Email
PrintA Turn for the Better
Modern ski gear descends from a long line of technological advances
(page 1 of 2)
Stroll through a modern ski shop and behold the wares: high-topped plastic boots offering incredible support, comfort, and Star Wars styling; precision-engineered bindings claiming bomb-proof retention in nearly all situations (but reliable release in the event of a yard sale); and technology-laden boards that practically ski by themselves. These skis of the new millennium boast the smooth ride of a Cadillac, the edge hold of ice skates, and curvaceous side cut dimensions that translate to easy turns. This stuff is killer—a far cry from gear in the old days. Or is it?
Ski history fanatic Richard Allen of Carbondale, Colorado, who owns a collection of more than 300 pairs of vintage skis and thousands of historical artifacts dating back to the 19th century, is not so sure. “When you look back a hundred years,” Allen says, “we really haven’t come that far.”
What? Can state-of-the-art all-mountain skis compare with solid wood planks?
While acknowledging that today’s gear makes skiing infinitely easier, Allen points out that the fundamental design of modern equipment was in place more than a hundred years ago. The rest of the story is mostly refinement and reinvention of existing principles, as gear design responded to changes in skiing styles and the demands of competition. Through it all, though, having fun on snow remained the heart of the sport.
In the Beginning, There Were …
Snowshoes
The Vikings’ transgressions aside, the world has a lot to thank Scandinavians for: affordable IKEA furniture, swimsuit models, and, of course, skis. The very word “ski” comes from the Norwegian “skid,” meaning a split length of wood. Ted Bays, author of Nine Thousand Years of Skis: From Norwegian Wood to French Plastic, writes that skiing was a Stone Age pursuit in northern Europe and Asia. Carvings found across the Arctic rim from present-day Scandinavia to eastern Russia, some dating as far back as 9,000 years, appear to depict hunters on some form of skis, although the boards probably weren’t made to go downhill fast.
Bays writes that the oldest-known ski, dated to 2500 B.C., was found in a peat bog near Hoting, Sweden. Dimension-wise, the wooden Hoting ski was a shorty: at about 110 centimeters long by approximately 100 millimeters wide, it roughly matched the size of a modern snowboarder’s approach ski (used to
access backcountry downhill runs).
Basically, it was a snowshoe, probably nothing more than a winter survival tool. Not surprisingly, Scandinavians put skis to military use. Norse literature describes scouts on skis spying on enemy positions as early as 1200 B.C. But within a mere couple of thousand years, the Vikings apparently figured out that skiing was fun.
In an article from Skiing Heritage: A Ski History Quarterly, Morten Lund, a noted ski historian, writes that Icelandic poems known as the “Eddas,” circa A.D. 1000, allude to skiing skills as an aristocratic trait, and mention both ski races and wagering on the outcome.
Over the course of the next millennium, Scandinavian armies used skis for winter warfare, and into the early 1800s, skiing was still primarily a cross-country pursuit. Downhill technique remained awkward—skiers dragged a single pole between their legs as a brake. Informal competition among 19th-century ski troops in Norway was roughly comparable to the Nordic combined event in today’s Olympics: a test of cross-country endurance and jumping prowess. But then a handful of poor Norwegian farmers revolutionized ski technique and equipment, ushering in the modern era of downhill skiing.
From a town in Telemark
In 1868, 43-year-old Sondre Norheim and two companions skied for three days straight from their village in the Telemark region of Norway to reach the capital city of Christiania (now known as Oslo). There they took part in a national ski competition that, according to Lund, featured the descent of a hill overlooking the city. The Telemarkers’ graceful presentation—without straddling a big stick—wowed the crowds. Norheim dominated the competition, carving big arcs in the snow using a staggered-leg stance for stability, a technique later dubbed the telemark turn. To stop, the Telemarkers would abruptly swing their parallel skis uphill, a method soon to be known as the Christiania turn, or the Christie.
To a large degree, gear innovations made this downhill control possible. The telemark ski, though long by today’s standards, was short and slender for that time. It was designed with camber, a bowed shape that distributes skier weight more evenly, as well as side cut—the ski narrowed at the waist. They were, in effect, the first “shaped” skis.
Norheim also introduced the osier binding, a woven birch root toe and heel strap, offering increased retention while jumping and better lateral control than the nearly universal leather toe-strap binding.
According to Bays, telemark skis of the late 19th century ranged in length from about 200 to 240 centimeters. In the shorter lengths at least, these early skis nearly match the dimensions of the Yöstmark Mountain Noodle—a popular telemark ski during the 1990s (based on an alpine powder ski) and still a favorite of some local backcountry powder-seekers.
Nineteenth-century ski builders typically handcrafted each ski of solid pine, ash, or hickory. Metal edges were non-existent. The thickness of the ski and the shape of the top determined the flex. Ridged-top skis were stiffer, higher performance skis, though all these skis were extraordinarily stiff by today’s standards. Lund writes that the first laminated ski, constructed of a pine top and an ash sole, appeared in Norway back in 1881, but such construction didn’t gain wide popularity until many decades later.
During the 1880s, Europe’s first ski factory was established in Christiania, and Martin Strand began manufacturing skis in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the influential Northland Ski Company was later established. Along with central European factories, these manufacturers refined the telemark design and made ski gear more accessible to the average person.
Meanwhile, Scandinavian immigrants brought Nordic skiing to the gold rush mining camps of California during the mid-1800s, and later to Colorado, some performing duties as wintertime couriers and mail carriers. Starting around 1860, miners began staging rowdy “long-board” races, sort of a hybrid of modern speed skiing and skier cross, where several skiers would bomb straight down a hill in a crouched position on 12- to 14-foot-long skis, using a long braking pole for a token measure of control. Though colorful tales of the long-boarders helped popularize skiing in the United States, the sport faded away with the mining boomtowns and ultimately had little influence on modern skiing.
