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.
