up a race until you’re through the finishing posts.” “Don’t read this,” I said, “before you’re on the train.”
He gave a sudden understanding murmur of assent and thrust the letter into his pocket with an abrupt downward glance as if he could not bear to see the sorrow of farewell in my eyes. He was bracing himself for the fiction of a gay send-off, and could not risk a change of key. We did not even dare to shake hands. It is odd that we should have parted without a formal word or gesture of farewell, but I did not need the letter which he wrote to me from the train to convince me that he knew why I had been, for once, completely inarticulate.
There was an air of macabre hilarity about the Eiger Bar, but we certainly did our best to maintain the tradition of a Mürren send-off . . . old memories came back to me of arrivals and departures in which Deggers had played a prominent part… the formal welcome to Prince Chichibu, the less formal farewell with Deggers and H.I.H. rattling down to the station on a tea-tray while Baron Hayashi signalled faint disapproval. … Deggers stealing the show on the arrival of the Field Marshal, and his delight when a Swiss paper published a photograph of Deggers leading the F.M. up the hill with the caption “Marshal Montgomery und Sir Lunn.” … “We shall expect you back,” said dear kind Mimi von Allmen, “remember to come straight back to the Eiger after the operation as our guest.”
The band had asked me whether they should bring their instruments to the station and my first reaction was that festive music would be terribly incongruous, but second thoughts were best. Deggers appointed himself conductor, and the flame of his genius had never burnt brighter than in that final tragic but hilarious performance.
One remembered not only Kipling’s comedian, but also Horace’s Regulus returning to torture and death, and bidding his friends farewell. Atqui sciebat quis sibi barbarus Tortor pararet, and which may be paraphrased, “And though he knew what the surgeon’s knife was preparing for him …” He continued the performance from the train window, and when the laughter which was only a laboured screen for tears began to flag, Deggers, with the instinct of a great artist for a curtain that is overdue, ended with the one perfect and tragically apt quotation, “Like Charles II, I apologize for being such an unconscionably long time in dying.” Then the whistle blew and the curtain fell on Deggers’ positively last performance on the Mürren stage.
Source: Arnold Lunn (1963) The Englishman on Ski Museum Press Ltd, London. p73-77
Figure 1: The author (on the right) snowboarding in Andorra 1989/1990
Recreational use of snowboards emerged in the USA, the first popular manifestation being the Snurfer in the 1960s, followed by the Winterstick, in 1974. Tom Sims patented a snowboard in 1977 but the widespread adoption of the snowboard was mostly down to one man, Jake Burton Carpenter, who produced 300 Burton-branded snowboards in 1979, and never looked back. Burton built on the culture of surfing and skateboarding, and the associated dress, music, attitudes and language of those sports. In an interview Burton claimed that “Without youthful snowboarders, ski areas would have become elitist, small, high-end, inbred.” Initially US ski resorts banned snowboarding, but the early adherents didn’t care, they preferred making their tracks in fresh powder away from the pistes.
European resorts were more open to snowboarding than their American counterparts with many resorts in France actively encouraging it. As a result, a new generation of snowboards was being developed that worked as well on-piste as off. In 1983 a Swiss company, Hooger Booger, started building snowboards in Europe. Seeing the potential in the new market, Jake and Donna Burton opened their European Headquarters in Innsbruck in 1985, with a new design of snowboard manufactured in Austria. The CEO of the European operation declared that “The city of Innsbruck got a whole new image after Burton settled there: the traditional mountain town became a lot more young, dynamic and trend-setting”. In 1987 the French conglomerate, Rossignol, entered the snowboard market with their own branded products.
Up until this time there had been little coverage of snowboarding in the UK. However, in late 1987 an issue of Ski Survey announced that “As an indication of its fast-growing popularity, snowboarding is now attracting the attention of the big ski manufacturers.”. The article went on to say that “The big question is who will produce the first viable release binding?”.
The following issue of Ski Survey noted that:
“Snowboarding is looking more and more like a long-term addition to winter sports. Although it started very much as a way of surfing powder, the latest trend is towards competitive events on hardpack snow – slalom, giant slalom and downhill. This winter there will be a race circuit across the Alps and the latest equipment is being specially designed to meet the demands of the different race events.”
Elisabeth Hussey, the editor of Ski Survey from 1974 until 1992, said of snowboarding:
“At the beginning we were a bit worried about the snowboarders because they tended to crash into people. This I think was because they started by being skateboarders and they were young and they were energetic. But we always felt it was going to bring about an expansion of the sport and that’s good. You have got to have something new for the young to do. The snowboarders eventually took lessons, and once they began to learn about how to snowboard they became much safer.”
The first snowboard race in the UK, reported in Ski Survey, was held in the winter of1988, sponsored by Pernod, as part of the Glenshee Fun Week. The race was a slalom, but an impromptu freestyle event also took place. The magazine also announced the introduction of the halfpipe event in snowboarding competition, a concept adapted from skateboarding, declaring that it was “something quite unique in wintersports.”The same issuecarried its first advertisement for Burton snowboards, an advert for a snowboard supplier and an advert for Les Deux Alpes featuring a picture of five skiers – and a snowboarder.
Although the first world snowboard championship took place in 1983 in the USA, it was a parochial affair fuelled by competition between Sims and Burton for market share of the growing domestic snowboard market. It was not until 1991 that competitive snowboarding took on a truly global dimension when the International Snowboarding Federation was formed. The International Ski Federation (FIS) subsequently introduced snowboarding as an FIS discipline in 1994. The Olympic snowboarding program now includes five disciplines for both men and women – Halfpipe, Big Air, Slopestyle, Snowboard Cross, and Parallel Giant Slalom – and one mixed team Snowboard Cross event.
Although snowboarding had begun on powder snow, the use of hard pack snow for competition opened up the use of artificial slopes for training to nations that were not traditionally ski nations.
David Goldsmith in Ski Survey, in a review of artificial slopes in the UK, considered the use of snowboards on artificial slopes. “Snowboarding on plastic might sound like a fatal attraction”, he wrote, “but it is certainly not deterring many of Britain’s enthusiasts.”
By February 1990, the SCGB was running a soiree at its Clubhouse to help members find out why snowboarding was so popular. The September issue of Ski Survey that year was noteworthy for carrying the first cover picture of a snowboarder. A subsequent issue focussed on snowboard classes under the byline “Snowboarding has already outgrown skiing in some resorts.” The article recognised a rapid uptake of snowboarding in the previous two years but thought that: “This does not come as welcome news to many skiers, who fail to see why snowboarders dress so strangely, and who feel snowboarders are a danger.” The article also offered a helpful guide to snowboard speak, including what was meant by a ripper, a Shred Betty and a goofy rider. In the November 1994 issue, the regular Ski Fashion column in Ski Survey was made over entirely to snowboard chic. It states that “Martin Drayton, who runs the Snowboard Asylum in Covent Garden reports a huge sell-out of snowboard clothes and fields requests for them even in mid-summer.” He is further quoted as saying:
“Some 50 year olds starting to come in as well. This fashion is so comfortable it is happening for everyone. Definitely about 40 per cent of the kids who come in here have never been on a snowboard. These clothes are for everyday.”
The clothing typically had “wide shapes, soft fleeces and roomy pants”.
In the same issue, Ski Survey was reporting that “Snowboarding is definitely a part of the Olympic program”, quoting Marc Hodler, President of the International Ski Federation.
Conflict between skiers and snowboarders was being widely reported. Ski Survey noted: “Reading the anti-snowboard tirades in the press recently one could be forgiven for thinking that skiers were claiming territorial rights over the pistes”. Ski Survey, had “decided to take a more enlightened view”. Snowboarders kept lift prices down and segregation would have its disadvantages: “Snowboard-only areas would be a pity – they would probably include some of the best ski terrain!”
In practice, a new type of mountain sport terrain had started to appear, aimed exclusively at snowboarders – the snowboard park.
The first snowboard park was constructed at Bear Valley in California in 1989. Over the next decade they became ubiquitous and increasingly attracted skiers, leading to them being re-branded terrain parks and open to all-comers. Skiers took to many of the competitive sports practiced by snowboarders in a class of competition called freestyle, first introduced at the Olympics in 1992
In the September 1995 issue of Ski Survey, TV presenter Martin Roberts looked at the state of play with snowboarding:
“By the year 2000, snowboarders are expected to outnumber skiers on the slopes. Think about that for a moment: more snowboarders than skiers in just four years’ time. Couple that with the fact that, as of next year, snowboarding becomes an Olympic sport and you snowplough nervously towards a startling conclusion: you can no longer dismiss snowboarders as a group of uncouth, long-haired yobs with stupid hats and baggy clothes, who carve down the piste on oversized tea trays with all the finesse of pit bull terriers.
“Believe it or not, normal everyday skiers are trying the sport and discovering that actually it’s quite good fun.
“Some 90 per cent of the people I take guiding on skis try snowboarding; says 22 year old snowboarding champion Lee O’Connor. ‘The next time I see them, they are raving about the sport.’
“’The sport has had such bad press;’ she adds… ‘You shouldn’t criticise until you’ve tried it’”.
Roberts indeed decides to try snowboarding, observing that the ability “to progress from novice to competence in such a relatively short time is a major appeal of the sport.”
Roberts was not alone in being an older skier learning to snowboard. Nicky Halford, the snowboard editor of Ski Survey, observed a trend for snowboarders over 40 taking up the sport in significant numbers. despite “the dedicated snowboard magazines and TV shows aimed at the younger market”.
Snowboarding as a distinct sub-culture was starting to become absorbed into a common cultural identity shared with many skiers. Ironically, snowboarding made skiing cool again.
The last issue of Ski Survey was published in February/March 1997, featuring an interview with Jake Burton. For the following season the Ski Club magazine would be entitled Ski and Board, reflecting the Ski Club’s full adoption of snowboarding.
Despite the popularity of snowboarding, the pace of uptake had slowed. Martin Roberts had been wrong about snowboarding overtaking skiing. In practice general estimates are that snowboarding adoption has since plateaued, accounting for less than 20% of the activities of British winter sports tourists, and around a third in the USA.
Despite participation levelling off, snowboarding has nonetheless become well-established as a popular competitive sport.
Snowboarding was adopted as an Olympic sport, as Hodler had predicted, at the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympic Games in Japan – although not without some controversy. Reflecting the first major shift in Olympic skiing since the introduction of slalom and downhill disciplines, more freestyle and snowboard were progressively added to the Olympics. Both sports proved popular with TV audiences – at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, 92m watched snowboarding, 78m watched freeskiing and 77m watched alpine skiing.
Back in the 1930s, the Ski Club of Great Britain had been instrumental in establishing alpine skiing as an Olympic discipline. At the same time, many skiing luminaries were lamenting the inability of British skiers to be competitive with Alpine nations. Arnold Lunn, long-time editor of the SCGB Year Book, claimed that:
“Once the Alpine countries discovered that Olympic medals were alleged to be a good advertisement for the national ski schools, and such victories therefore of commercial importance in attracting tourists, the odds against the British became impossible.”
Snowboarding and freestyle skiing have levelled the playing field for participants in non-Alpine nations. The sports could be practiced on dry or indoor slopes and using equipment such as trampolines and airbags all year round. In 2018, the CEO of GB Snowsport, Vicky Gosling, declared that “Great Britain is already a leading snowsport nation… In the last eight years, British skiers and snowboarders have been on the podium in every discipline at either World Cup, World Championship or Junior World Championship level”. Gosling aimed for GB to become a top five snowsport nation by 2030.
In 2014, Jenny Jones, was awarded the Ski Club’s prestigious Pery Medal for her bronze medal performance in Slopestyle at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, becoming the first snowboarder to win the Pery Medal.
